Ballett Frankfurt: Order, Chaos & Evolution
L.P. Streitfeld
The prolonged
standing ovation resounding through the Brooklyn Academy of Music Howard Gilman
Opera House on Tuesday, the final opening night for Ballett Frankfurt in New
York, was a tribute to the man who challenged all artistic expression by his
daring. William Forsythe succeeded in stripping movement down to the fundamentals
– the convergence between order and chaos. In doing so, he defied the postmodern
and set the stage for that which is authentically modern.
The dancers were
in street clothes, the only scenery the guts of the stage, and the choreography
was so natural that it appeared to have been occurring out of spontaneous patterns
evolving on stage. Intensely physical and bursting with emotional immediacy,
this collection of U.S. premieres built up the tension between naturalism and
technique to the clamorous One Flat Thing, which insisted on having the final
word on the subject of establishing order through chaos.
If time has
been a preoccupation for Forsythe throughout his 20 year run as artistic director,
perhaps he realized, like every innovator, that his time was limited. In 1992,
The Loss of Small Detail dancers read urgent warnings against time as a machine
spewed tickertape over the floor. His 1995 breakthrough, Eidos Telos, crossed
the boundary of real time into the eternal realm of mythology and the archetypes.
In this final performance, Duo presented two female dancers on the floor making
the motion of hands on a clock. Time was visually expressed through lyrical motion
as carved up space.
An ominous figure
on stage has been the avant garde’s answer to the Heisenberg Principle,
an acknowledgement of the choreographer/scientist as participant in the experiment.
Yet, Forsythe further evolves this idea by presenting dancers lying or sitting
on the stage, not as disengaged observers but motionless participants. Here we
also have the millennial conflict of individualism versus the group coming into
play: how do we find common ground between separate languages?
The Room as it
Was created fluid constellations that ebb and flow in time and space to the music
of personal sounds – the breath, a slap or stomp of the foot. Here is an
evolution, the conscious body fulfills the creation and the ego is no longer
separate from its own act of creation. Despite the complexity of technique, the
process is so natural that the audience is engaged. Forsythe said during his
last BAMdialogue that the luxury of being an avant-garde in-house company is
having the stage serve as rehearsal space. The logical extension of this process
delivers the improvisational techniques honed in rehearsal onto the stage, therefore
transforming dance into its origins as an authentic means of the body making
connections rather than a carefully rehearsed performance.
One Flat
Thing utilized 20 tables as staging ground for the tension between conscious/unconscious
and order/chaos. The tables provided an objective demarcation line between above
(sky), below (the underworld) and surface. As a symbol for the avant garde role,
the company pushed their harsh and jagged edges by going over, under and around
them. This proved to be an uproarious farewell to an unforgettable ride. Ultimately,
Ballett Frankfurt’s legacy is in the body of work — movements reflecting
the process of evolution arising out of the convergence between order and chaos.
As one audience
member commented on the way out, this final work was a metaphor for the classroom.
William Forsythe utilized dance as a classroom and the learning seemed to have
no end — until now, that is. Perhaps we have finally gotten the lesson.
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