Not much. Unlike Penny (goodness, how lyrical!), my experience is all in words, and I feel the particularly invidious nature of words (their prickly jealousy of flesh) as I try to assemble my thoughts here.
I’ve read reviews. Critics often fixate on movement quality (they say things like sharp, fierce, obsessive) and critical apparatus–the text in the programs or in the pieces. Writers often feel possessive about words, and when dancers/choreographers wander over into our territory, we occasionally spit at them–which is the impression I get from Forsythe reviews. The reviews scare me. From them, I expect to see cold hard theory. I expect pomposity. I expect pretentiousness.
But if Penny likes it, I suspect I might as well. Penny’s own work fits a lot of the descriptive words she’s using for Forsythe’s, and I adore Penny’s work. I’m also excited to see the foremost choreographer of avant-garde ballet, because I love ballet and I often love the avant-garde, and I often wish that more ballet work exposed the really fascinating structure, ethos, framework, whatever you’d like to call it, of ballet. Ballet is far more interesting than most avant-garde artists and viewers give it credit for, and I’ll raise a glass to any choreographer working to show that.
And about the words? Well, I’m trying to get used to a certain language that crops up in movement circles. It’s thorny, not pretty, sometimes absurd and sometimes hyperbolic. But you have to remember that this language is trying to describe something at language’s edge–the body and its life. That in itself is an interesting project.
Well, you are in for something incredible. I have been loving this company since visitting Frankfurt in 1990, although, like Penny, I also was blown away by William Forsythe’s choreography in “Love Songs” for the pre-crusty Joffrey (the work is available on video. You can see my maid-of-honor Leslie Carothers doing an amazing drunken releve to arabesque).
The relatioship to music, to the space, to other people is strikingly different from anyone else’s work. While we have suffered Forsythe wannabees who present dancing that is merely fast and motivated from the neck and shoulders, as though to prove “I am really into this cool, funky movement!”— with Forsythe’s company you see more possibilities, more sources. It may be the connection to and admiration for archecture.
When I show non-dancing friends the dances on video they comment that it’s clearly ballet dancers, even though they’re wearing socks and there’s not a tutu in sight, because of they relationship of the shoulders to the room (even upside-down). They remark about the physicality, line, tension, arched feet, as opposed to an airy, released quality you might find in modern dance. I like hearing what non-dancers have to say. So I’ll end here and hope to read more than write.
Comment by Sally Rousse — 3/12/2007 @ 10:29 pm
I knew nothing about this co., until this week and what I googled.
Europe loves the co. Or some of Europe, and I am liking what I am
experiencing in classes. Attention is cultivated about the inner intention and outward expresson of movement. Some exercises exemplified the co.’s training in and through ballet. Through by means of progressions into modern dance elements of release and extreme oppositions of limbs and spirals. Thus dynamics play an integral role in the expressions of movement for clarity of intention, identification of space and time, and the projection of story, character or other abstraction.
Comment by Robert Haarman — 3/14/2007 @ 1:59 pm