Frankfurt Ballet

FRANKFURT BALLET IN PARIS


The 50-franc program distributed at the opening night of
William Forsythe's Frankfurt Ballet season at Paris'
Chatelet Theater begins with a benign comparison: four bars
from Stravinsky's Apollon musagète grace page twelve;
twenty-two bars of Thom Willems' Eidos : Telos face them
on page thirteen. The lopsided correlation speaks volumes
about the evening-length work Forsythe has created to
Willems' score. Though it is difficult to think of the
composition as a score in any traditional sense. After the
first act, derived from Stravinsky, the score descends to
the level of intermittent trombone blats.

The works Forsythe has shown in the U.S. in the 1980s (Love
Songs, France/Dance, Artifact, Steptext, Behind the China
Dogs, and the audacious, impressive Impressing the Czar)
demonstrated a radically new movement style: frenzied,
powerful and wrenching, but full of kinetic interest. If
the choreographer occasionally descended to the level of
modish Eurotrashteatr (in his use of texts and imitation of
Tanzteatr in particular), his musical choices (particularly
the work of Eva Crossman-Hecht) provided driving rhythms to
power choreography based on a ballet idiom carried to its
logical extreme.

The first act of Eidos : Telos (a création française,
according to the program notes) is titled 'Self Meant to
Govern,' though the extraordinarily extensive program notes
(eighteen pages) provide little insight to the meaning of
this decidedly illiterate phrase or the ballet that follows.
After the musical examples, the reader is offered (actually,
bombarded) with the deep thoughts of an amusing range of
thinkers, including Robert Calasso, Maya Deren, Henri
Bergson, and Forsythe himself. The work's dramaturg, Heidi
Gilpin (a member of the dance faculty at the University of
California/Riverside) quotes liberally from Greek
dictionaries and discourses briefly on fractal geometry.
The gist of the notes centers around the meanings of the
ballet's title, though Forsythe has the last word:
'Dissolution, letting yourself evaporate. Movement is a
factor of the fact that you are actually evaporating.'
Another extract begins with ellipses: '...since it was all
alphabetic operations, which means there is access by
proximity - in other words, positions suggest movements
within an associative chain or organization, which is based
on where the limbs are placed in relation to each other.'
It gets no better.

The first act features six dancers, a violinist mauling
Stravinsky, and three trombonists posed ominously at the
side of the stage. The movement is vintage Forsythe, though
with little rhythmic force to propel the movement. There
are likewise no discernible relationships established among
the dancers. At one point, Thomas McManus dances with three
women while the choreography apes Balanchine's Apollo - to
no end. As with the third act 'divertissement,' the
choreography is chaotic and unfocused. As with the second,
mythology is insistently, though pointlessly evoked.
The work's second act opens on a set as aggressively empty
and high tech as the galleries that are consuming Paris'
lovely Marais district: some sort of illuminated table at
the center, cobwebs imposed through the wonder of lighting,
television monitors suspended from wires, more wires
stretched across the back of the stage. (At one point, the
violinist scrapes his instrument across them.) Dana
Caspersen (née à Minneapolis, dans le Minnesota...) recites
a text she has written herself: 'This is a spiders [sic]
voice./Then, this voice is a spider's./Now,/when she returns
from underneath,/she has been down, under,.....' Etc.
Forsythe has long demonstrated a fondness for idiotic texts,
though they used to complement the movement, as in
France/Dance.   Here, the program notes would imply an
allegiance to the Persephone myth, though any relationship
to any reading of the Apollo legend (remember act one?)
remains a mystery.

When Caspersen, who is topless, has declaimed the bulk of
her text (in English), she extracts an enormous piece of
amber cellophane from the illuminated table. She rubs her
breasts on the stage for a time, then scrunches the
cellophane meaningfully against the most imposing of the
television monitors. Other arachnids appear to fill the
stage with dances reminiscent of Béjart's least inspired
ballabiles. Caspersen's speech is punctuated by a female
dancer, who repeats 'Luck be a lady tonight,' in a frog
voice. A male voice offers such bon mots as: 'I'll shit on
the table and make you eat it. . . I'll burn your tits. . .
I'll scratch your CDs.' A few 'fucks' are thrown in for
emphasis.

As in Impressing the Czar, Forsythe ends his ballet with a
group dance, an offhand homage to Petipa, one guesses. But
this third, untitled act is danced mainly in silence, though
the trombones occasionally repeat an unvarying, four-note
phrase. Like the first, the last act becomes a humorless
parody of Forsythe's good works. But lacking a rhythmic
base entirely, the frenetic, at times interesting movement
lacks purpose altogether. As if to add visual interest, the
telegraph wires now stretch diagonally across the stage,
threatening to disembowel any dancer who fails to interrupt
the movement trajectory he has embarked upon by ducking
under them. The ballet ends shortly after Caspersen, now
naked, has some moments to shriek at the wires and the
trombones have come onstage to play the first chord of a
misbegotten fanfare.

Many of the Continental thinkers of the 1970s (for whom
Forsythe confesses admiration) sought to displace the
traditional order that places the artist and his text at the
top of the creative hierarchy. Naturally, this places a
living artist in a rather ticklish position. But what if the
artist were to steep himself in those very theories and cut
his critics off at the pass? (Eighteen pages of notes would
seem sufficient to this end.) Here, the result is a ballet
that takes a distant second place to a set of explanations,
for the latter may be enjoyed as absurdist literature. If
Forsythe's yearning to create dance theater in the manner of
Pina Bausch (and to show off his pseudo-intellectual
inclinations) has always been apparent, it had not overtaken
the dancing that ostensibly provided the raison d'être of
his theater. But in Eidos : Telos   there is virtually no
choreography (organized movement) to speak of. The final
act is choreographed in collaboration with the company;
Forsythe credits himself merely with 'conception' and (of
all things) 'coordination' of the work as a whole. In
short, the ballet has something for everyone but those who
came to see dancing. It makes a pass at every ism of our
century, stopping short of the formalism that might have
saved it. It is longest on pretension.

The first text of the precious program notes begins:
'Alors, que voulaient-ils? Etre reconnus.' But to what
end? Given that the ballet pretends to pose teleological
and phenomenological questions, it is possible that Forsythe
merely means to prove he still exists (albeit with nothing
new to say). I fear I didn't recognize Forsythe at all.

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