photograph courtesy of Sadler's Wells Forsythe Interviews Frankfurt reviews Frankfurt Uk performances? Frankfurt web site

As Clement Crisp once noted, the works of choreographer William Forsythe come to town accompanied by "heavy intellectual baggage." Indeed they are all but drowning under words, explanations, analyses and theses.

You don't want to be unprepared for a Forsythe interview, so this writer dug deep into Forsythian "baggage" on websites, books, magazines, and lectures before talking to the choreographer last week, a few weeks before his company's tour to Melbourne this month with Eidos: Telos. This is one of two works Ballet Frankfurt is bringing to London in November. In the maze, I learned much, but often got lost in academic thickets. My vote for the most obscure article is on Ballet Frankfurt's official website. By Barbara Johnson, it is called Nothing Fails Like Success.

In The New Criterion, a piece by dance critic Laura Jacobs called Meaningless Enchainements, begins warmly enough but ends crankily. Assessing the company in February 1999, after its New York appearances, she notes the women of Ballet Frankfurt have "faulty turnout and sickled feet" while the men were "somewhat grungy, and puffed up in false bravado." There was "not a virtuoso in the whole group. Forsythe should get his nose out of Derrida and start tending his tendus." He is, says Jacobs, "pretentious as hell." Most useful to me was an interview at http://www.riverbed.com/ideas/forsythe1.htm in which Forsythe talks of his choreography, most interestingly, on epaulement.

For a newspaper audience, this is almost impossible to explain but not so for ballet audiences, dancers, teachers and choreographers. Forsythe said of epaulement "it is the crowning accomplishment of great ballet dancers. It entails a

Frankfurt Ballet in 'Artifact' photograph courtesy of Sadler's Wells

tremendous number of counter rotations determined by the relationships among the foot, hand, and head and even of the eyes. As in Indian classical dancing, it dictates rules of gazing past the body. For me, epaulement is the key to ballet because it demands the most complex torsion. The mechanics of epaulement are what give ballet its inner transitions." As he told me in the interview, "epaulement is essential to a lot of my thinking. At one point it's a completely embodied mechanic, you don't have to think about it any more.... no matter how you turn your hand in relationship to the foot or head you can induce epaulement, so to speak."

In epaulement, as he says, the eyes gaze out, yet Forsythe is now concerned with turning the gaze inwards. "If you take the notion of putting your eyes in the back of your head, for example, what happens to that epaulement - you can literally invert the epaulement." He calls this "disfocus, shorthand for inverted epaulement... dancers have to stare up, roll their eyes back and try to accomplish the inversion." The only way one could really understand this process would be to see him work in the studio with dancers, as you can in Mike Figgis's documentary, Just Dancing Around (1995.) Just one section of this documentary, showing him working with a dancer, leading phrases with the elbow, stressing the emphasis on the beginning of the movement, says more than all the words can. One easy way to understand his concepts of tracing movements through space is his comment "people often ask me where is the book of photographs of the Frankfurt Ballet. Ballet has been blessed and cursed by the profusion of coffee table books with ever more more beautiful pictures of graceful bodies frozen in the air. But our work is about moving between positions, not maintaining positions. This is actually a fact of ballet in general, new and old: one moves through a position with greater or lesser accuracy."

Frankfurt Ballet in 'Eidos:Telos'
photograph courtesy of Sadler's Wells

Forsythe said in our interview that Eidos:Telos was made in 1995, "in the aftermath of my wife's death." The middle section is danced by his current partner, Dana Caspersen, who wrote the text she speaks. It's do with death and the underworld, and female mythical creatures, in particular Arachne and Persephone, and was inspired by Caspersen's reading of Roberto Calasso's book, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. There's a good interview about the work with Roslyn Sulcas, also on the ballet frankfurt website. Forsythe's newest work, Woolf Phrases, evolved from his reading of The Hours, the novel by Michael Cunningham, an homage to Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway which, "in every reading, gets better and better."