Making the Impossible Possible: William Forsythe’s Decreation and Human Writes

In every artist’s career there comes a time when cherished principles of creation and long standing paradigms of production come under scrutiny again. In his thirty-year career as a choreographer, William Forsythe has created three pieces that can rightly be considered seminal steps in his way of thinking about ballet, its historical prerequisites and modes of being. Gänge, whose first part was produced by NDT in 1982, started his investigation into the world of ballet as a discourse made up of choreographic rules as well as verbal descriptions of the dancers reflecting on their daily routines that would eventually lead to the creation of their roles on stage. The Questioning of Robert Scott †, which premiered with Ballet Frankfurt in 1986, triggered Forsythe’s interest in the physical coordination of the balletic body itself. Traditional alignments of the limbs were broken up and rearranged. The body’s orientation in space was revolutionised by shifting the dancer’s focus away from points in space to impulses inside the dancing body. The choreographic structure was expanded by treating positions and movement as information that could be read, processed and fed back into the structure. All this led to what we today recognise as the “Forsythe style” or, to be more precise, his specific movement sensibility.

But William Forsythe, whose interest in the other arts as well as other areas of knowledge and science are well known, has always resisted being pinned down. If Robert Scott served as the blueprint for nearly two decades of work on ballet’s principles, Decreation serves as a model for a new area of investigation. Decreation was premiered on 27 April 2003 at the Bockenheimer Depot in Frankfurt am Main. During the premiere, it immediately became clear that something new was under way. Forsythe’s primary interest is no longer sequencing steps in time and space and devising choreographic structures that the dancers then have to fill themselves via structured improvisations, but exploring physical states, states the body is brought into by specific methods of producing movement.

The title Decreation refers to Anne Carson’s eponymous opera in which the Canadian writer uses three interspersed stories to talk about love, jealousy and the journey of the soul towards God. Carson confronts the mythological story of Mars, Venus and the betrayal of her husband Vulcan with a text by Marguerite Porète, a thirteenth-century mystic who explores her love of God by using the ideal of courtly love as her foil. The third line of thought is provided by the author’s meditations on the French philosopher Simone Weil’s relation to God as a means of working through the separation from her husband. From these love triangles Carson derives the perspective of Decreation as a process of self-interrogation, a productive undermining of the self leading to the creation of a space for something hitherto unknown and new. The texts actually spoken or sung by the performers, however, are from another of Carson’s books, The Beauty of the Husband.

As usual with William Forsythe, these stories are not represented on stage by characters who act out love, betrayal, jealousy or hope. Instead, he derives a structural principle from them that triggers a certain movement quality. The story or content is therefore not in the characters but in the very physicality of their decentred bodies. During the rehearsal process, which a lot of the dancers described as having been particularly open, playful and experimental, tasks were used to make movement impossible. The dancers tied themselves up with ropes while trying to execute certain steps. Later, the movements were repeated without the ropes, thus altering the sensibility with which they could be performed. A dancer was assigned the task to do every movement possible in one and a half minutes. Even if anybody could imagine what “every movement possible” was, nobody could do it compressed into such a short span of time. But the mere thought of this opened up channels that altered the movements that were actually performed. Charcoal was used to draw and to register movement on white pieces of cardboard with the dancers sometimes throwing themselves onto the canvas to leave traces of their bodies.

The principle that resulted from those playful explorations of the impossible was the indirectness of movement and emotions, the bounding off of each other, the making of detours before one reaches some kind of unexpected result. Dana Caspersen describes the movement principle thus discovered as “shearing”: “It is a state that the body enters into where no approach, neither vocally nor physically, is ever made directly. For example, as we approach a microphone, or a person, our thoughts might move in that direction, but our bodies ricochet backward, off of the thought, in a series of oblique refractions. The body becomes a proliferationof angular currents, a state of complex, fragmented reaction.”[1]

Traces of these experiments with material can still be seen in the actual piece. In the first scene, a woman catches the lower half of a female dancer somewhere in space with her camera and projects it onto a screen at the back of the deep, broad stage. A dancer enters this stage and positions herself behind it, her body now becoming a montage of two images that do not match. With a grotesquely distorted mouth she talks about a liar and a traitor and accuses her imaginary listener of leading a double life, while she simultaneously pulls and tears at her clothes with pointed fingers. Towards the end of the piece, a round table that has been resting next to the screen is pushed forward. The dancers fetch their chairs and sit down around its coal dust-covered surface. A dancer, a burning cigarette between her toes, rolls herself across it until black soot covers her entire body. Suddenly the dancers break off this ritualistic scene by dragging their chairs to the back of the stage and dispersing across the space.

