dance geometry
TRANSCRIPT
Dance Geometry (Forsythe)
William Forsythe’s methods of choreography are strikingly
algorithmic and give rise to a style of movement and interaction
that is distinctively his own. This conversation between Forsythe
and Kaiser was recorded in 1998 and later published in
Performance Research, v4#2, Summer 1999.
I first met William Forsythe in his kitchen in Frankfurt in 1994. The
first thing Bill did was to try to explain how he goes about creating
new movements. He started drawing imaginary shapes in the air,
and then running his limbs through this complicated and invisible
geometry. As a non-dancer, I was completely lost.
Later that year, I suggested that he use computer animation
superimposed on videos of himself explaining them to make this
geometry visible. Together with Chris Ziegler and Volker
Kuchelmeister at the Center for Art and Media Technology (ZKM)
in Karlsruhe, he created a multimedia work along these lines
entitled Improvisation Technologies. Since then, he’s exhibited this
extraordinary catalogue of dance procedures in several museums,
and still uses it in training new members of his dance company.
Three aspects of Bill’s approach have always struck me:
how ingeniously he uses spatial transformations to generate new
dance movements.
how great a demand this places on his dancers’ minds as well as
their bodies.
how intertwined are the acts of drawing and dancing for him.
In April 1998 Bill and I spent three days together, at the end of
which we recorded the following conversation. Bill had read
transcripts of my Unreal Pictures and Playground dialogues with
Michael Girard and Susan Amkraut, so our conversation built on
that earlier discussion.
This piece is still unfinished. Someday we intend to expand the
dialogue in both directions to make a complete book. In the
meantime, we are collaborating on a dance for children and Lego
Mindstorms robots, under the auspices of the museum
mak.frankfurt.
KAISER: Why did you begin using spatial concepts such as rotation,
extrusion, inscription, and refraction to create dance?
FORSYTHE: Necessity was the mother of that invention because
our dance company never had a lot of time to make the work. My
basic method, developed over a period of 15 years, is to find ways
to use what my dancers already know. Since I work primarily with
ballet dancers, I analyze what they know about space and their
bodies from their intensive ballet training. I’ve realized that in
essence ballet dancers are taught to match lines and forms in
space.
So I began to imagine lines in space that could be bent, or tossed,
or otherwise distorted. By moving from a point to a line to a plane
to a volume, I was able to visualize a geometric space composed of
points that were vastly interconnected. As these points were all
contained within the dancer’s body, there was really no transition
necessary, only a series of “foldings” and “unfoldings” that
produced an infinite number of movements and positions. From
these, we started making catalogues of what the body could do.
And for every new piece that we choreographed, we would develop
a new series of procedures.
Some of these procedures worked with what is already in ballet. If
you analyze the basic ballet position where the hands are held over
the head, you realize that there are two curves involved, one on the
right and the other on the left. You can create innumerable
transformations from that simple position, which is a given in
ballet, and can act like a keyframe. You can extend it out into
space, or by let it move through the body as a natural continuation
of the curves. You can also make dancers perceive the relationships
between any of the points on the curves and any other parts of
their bodies. What it boils down to in performance is the dancer
illustrating the presence of these imagined relationships by
moving.
And in the process discover new ways of moving.
What it actually does is to make you forget how to move. You stop
thinking about the end result, and start thinking instead about
performing the movement internally. That’s what pulls your body
through its “rigors,” as it were.
That approach diverges from classical ballet, where the final
position is paramount, as opposed to what goes on internally and in
between.
Well, I don’t know about that.
Take the ballet position of épaulement, which is the crowning
accomplishment of great ballet dancers. It entails a 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
épaulement is the key to ballet because it demands the most
complex torsion. The mechanics of épaulement are what give ballet
its inner transitions.
At the Frankfurt Ballet, we’ve created a new “paradigm of rigors,”
in which the dancers maintain very complex torsions during
physically antagonistic events. This happens in motion. For
example, you can spin out of a classic position, and as this spinning
undoes the position, you look at the resulting distortions to your
body and correct them. You correct them within the aesthetic rules
of ballet ‘ you never lose your balletism.
So it’s ballet under stress.
Well, all of ballet is about maintaining decorum under extreme
physical stress.
What we do differently from traditional ballet is to focus on the
beginning of a movement rather than on the end.
To see what spills out from there?
