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16/11/03

Interview

William Forsythe-Agnes Noltenius:
10 May 2003

A.N: How do you feel when you look at these photographs?

W.F: I feel both happy and sad, because they make me realise how much we’ve done. I think this is the only real documentation of what happened at the Frankfurt Ballet, of our twenty years of work. Even though you've only photographed a part of that time, it's a part that covers so much of the repertoire. What you’ve done is to convey the illogical state of some of these things. When I look at these photos, I see a very wild and dynamic environment - and that’s what it was. They really give you the sense of the energy and visual organisation of the work.

A.N: I wasn’t really conscious of trying to capture something specific like that. It was always totally spontaneous.

W.F: Well that's how I work. I work beforehand and I work afterwards. In the moment, I go with instinct. And you had been within the work beforehand, so you understand its rhythm, and your photographic instincts were like your instincts as a dancer.

A.N: Yes, that is true even at a physical level. Taking the photographs felt to me like a physical need, or instinct.

W.F: But it was also a collegial act. The photographs are of people you know intimately, and this is a document of that intimacy with those people, and what you shared with them for over a decade. I think it is very important that this is a homage to people who you worked with physically. In this case you were the author of these images, but you were all muscular authors, for many years.

A.N: I think that taking the photographs was a way of questioning the work.

W.F: It was a good chance, also, I think, to effect a meaningful transition for yourself. You took the same kind of analytical eye that I ask dancers to employ to observe and create things from the inside, and moved it to the outside. There are many photographers, who are making good photos, there’s no doubt about it. But your photographs all look like they come from the inside of the work. There’s a big difference. That’s what I mean when I talk about intimacy. It doesn’t look like you’re in the audience. There is scarcely a photo here that gives one the impression of being offstage.

A.N: That’s how it felt when I was taking them. I never felt like I was outside. It was as if I was physically with them, because I knew how the movement felt.

W.F: You knew the rhythm of the event itself, and you were able to latch on to that rhythm.

A.N: What, for you, is a good dance photograph?

W.F: One that communicates the logic of the event, not necessarily by making it intellectually apparent, but visually apparent. Something as simple as the lines of a person’s throat can convey everything about the dynamic that we used in the coordinations. Its expression is immediate - its effect moves from the eye to the brain and not via, for example, language. It’s is an immediate experience, and we understand in the same way that our understanding of the logic of dance often depends upon our immediate ability to perceive patterns.

A.N: When I was taking these photographs, I re-experienced something that I felt very aware of as a dancer; the way you use fragmentation in your work. We could remove a part of the body from the physical equation, but the rest would still be active. Where does that impulse come from?

W.F: With Decreation I finally figured it out. I think it comes from an idea central to Gnosticism - my secular, non-religious version of Gnosticism - that there is space kept between things. To say something is a fragment is one way of expressing it, but I think of it as keeping space between events so that things are really allowed to emerge and to move. You make space for things to happen, space that is not filled with signs, or symbols, or objects, all of which often reflect, or are, distress at the idea of a void.

A.N: Decreation felt much more theatrical to me. Facial expressions and gestures seemed to be part of the movement, not added on.

W.F: It is the movement. The expressions are all muscular. It’s as if the body is a mathematical totality of an equation, and normally I distribute the solution, the expression, all over the body. In this case I directed it towards the throat, which produces sound. In that sense, I choreographed the throat and the jaw. The body was there at the service of the voice.

A.N: You mean that the body works and the movements works to make the sound?

W.F: Yes, and I think that photographing that piece is very difficult because you don't realise initially that it is so focused on the acoustic. The work itself is hard to find visually. It’s a kind of opera, a hybrid form of music theatre.

A.N: You go so far in Decreation, but what about ballet? Is it possible to go that far, formally, there too?

W.F: Well, it’s the idea of ballet that’s the issue. What does “going far” mean in ballet? It's very difficult to find the appropriate metaphor, or an appropriate language to talk about this. How does ballet get put together; when is it is still ballet and when is it no longer ballet? If you're making something that is visibly balletic, how do you wish to participate in that history, and to what degree do you want to be complicit in its politics, its ideologies of gender and so on? How do you get underneath the political and philosophical issues to an essential, non-ideological state? Is that even an appropriate goal? If you are looking at Ballet from a contemporary point of view there are numerous analytical positions that one could take.
In any event, I'm not interested in putting ballet on trial. I think the mechanics of the form are extraordinary and I see it more as a coordinative phenomenon. The problem is that conservative practitioners of ballet insist upon its ideologies, and that they be maintained. I would say we were looking at the subject or the category: You can say, these are all those things it has been, yes, but it is now open to any number of analyses. For example, you can say that ballet is geometrically based, and work with that facet. The CD-Rom that we made is a good example of this. I’m not interested in undoing the propriety, the decor, the politeness, or the behaviour of ballet, just in going to its functional state, which is how dancers experience it.

A.N: Yes, that state is what I was interested in showing in the photographs.

W.F: Right now, I think choreographers are at a very complex point in the history of dance and its aesthetics. I realise that are we all, in essence, historians of the body, and that is what your photographs show. They define, historically, a cultural institution and a generation of artists. That's why I referred to the book as a kind of choreography, because you show what constituted the company’s aesthetic. I really appreciate the fact that you do not focus on the obvious. The great photo-art moment is fine, but can be of absolutely no interest whatsoever in terms of the work. You’ve addressed this from the inside and so you know the meaning of the work and haven’t ever compromised it in the service of aesthetics.
All dance photography must partake of some kind of serendipitous moment but it’s clear to me that your pictures emerge out of a deep sense of rhythm,

A.N: It was something that I felt. I didn't intellectualise - it was more physical.

W.F: Yes, and that’s what gives the book its rhythm. You find what was, for the performers, the essential qualities of each particular piece, and that's what emerges.

A.N: Does the relationship between a dynamic dance movement, and the stasis of the photography seem problematic to you?

W.F: Not here, because what I understand here though the photographs is the energy of the organisations. I don’t feel in the least like it’s a series of dance poses that have been displayed for our critique. Sometimes the page contains a lot of movement, and other times a lot of form, or combinations of both. It's a funny thing, but I feel like you’ve learned composition from the way I work. Because the photographs adequately express the composition of the pieces, I know that you really understand it.

A.N: I really started taking pictures of the company when we were making Sleeper's Guts, and actually I first started thinking about photographing the details, the things that people could not see, rather that overall patterns or organisation.

W.F: You constantly show the body’s configurations, the body configuring with itself, not configuring the space. The photography has the quality of exaggerating anatomy. It’s interesting, because the study of anatomy is about making the interior of the body visible. And this book is an anatomy of an era - let’s say the musculature of a period - it lays it open. The distance of the observer is negated, and the work is uncovered from your internal point of view. And I think on a personal level, you have had to move from designing your own body in a certain kind of way to saying, what is an exterior body of work, and how do I understand that? You've learned from your work as a dancer how to expose yourself in a certain way.

Erstellt: 22-04-04
Letzte Änderung: 16-11-03