'Eidos:Telos' reviews Caspersen in reviews Frankfurt reviews Frankfurt in InterViews/News

In classical theology, Plato’s idea of the “telos of man” held sway for many centuries. By this he meant, “becoming similar to God as much as possible”. Not becoming God, but Godlike. Forsythe’s piece, as I understood it, was an essay about humankind’s voyage from the gravity field of the limitations of time, personality and failure towards a more transpersonal and achieved existence. “Fail again”, in Samuel Beckett’s words, “fail better”.

E: T has three acts. The first, ostensibly one of pure dance, foreshadows the later acts. To get an idea of how it works, picture a map of the world based on the Mercator projection. The lines of longitude do not narrow towards the poles. Greenland and Antarctica look huge. But then change the map, perhaps in the way beloved of developing world agencies. Instead of a flat earth, the world is represented in an ovoid way with continents like Africa and South America assuming their rightful proportions and Europe shrinking away to a corner of the map. Forsythe does something like this to classical ballet. The landmarks are still there – the tendus, piqués, glissades, attitudes, and the rest, but they are scaled differently and their symmetries to each other are completely altered. A text from the final act eventually makes some sense of this early landscape: “If the earth is a sphere, the abyss below the earth is also the heavens”.

The setting for the first act was reminiscent of an athletics track, the floor divided by white strips running across the stage. A series of clocks are scattered around, each one possibly representing the different inner times of the dancers. At the back a digital clock shows elapsed time in seconds. An acoustic string is slung across the stage, making the area beneath it an enormous sounding board. The plucking of this string disrupts the unfolding action. Near the footlights a solo violinist plays. A male dancer stands at his shoulder using it as a barre. A metronome is set. The count changes, speeds up. The dancers now try to navigate a sonic world determined by the violinist, the metronome and the acoustic string. But the centre cannot hold. Trombonists at stage right sound menacing dischords. The digital clock starts rapidly losing time, right back to zero. The unfolding action has been pulled back to its beginnings. Start again.

When the curtain comes up on Act Two, the landscape is dark and sepulchral, criss-crossed by cables and wires - a spider’s web. Dana Caspersen, bare-breasted and wearing a long orange skirt, walks on stage speaking a despairing monologue: “I am woven through dark and return to it. I come up with a weaving heart and I return to the dark…. She’s going down down spinning salt and dirt. All there is is the spinning. Frozen lives collapse”. Violin cadenzas punctuate her flaying and manic anger. Occasionally there is a moment of calm as Caspersen, her persona shifting now (she assumes three characters throughout, Persephone, Kore and Demeter, girl, wife and mother), sounds the hope for a creation that may escape the dark. An exquisitely woven dance of death begins. This is Forsythe in “classic classic” mode. It is in waltz time, and is subverted by shouted obscenities from the cast. One dancer occasionally breaks off from such sentiments as “You are f***ing dead man”, to count time 1-2-3, 4-5-6. The curtain falls.

In Act 3 we are back in the light. The movement is heavily abstract and the trombonists’ discords build to a barrage on the senses. The stage is a web of a different kind. The acoustic strings shimmer – rather like old-fashioned telephone wires ahead of an approaching gale. As in Act 1, the centre cannot hold. But there is no spider-like return to the dark. Life struggles to be born and as Caspersen's dress falls away, she unshackles her chains and walks naked towards the footlights as the curtain falls.

I came to Sadler’s Wells as a sceptic and left as a partisan. See it.