Exactly. We use the reflexes that we’ve learned in classical ballet to
maintain a kind of residual coordination, which allows the body to
acquire elastic surfaces that bounce off one another. This elasticity
is derived from the mechanics of torsion inherent in épaulement.
In my conversation with Michael Girard, he defined “grace” as the
smoothest and most efficient transition between two positions. This
is certainly the case in classical ballet, where both positions and
transitions are highly formalized. At the Frankfurt Ballet, however,
your definition of grace seems to be based on unstable, complex
movements rather than smooth, simple ones. As opposed to
traditional choreography, which can be memorized and duplicated
rather easily, your pieces must be much more difficult to teach —
and to learn.
The simplicity of classical ballet is precisely what enables it to be
reproduced with such ease. I sometimes think of it as an
unconscious mimicry of the printing press in Gutenberg’s time. In
fact, there is something extremely alphabetical about traditional
ballet figures and positions – they resemble glyphs.
Since today’s technology is digital rather than alphabetical, why
shouldn’t we go with the flow?
Your choreography does seem to take what is spatial and fixed in
ballet and make it temporal and unfixed.
One of our ideas is to imitate a computer application that can wrap
a different quality around an existing event, thus altering its very
nature. This is another reason why I’ve stuck with ballet. It defines
a very precise spatial environment, which I’ve through a series of
distorting operations.
A lot of what we do in our company is based on states of fold. We
teach our body how to fold and unfold again, at various rates and
moving through different body parts. So we create what I call a
“many-timed body” folding and unfurling towards and against
itself.
One aspect of classic ballet is the constant folding and unfurling of
just the leg, which the dancer always brings back to one of the
prescribed positions. Our fold differs in that it not just in the knee
but also in the hips, thus affecting the torso as well. This means
that instead of remaining at a 90-degree angle to the floor, the
torso begins to fold down and become parallel with it. An entirely
new set of mechanics then takes over, since the body has achieved
a new state of balance.
Since your dancers focus on the beginning rather than the end of a
particular movement, how can they predetermine their final
position? And if they can’t, isn’t this significantly different from
classic ballet?
Well, they still have all the reflexes of the traditional ballet dancer,
and they have essentially the same basic mental training, which
lets them picture points in space very precisely. They orient their
positions very quickly within those points. Of course, the mental
images we use are not traditional.
You recently told me that your body happens to have a high
proportion of “fast twitch” muscles, and that you look for similar
bodies in choosing new dancers. In what ways has your physical
constitution affected your choreography?
I like the physical thrill of rapid shifts, as opposed to smooth
transitions, and a “fast twitch” body allows you to do this. Our
company has something in common with collies, who can herd and
change direction so quickly.
In classical ballet, in addition to adagio and grand allegro, there is
something called petit allegro, which involves small, fast
movements made primarily by the feet and legs. In applying petit
allegro to the entire body, I’ve found that it’s possible to move it in
counterpoint to itself. It’s more like playing the organ than playing
the clarinet: you’re not just using one part of your body, you’re
using it all.
As you know, Shelley and I originally toyed with using “Motion
Alphabets” as the title for this book. I’ve since learned from you
that you yourself have invented a procedure you call “movement
alphabets,” which you use to help make new dances. How does that
work?
I chose the alphabet because it’s simple, familiar, fixed, and
arbitrary. We use it primarily as an index for a database of
movements. Everyone knows alphabetical order, and the dancers
can navigate through its sequence easily even if they only do so in
chunks.
Again, this is not so different from traditional ballet where each
motion and position has its own name. In a similar vein, I created a
non-balletic vocabulary of 135 movements, which I then taught to
my dancers until they knew it backward and forward. No matter
where or when the dancers move through the zone of one of those
movements, they immediately know its place in the sequence. It’s
like rapidly scrolling through a list of names in a computer
program.
We use our alphabet in connection with the kinesphere — the total
volume of a body’s potential movement. Dancers are always
conscious of their kinespheres, which exist in the air around them.
For us, it becomes a huge field for jogging memory.
Let me give you an example of how exactly how this works. When I
cup the back of my neck with my hand, it’s as if I were swatting a
mosquito — and so, using this arbitrary association, we say that I’m
spelling the letter “I” for “insect.” Now suppose that while I’m
dancing, I suddenly find my hand cupped around my knee, which
reminds me of the insect element. Bearing in mind that my focus is
always on the beginning of a movement rather than on its end, I
will have to fold my neck down to that point in space rather than
performing it standing up, as in the original alphabet. Now,
keeping to the sequence of the movement alphabet, I can perform
the movement either directly before or after I — that is, the
movements associated with either H or J.