Of Forsythe’s original idea to stage Anne Carson’s opera Decreation only the level of sound has remained, which strongly shapes the piece. Forsythe choreographs the faces of his dancers, makes their mouths contradict the movements of the rest of their bodies, and lets their voices soar through their grotesque bodies. Their sound results directly from the movement and is additionally deformed and distorted by electronic filters. David Marrow has composed the accompanying score and plays it live on a keyboard. It consists of individual sequences and notes nervously oscillating and jumping between highs and lows and always sounding as if they were about to tumble into an abyss.

The movement thus produced is useless in the best sense of the word, namely free from intentions and therefore potentially free from depicting anything in particular. The result is not a choreography of steps. The piece is structured according to theatrical principles such as contrasting proximity and distance of actions in space, or the dynamics of scenes and music. Decreation creates bodies that are inhabited by conflicting forces, but refuses to take them anywhere in particular. They are bodies undone or “de-created” because they are plural bodies in one body. The dancers divest themselves of any kind of particular form or identity that is traditionally connected with the unity of the body. The dancers do not have to be “one” any longer. They are undoing their selves to make space for movement. They dance neither roles nor characters nor according to any kind of dance technique. Theirs is a unique sensibility of responding to movements surrounding them, picking them up almost by osmosis, and rendering their bodies alien in the process.

Over the past ten years, William Forsythe has developed a strong interest in devising performance-installations that leave the traditional theatre space behind. Projects such as White Bouncy Castle, City of Abstracts, or Scattered Crowd create specific laboratory situations in which the public is made to move by means of consciously designed parameters. Among these projects, Human Writes holds a special place because of its political implications. Together with Kendall Thomas, professor at the Columbia School of Law in New York City, William Forsythe developed a performance that takes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ratified by the UN in Geneva in 1948 as its starting point. The title puns on the homonym “rights” and “writes”, as dancers and members of the public alike engage in spelling out the words of the Declaration. Dancers and audience share the same space, which is constantly being transformed as the audience participates in the action.

The performance premiered in the Schiffbauhalle in Zurich in October 2005 and has since been shown in Dresden-Hellerau and Frankfurt am Main. Depending on the size of the hall, 40 or 60 tables with white sheets of paper attached to them are neatly lined up in rows. On closer inspection, one can detect words and phrases, excerpts from the Declaration of Human Rights, written on them in thin pencil. It is these words that have to be made visible during the three hours of the performance, that have to be worked on in order to bring them into full visibility and, by implication, the law to validity.

The performance makes use of some of the improvisations used during rehearsals for Decreation. Impossibility, for example, shifts from being simply a principle to being the mechanism by which unforeseen movements in the social sphere are generated. All writing has to be done indirectly and under adverse conditions to underline the difficulty of enforcing the Declaration of Human Rights in the current political climate of a supposed terrorist threat. Ropes and charcoal are used as instruments to work against the odds. A dancer lies on his back on the table holding a stick of coal in each hand. Normally his hands move while writing. Here they are motionless while the dancer wiggles his body up and down on the surface of the table, so that the actual writing is achieved not by his hands but by other moving parts.

At the beginning, the dancers work alone at their tables while we are left to wander about and look at the various ways in which they go about their tasks. After a while, however, the audience is asked to join in and help. As the dynamics of the actions increase, the tables are toppled and used to build bridges between different, hitherto isolated performance spaces. Communication between participants increases. A dancer asks a member of the public to hold on to one end of the rope while he holds the other. A piece of coal is inserted into the rope, and together they move it up and down, making the coal hit the table like a hammer hitting a nail. Each dancer has made up his or her own set of little performances, sticking to the parameter of indirectness. They are free to change the order of their performances as they wish.

Although the legibility of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is severely impaired, something does become visible. Only by working together can the task be achieved. Only by getting our hands dirty (from the coal) can we actually change the situation. Human Writes creates both a space for actual physical experiences and exchange, and an imaginary space in which we act as if it were possible to achieve the impossible. This is the political gesture of the performance installation. It creates an imaginary space where the validity of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights may emerge. The letters, words and phrases of the Declaration bind us. By moving around them or away from them, by turning our backs on them, we are nevertheless constantly interpellated by their force.

Gerald Siegmund

[1] Dana Caspersen, “Der Körper denkt: Form, Sehen, Disziplin und Tanzen”, in: Gerald Siegmund, William Forsyth - Denken in Bewegung, Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 2004, p. 114 [original English version of the quotation].