Dance Geometry Hand Out

8/14/2019 Dance Geometry Hand Out

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Dance Geometry (Forsythe)

William Forsythes methods of choreography are strikingly algorithmic and give rise to astyle 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

entitledImprovisation Technologies. Since then, hes 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 Bills 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 adance for childrenand 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


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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. Ive 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 dancers 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 boilsdown 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. Thats

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 dont know about that.

Take the ballet position of paulement, 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 paulement is the key

to ballet because it demands the most complex torsion. The mechanics of paulement


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are what give ballet its inner transitions.

At the Frankfurt Ballet, weve 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 its 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 weve 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

paulement.

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 andtransitions 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

Gutenbergs time. In fact, there is something extremely alphabetical about traditional

ballet figures and positions they resemble glyphs.

Since todays technology is digital rather than alphabetical, why shouldnt 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 Ivestuck with ballet. It defines a very precise spatial environment, which Ive through a


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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 cant, isnt 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, Ive found that its possible to move it in

counterpoint to itself. Its more like playing the organ than playing the clarinet: youre

not just using one part of your body, youre using it all.

As you know, Shelley and I originally toyed with using Motion Alphabets as the title for this book.

Ive 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 its simple, familiar, fixed, and arbitrary. We use it primarily

as an index for a database of movements. Everyone knows alphabetical order, and the


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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 cant 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 dont forget that visceral thinking is something thats 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.

Thats quite different from a more traditional dancer, whos simply moving through a sequence thats 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 theyre experiencing. When she performed, she

was entirely in the moment.

Still, that seems very different to me: her moment is not nearly so uncertain!


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However, lets move on to another topic. I know that youve spent a good deal of time creating and

manipulating drawings, processes that youve likened to that of choreographing for dance.

Lets 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. Its a proliferating space, and also a space of loss: youve 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.

Thats exactly what were attempting to do when we take one cultural event and use it as

a host in order to create something entirely different. Im 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, youre colonizing yourself. Youre taking off from a still of one of your own productions.

Whereas the photograph shows a stage space thats fixed in the usual way, your drawing creates an

architectural space thats 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 Ive 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 Id drawn. Each separate

page became a key frame. Using the vectors, the dancers had to invent a transition to the

next frame they entered.

Lets talk about the future. In your thirty years of dance-making, youve 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


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least, they could last forever.

Well, you raise a number of points. Let me start by saying that up until recently Ive

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 Ive 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, theyve 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. Its more about time than it is about position.

Now to answer your question about the future, Id say that the virtual dance is certainly

not for posterity, its for now. As Balanchine once said, the dance of today will not be

the dance of tomorrow.

Well see about that! That certainly isnt 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, Ive noticed that the questions are

virtually the same. In fact, it reads like my diary as if Ive 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 thats dance. Thats 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 bodysexperiences in space, which I try to connect through algorithms. So theres this


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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 were no longer restricted to the prescribed classical methods of connection, were

open to an extraordinary leap in connection, which is just a matter of defining connective

space.

Thats where your focus on spatial procedures and the architecture of movement maps so well onto

computer algorithms and virtual spaces. As you said before, its as if were 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 Id start is with the score. Whats 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.

Source: http://openendedgroup.com/index.php/publications/conversations/forsythe/

(Retrieved on 25/01/2010)

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Dance Geometry Hand Out