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Issue 103 Spring 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
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Clouds After Cranach, which premired November 2005 in Frankfurt. Foreground: George Reischl and Dana Caspersen. Photo: Dominik Mentzos, courtesy of the photographer.
I met Bill Forsythe early one morning last fall. He was in New York to work on a new project for the exhibition The Plain of Heaven, a dance that forces the spatial imagination of its dancer to continuously adapt. This single figure, Brock Labrenz, moves in a cavernous space that has been turned into a field of hanging pendulums. Dancing around the pendulums, sometimes with eyes closed, following his own rhythms, the dancer mesmerizes the viewer in ways I had not experienced before.
A thin energetic man with the physical agility of a dancer, Forsythe speaks with contagious enthusiasm about the vast number of projects he has created and the infinite number he would like to produce. They flow from his conversation, the product of a curious and educated mind that finds inspiration in a diverse array of sources. Forsythe is the foremost choreographer today, and every performance in his oeuvre challenges space, movement and the logic of music. These are works of enduring and unforgettable force.
The director of the Ballett Frankfurt for 20 years, Forsythe now heads his own company, which just performed its groundbreaking Kammer/Kammer at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Kammer/Kammer combines theater and dance on a stage made to seem chaotic and disjunctive, but the narrative thread, guided by two superb texts and charmingly performed by Dana Caspersen and Antony Rizzi, bind the viewer. Douglas Martin’s Outline of My Lover, an account of the author’s affair with a famous rock star, is refracted by the performance of Anne Carson’s essay, “Irony is not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve.” To say that humor abounds in the midst of fierce disappointment is an understatement. The piece is quietly ribald, chattily amusing and utterly ingenious.