In this kind of dancing, I can lose my equilibrium within a dance
phrase, then remember everything from the point of that
dislocation, so to speak. My body exists in the sphere of its own
memory.
In Alien Action, were you performing operations based on the
elemental motions represented by each letter?
Yes. Each letter of the alphabet, which covered as many human
configurations as possible, was then modified by the various
operations that we’ve developed over the past 15 years. These
modifications reminded us of more letters, which in turn recalled
more operations. It was a total immersion system.
Your description makes me think of recursive algorithms, where
procedures call themselves, modify the results, call themselves
again, and so on.
In fact, Alien Action was the first time that I actually began to
produce movement based on recursive algorithms. However, they
were fixed variations that we created through a long, painstaking
process, not unlike that of computer programming, where every
step has to be repeated ad infinitum.
The dancers in Alien Action face a challenge similar to that of the
characters in the film Alien. Both are trying to find their way in an
unknown architecture, and both are using a diagram. The dance
diagram, however, does not depict any concrete or existing space,
but rather a potential space — as the piece forms, an architecture
emerges. The goal of the piece, actually, is to form another and
smaller stage within the real stage. This is a drastic scale shift —
the whole thing suddenly has to happen on a stage one eighth the
size of the original stage, a dramatic condensation.
Dancing Alien Action is like navigating levels on the computer. You
can’t just move directly sideways to the desired destination, you
have to go down to a different floor, so to speak, and then walk a
ways and cross over and move back up.
Are your methods now more advanced — in Eidos, for example?
I believe so. In Eidos I was searching for a counterpoint algorithm.
There were also certain emotions associated with Alien Action that
led to extremely idiosyncratic, almost narrative events built into the
movement. Eidos, on the other hand, is completely abstract, even
though the scale of the entire structure provokes a powerful
emotional reaction.
All this supports my notion that your dancers have to think even
faster than they move – and they move very fast.
Yes, but don’t forget that visceral thinking is something that’s
acquired over a long period of time. Even so, the first act of Eidos
requires an encyclopedic command of a huge kinetic field. The
dancers must be able to recover any part of the piece
instantaneously, since there is always a physical “accident.” When
the force of gravity throws them into another configuration, for
example, they have to analyze themselves and their current state in
relation to the entire piece. In this sense, they are always in a
“possessed state,” whether it be Apollonian or Dionysian.
That’s quite different from a more traditional dancer, who’s simply
moving through a sequence that’s well known in advance.
On the contrary, I believe that truly great dancers, such as Gelsey
Kirkland, are equally “possessed” by the act of defining what
they’re experiencing. When she performed, she was entirely in the
moment.
Still, that seems very different to me: her moment is not nearly so
uncertain!
However, let’s move on to another topic. I know that you’ve spent a
good deal of time creating and manipulating drawings, processes
that you’ve likened to that of choreographing for dance.
Let’s take this scene from Slingerland, for instance. What I see
here is not exactly a tracing, but an extrapolation of lines from a
still photograph.
This kind of drawing is an attempt to mask origin. It does work by
extrapolation. Where it diverges from the original photograph is in
its repetition of elements that get in the way of one another, which
creates an unusual kind of architectural space that emerges
entirely from itself. It’s a proliferating space, and also a space of
loss: you’ve lost any sense of the concrete, leaving you with nothing
but indications of its origins.
In one of our earlier conversations, you spoke about colonizing a
photograph as if you were an alien element.
That’s exactly what we’re attempting to do when we take one
cultural event and use it as a host in order to create something
entirely different. I’m sure that the makers of the film Alien could
never have imagined how we would use it as a model for our own
mechanics.
In this drawing, you’re colonizing yourself. You’re taking off from a
still of one of your own productions. Whereas the photograph
shows a stage space that’s fixed in the usual way, your drawing
creates an architectural space that’s precisely unfixed.
Well, I think the space was potentially there, and it was just a
matter of choices. The drawing suggests that from that space there
could have been these vectors generated.
Recently I’ve also appropriated (or “colonized”) some Tiepolo
drawings, which I found in a Dover book. The figures in the ink and
charcoal drawings are like knots of figures hovering in the air,
suspended and tangled in the sky. From their limbs, heads,
shoulders, arms, wrists, knees, and butts, I drew rather complex
vectors.
