The conceptual category of choreography has recently been expanding to include a wide range of artistic, scholarly, and social concerns that may or may not derive from the practice of dance, or even performance. What the term choreography is being asked to do in this current interdisciplinary context depends a great deal, of course, upon who is asking and from which field the question arises. But in framing exhibition—curating, urban planning, digital-information design, and social networking—as choreographic work, these disparate fields are borrowing from dance new ways of conceiving their own disciplines in terms of organizational complexity and the relational, affective, and perceptual dimensions of embodiment. At the same time, many professionals in the field of contemporary dance are approaching choreography in broader terms that de-emphasize the primacy of the dancing body in order to explore new theories, practices, media, and performance relationships. Some have claimed in para-revolutionary rhetoric that, “choreography is emancipating itself from dance” and must be recognized as “a practice that is, in and of itself political” (Spångberg Reference Spångberg2012). This theoretical disembodiment of choreography from within the field of dance can also be seen as a strategic move in the ongoing battle of dance and performance for recognition by those disciplinary fields that, by definition and centuries of philosophical prejudice, have excluded body-related disciplines.

William Forsythe is a choreographer who has dedicated his career to redefining the conceptual and disciplinary boundaries of ballet specifically, and choreography more generally. His recent work has been playing a major role in the current reevaluation of choreography's scope, and has forged vital new conversations between dancers, architects, curators, musicologists, filmmakers, graphic designers, cognitive neuroscientists, and philosophers. But it is also important to see Forsythe's contribution to these debates as the logical extension of the work he began over thirty years ago, challenging the ossification of thinking that had prevented ballet from developing into a fully modern—let alone contemporary—art form. This first English-language monograph on Forsythe's work, edited by Stephen Spier, assembles various histories, theories, methodologies, and critiques of Forsythe's work from his pioneering analytic approach to ballet to his more recent endeavors to introduce choreographic knowledge practices to other disciplinary fields.Footnote ¹ Several essays focus on Forsythe's twenty years with the Ballett Frankfurt, disentangling ballet's physical mechanics and the cultural forms of romanticism from which they emerged. Others attend to the ensemble performance works of The Forsythe Company and Forsythe's independent “choreographic objects”—his site-specific and gallery installations that generate choreographic encounters with the public. Several contributors to the book are current or former collaborators of Forsythe's who offer a range of perspectives and analyses of various creation processes.Footnote ²

Forsythe has been widely celebrated for revitalizing what many had dismissed as the dead idiom of ballet by asking how it might be spoken as a living and still-evolving physical language, and how it might voice contemporary concerns instead of merely reiterating aesthetic dogmas of the nineteenth century. In her essay for the book, Senta Driver casts Forsythe as a contemporary Nijinsky—a visionary artist of the classical tradition who has advanced the art form at least as much as modern choreographers who abandoned ballet altogether. In his introduction, Spier counts Forsythe amongst the greatest artists of our time for “fundamentally questioning the supposed precepts of his own medium (3).” But for those critics who extol ballet in so far as it strives to refine and perfect a classicized ideal, Forsythe's search for alternative methodologies and outcomes has been perceived as nothing less than the wanton disregard and dissolution of the grand tradition. In a chapter entitled “Splintered Encounters: The Critical Reception to William Forsythe in the United States, 1979–1989,” Mark Franko insightfully explores the genealogy of the rift between the conservative anti-intellectualism of much of the critical ballet establishment in the U.S. and Forsythe's theoretically savvy iconoclasm (defensively derided as “European”)—a rift that, remarkably, still persists to some degree in spite of the international acclaim and exuberant audience engagement that has followed Forsythe's thirty-six-year career.

Reactionary reviewers have at times heaped language so excoriating as to be amusing upon the aesthetic affronts they perceive in Forsythe's most innovative work (not the least of which turn out to be his dancers' use of spoken language onstage, as well as his own critical theory–informed conversational style). Confronting these attacks, Franko rightly frames the issues as philosophical and ideological rather than purely aesthetic.

As critic and longtime follower of the Ballett Frankfurt and The Forsythe Company, Roslyn Sulcas explains in her essay for the book, Forsythe dared to propose that ballet can be approached most productively as a conceptual and historical category worth investigating, rather than as the pre-ordained solution to the problem of how to go about dancing. In an essay on systems of linguistic and physical memory in Forsythe's early work, Frankfurt-based performance scholar and critic Gerald Siegmund examines Forsythe's grammatical play with classical ballet vocabulary as well as spoken language in Artifact (1984). Extracting balletic ideas from the conventional phrasings of their standard usage, Forsythe set them circulating as speech acts of dancing. In so doing, he explicitly recast ballet from immutable doctrine to an available subject of inquiry. Since then, Forsythe has continued to examine how ballet's organizing principles, coordinative geometries, and perceptual habits might be dissected, exposed to parallel ideas in other disciplines, and recombined to produce new states, forms, and configurations of knowledge. He has expanded and diversified ballet's scope while maintaining the integrity of its logic—if not all of its assumptions. As choreographer Jonathan Burrows puts it, Forsythe “rearranged all of the furniture whilst leaving the room recognizable” (Burrows Reference Burrows2010, 112).

