Artifact
Eva Dewaele | Photogr.: Johan Persson
As a youngster, American-born William Forsythe used to watch Fred Astaire on television and spend his afternoons practising rock ‘n’ roll holding on to the refrigerator, but today he is considered very much a 'European-oriented' choreographer. This is no doubt partly due to his interest in French philosophy, particularly in such poststructuralists
as Michel Foucault; awkward thinkers akin to the postmodernists, who will not settle for the status quo of the great ideologies, and with a preference for destabilising and deconstructing ‘authority’ (i.e. the author, the work of art, perception, ...).
This aspect is certainly also apparent in Artifact, which Forsythe created in 1984, his first work as the director of Ballett Frankfurt. Although this pioneering choreography was by no means unanimously well-received, it has since become as much a box-office draw as Swan Lake; a measure, not only of the speed with which artistic innovation penetrates into the mainstream, but also, primarily even, of the intrinsic qualities of Artifact.
Artifact is an evening-length work in four parts that incorporates speech, an elaborate repertoire of gestures and extremely formal pure-dance sections, and sometimes frenetic combinations of all these ingredients. It was greatly influenced by Forsythe’s interest in the movement model developed by the Slovak dance theoretician Rudolf von Laban. In this system, the body is seen in relation to 27 points that mark an imaginary kinesphere, which defines the
limits of the body’s extension in space.
Visually, this translates in Artifact into a dance that is instantly recognisable as ballet and yet causes the shock of the new, as Forsythe alters configurations of familiar positions and either avoids conventional transitions between steps
or gives them unusual emphasis. With reference to the von Laban model, Forsythe puts it as follows: "It is like ballet, which also orients steps towards exterior points (croise, efface ...), but equal importance is given to all points,
non-linear movements can be incorporated , and different body parts can move to the points at varied rates in
time."
In terms of content, Forsythe – drawing from Foucault & Co - asks how we derive meaning from context.
In Artifact, this doubt as to the status of perception is given explicit spoken form by “a woman in historical costume”,
who links the various acts, and by “a man with a kind of megaphone”. The text is about “stepping inside of outside”, about remembering and forgetting, about seeing what you think you see... In the fragmentation of the work –
Forsythe deconstructs classical ballet and subsequently pieces it together again, though not necessarily in
the same order, much like Picasso used to do with his models – lies reflected Forsythe’s epistemological perspective.
He asks that we, the audience, call into question our own perception of what we see on stage.
“How does the vocabulary of dance work?” is another question that preoccupies Forsythe. And in exploring it,
he extends the boundaries of the grammar of ballet and undermines all kinds of theatrical conventions.
The relationship between soloists and corps de ballet, for example, is unpredictable; the lighting alternately
conceals and reveals; the choreographer uses the entire body of the dancers, ignoring the vertical plane that is so characteristic of classical ballet, and kneads them into unknown extensions and extraordinary muscular articulations, changing the dynamics of partnering and introducing a kind of disequilibrium that is like a curse in the church of
classical ballet.
„Artifact, a cyclone that leaves the audience exhausted, shattered and full of admiration.“ (Le Figaro)
„While he dismantles [art] into his own unattached pieces, he regenerates material from which something
new may arise, preferably in a not too distant future.“ (Stuttgarter Nachrichten)
Vlaamse Opera
fr 22/5/2009 - 20.00
sa 23/5/2009 - 14.00
sa 23/5/2009 - 20.00
su 24/5/2009 - 15.00
mo 25/5/2009 - 20.00
we 27/5/2009 - 20.00
th 28/5/2009 - 20.00
Tickets - Vlaamse Opera Antwerp