Maker of Dances
The dances of William Forsythe are based on a vision of the body as a thinking instrument. A vision of choreography as a channel for the desire to dance.
William Forsythe On…
Inspiration
“I like the mechanics of dancing. I like how it feels and I like how you think about it.”
“I’m a classical dancer, I’ve trained classically. I do other kinds of dance but they’re all fundamentally based on classicism. I think what’s interesting is departing from classical dance, using it as a starting point… and then you move in between those places or to places which aren’t familiar.”
“I don’t want to know what’s going to happen. I want to be ambushed by the results.”
“I have always wanted to facilitate dancing that shows the body’s own experience of itself, and this is an idea in opposition to my desire, as a choreographer, to organise movement. Trying to have each dancer articulate, choreographically, what he or she knows about dancing has made some coexistence possible between the two apparently irreconcilable elements.”
Rehearsal
“We gather an enormous amount of material. Then it is a process of sifting through it. It’s a bit like a sieve: in that process, what is essential remains, and what isn’t, falls through.”
“I always made the work for who I had in front of me. You don’t make a work for some non-existent person. You have to look at the person in front of you and see what they are doing. And I also change ballets constantly. If the cast changes and something does not look good on that person, I change it. If they are having trouble co-ordinatively with it, I change it. There is no point in making people suffer – for what?”
“(when choreographing a new piece)…I pray for what the Buddhist call that ‘don’t know mind’. I try not to know what the piece will be. I can start with an idea and I will study for years actually, to think about something, but when I go into the studio, I want to be able to see what is in front of me. I want to not have another idea…I try to devise methodologies that are commensurate with the project. The project has the same form as an idea. But those ideas have to become methodologies and I have to look at what the results are. I have to look at dancers. And that, I think, is the greatest challenge. It’s not seeing what I want to see, but seeing what is actually in front of my eyes.”
Dancers
“…the torso and arms have lives of their own…instead of accessorising the lower limbs…pitching the dancer into unknown extensions and introducing a notion of disequilibrium that classical ballet has traditionally spurned as anathema.”
Mise en Scène
“I like to hide, to make uncertain that which take place on stage and to extend that which I call the poetry of disappearance. People are always frightened that things will disappear. But life without death, light without obscurity, would be terrifying. Shadows is that which permits imagination”
Perception
“I have this particular quirk: I don’t narrate. I can’t. I think that I’m missing a narrative gene! That’s why I do everything the way I do.”
“There tends to be universal desire to project narration into dancing, and one of the things I always want to say is that you don’t have to understand this, you just have to watch it, and then maybe something will happen to you without thinking.”
“… of course I’m making theatre so there are certain things that function, certain things that don’t. You know how to build a certain amount of tension, when to pull it down, when to give it again, when you know expectations… they think it’s going one way, you yank it the other way. People love that, they like to be, let’s put it this way, they like to go to the theatre and come out knowing a little bit less than they thought they did.”