Once Forsythe had reconceived ballet as a subject in and of itself, he could then investigate it as intellectual, physical, and creative work—that quality which the aesthetics (if not the practice) of classical ballet most fervently disavows. While classical ballet's extremely demanding training, exacting work ethic, and hierarchical teaching and employment practices have fed public fascination with the genre, the aesthetic codes of virtuosity in ballet performance have served to obscure actual effort and naturalize subjugation. Forsythe, by contrast, seriously grapples with existential and ethical questions about how to work, as well as with the practical challenges of how to make the work of dance and choreography visible. Problems of work—such as what counts as work, who does it, and with whom; what kinds of knowledge it draws upon and generates; how it functions; how it might lead to consequential outcomes; and how to recognize it—have been central themes in performances such as Die Befragung des Robert Scott (The Questioning of Robert Scott) (1986, 2000), Human Writes (2005), and You Made Me a Monster (2005), as well as in Forsythe's choreographic objects installations including City of Abstracts (2001) and Instructions (2003). Similarly, Forsythe's award-winning pedagogical CD-ROM, Improvisation Technologies (1999), aimed to explain and demonstrate the Ballett Frankfurt's working methods for improvising, while his Synchronous Objects (2009) project created a digital score to visualize the choreographic workings of the performance piece One Flat Thing, reproduced (2000) by mapping, indexing, and diagramming its cues, movement themes, alignments, and organizational structures.Footnote ³

Taking ballet or choreography as a subject of inquiry and the impetus to work requires engaging in research, analysis, and creative thinking. In his own contribution to the book, the essay “Choreographic Objects,” Forsythe writes that most approaches to dance have overly invested in dance's corporality to the extent that they have failed to recognize the intelligence of dance practice. Complying with dominant philosophical tendencies to treat the work of the body as precognitive, he argues, the field of dance has perpetuated a false self-conception that has hindered it from clearly stating its own intellectual principles and participating in thoughtful and fruitful exchange with other disciplines. Thinking analytically in the realm of dance, as in any other, involves looking insightfully, hypothesizing about what is perceived, and constructing theories that attempt to assimilate what is known, frame investigations into the unknown, create new correspondences, and spawn new practices. In dance, however, the fact that the work of thought correlates to highly visible, energetic, and, most significantly, ephemeral transformations of the body draws attention toward the spectacular, affective, and fleeting-leaving sustained practices of knowledge production too often unexamined.

In performances throughout his career, Forsythe has explicitly thematized the work of translating knowledge from one idiom to another, as in The Loss of Small Detail (1991), 7 to 10 Passages (2000), Human Writes, and Three Atmospheric Studies (2006). He has identified, as a source of generativity, the residual networks that emerge from accumulated traces of connections and misconnections. The essays by his collaborators each discuss instances of how Forsythe constructs various systems of translation and the effects that these processes produce. Multidisciplinary scholar and former Forsythe dramaturg Heidi Gilpin theorizes how Forsythe's work of the late 1980s and early 1990s transposed rationalized strategies of physical orientation into approaches that fragment and multiply forces in the body, producing movement with a sense of falling out of form and disappearing. Digital artist and scholar Christopher Salter outlines the dynamic complexities of technical iteration and feedback between sound, digital systems, moving bodies, and architectural space in Ballett Frankfurt's Eidos:Telos (1995). Dancer and choreographer Dana Caspersen explains the thinking required to accomplish physically challenging translations between the focus of the dancer's gaze, coordinative geometry of limbs, and behavioral state in Decreation (2003)—the pivotal work between Forsythe's two companies. Current dramaturg Freya Vass-Rhee suggests how strategies for translating visual stimuli into movement have developed new multimodal perceptual synergies in Three Atmospheric Studies and other recent works of The Forsythe Company.

But Forsythe's analytic process of reconceiving choreographic practice by retooling its defining categories and terms is made most explicit in his own essay, where he begins by unpacking the definition of choreography in order to expand its spheres of relevance and to access some of its untapped potential. Interestingly, Forsythe's argument that choreography be thought as separable from the dancing body returns the concept of choreography back to its etymological roots in writing. And while Forsythe has long been interested in the ways in which a body could be understood as performing a kind of writing-through-movement (which the Improvisation Technologies CD-ROM so elegantly demonstrated), there was a time when he quite forcefully resisted the converse proposition—that movement of the body might be transcribed into a readable text. Gilpin's essay recounts Forsythe's argument (which was corroborated by an expert in Labanotation) that the notation of his choreography into a written score was virtually impossible given the complexity of its timings, orientations, and coordinations. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, generating choreographic complexity was such a priority for Forsythe that the prospect of translating what was happening into a fixed, written score could be seen only as anathema to the dynamism of the work.

In recent years, however, Forsythe has revisited the idea of the score in several different ways, such as in the concept of “breath scores” (addressed in Vass-Rhee's article) and in the online digital media score Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced, which is the pilot project for Motion Bank. But in his recent writing, Forsythe chooses to extrapolate the concept of the score specifically into the realm of three-dimensional objects and interactive installation environments. Forsythe's choreographic objects (described by Spier in the book's final essay) serve as scores, in so far as they present choreographic ideas in material form, extended in time and space beyond the dramaturgical confines of a one-off performance experience. These scores do not transcribe movement, but call attention to how ideas produce movement and how movement occasions ideas. Only one, Instructions, addresses its audience via the written word. The other objects are “read” as the public engages physically with them. The choreographic work performed by the object and the work of reading it (in both senses of apprehending the mode of engagement that the object affords, as well as responding to it by moving) permanently resides in the object itself, yet only unfolds and produces knowledge in the dynamic play of the encounter.

For Forsythe, the purpose of analyzing the categories of ballet and choreography, investigating how they work, submitting their definitions to translations of various orders and degrees, and seeking what other work might arise from thinking them through differently has always had to do with engendering, articulating, and perceiving complexity. The complex states of thinking, dancing, and seeing that his work simultaneously demands and produces, work transformational magic as they expose translational labor.