I used this as the basis for a dance, which took the form of the
following task. Given these complex, knotted, puzzle-like
configurations, the dancers were asked to “solve” these
configurations by unknotting them via the vector paths I’d drawn.
Each separate page became a key frame. Using the vectors, the
dancers had to invent a transition to the next frame they entered.
Let’s talk about the future. In your thirty years of dance-making,
you’ve discouraged people from writing books or making films
about your ballets. Yet here we are exploring the possibilities for
making virtual dances. Such works are made not of flesh, not of
paper, not of celluloid, but of numbers. In principle, at least, they
could last forever.
Well, you raise a number of points. Let me start by saying that up
until recently I’ve created works specifically for the stage, and not
for the page or the screen. The quality of light and of sound, not to
mention the physical presence of the dancers, cannot be
reproduced, so I’ve wanted my productions to stay intact as live
performances. Recently, however, I have made two short films,
Solo and Duo, with the specific aim of bringing viewers closer to
the dancing.
Now, people often ask, where is the book of photographs of the
Frankfurt Ballet? Ballet has been blessed and cursed by the
profusion of coffee table books, each with ever more beautiful
pictures of graceful bodies frozen in air.
But our work is about moving between positions and passing
through 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.
No one has ever done arabesque, they’ve passed through an
approximation of it. Arabesque will always remain primarily a
prescription, an ideal. I mean, there is a good arabesque and a bad
arabesque and a phenomenal arabesque, but arabesque is about
passing through. It’s more about time than it is about position.
Now to answer your question about the future, I’d say that the
virtual dance is certainly not for posterity, it’s for now. As
Balanchine once said, the dance of today will not be the dance of
tomorrow.
We’ll see about that! That certainly isn’t the case for other
temporal arts like music or literature, where reproduction is not a
problem.
In any case, what interests me about your virtual dance ideas is
that my thinking has mysteriously or surprisingly coincided with
developments in computer programming. In reading your dialogue
with Michael and Susan, I’ve noticed that the questions are
virtually the same. In fact, it reads like my diary — as if I’ve come
across messages I wrote to myself. When you talk about phases of
movement shifting through parts of the body, and about their
visible duration and rates of decay ‘ that’s dance. That’s exactly
what we talk about at the Frankfurt Ballet. All of us seem to be
posing the same kinds of questions about how to organize kinetic
events.
Some choreographers create dance from emotional impulses, while
others, like Balanchine, work from a strictly musical standpoint. My
own dances reflect the body’s experiences in space, which I try to
connect through algorithms. So there’s this fascinating overlap
with computer programming.
For Eidos, I gave my dancers ‘ and myself ‘ the following general
instruction: “Take an equation, solve it; take the result and fold it
back into the equation and then solve it again. Keep doing this a
million times.”
Recursion again! Where is all this heading?
If you look back over the last couple of centuries, the dominant
paradigm for what I call the temple arts — music and dance — has
been counterpoint.
Now once you begin to analyze the nature of an event carefully, as
we did with ballet, you begin to see completely new possibilities for
counterpoint. We looked at ballet and asked, what makes this
function? We looked at something classical, Symphony in C by
Balanchine, for example, and the logic of its functions began to
emerge. This logic is simply about creating ways to connect.
Now we find that these ways to connect can be algorithmically
redefined — infinitely. Since we’re no longer restricted to the
prescribed classical methods of connection, we’re open to an
extraordinary leap in connection, which is just a matter of defining
connective space.
That’s where your focus on spatial procedures and the architecture
of movement maps so well onto computer algorithms and virtual
spaces. As you said before, it’s as if we’re all on the same quest.
How do you define that quest?
Shelley and I have spoken about it as the search for a new art form,
which seems about to emerge from this odd confluence of the
dance, visual art, and computer worlds. I imagine that in this new
form, performance and recording and notation ‘ three strands of
the performing arts that have always been separate ‘ will be fused.
So that you can have the notation shaping the performance, the
performance shaping the recording, the recording shaping the
notation, and so on. Perhaps this new process, which builds on
itself, can bootstrap a new way of making art.
Where I’d start is with the score. What’s been missing so far is an
intelligent kind of notation, one that would let us generate dances
from a vast number of varied inputs. Not traditional notation, but a
new kind mediated by the computer.