William Forsythe : improvisation technologies : a tool for the analytical dance eye

Abstract

William Forsythe has brought about a shift of paradigms in contemporary dance. The vocabulary of his choreographies re-defines body, space, time and movement. The ZKM/Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe co-operated with William Forsythe in 1994 to produce a dance school in the form of an interactive computer installation - intended for the professional use of the dancers of Frankfurt Ballet. Revealing to the viewer the technologies of improvisation that William Forsythe developed in the course of one-and-a-half decades, the project makes it possible to analyse the specific vocabulary of contemporary dance. This revised version is being published on CD-ROM as a special issue of the ZKM digital arts edition with the support of the German Dance Archive, Cologne. It is made up of some 60 video chapters in which Forsythe demonstrates and comments upon the essential principles of his motional language. Examples, specially danced for the CD-ROM by Frankfurt Ballet members Christine Burkle, Noah Gelber, Thomas McManus and Crystal Pite, can be called up as required. Also included is a solo performance by William Forsythe filmed in 1996 by Thomas Lovell Balogh, and offering a rare chance to experience the choreographer as a dancer. New York-born William Forsythe is one of the leading choreographers of our time. His career as a dancer began at the Joffrey Ballet, New York, and from 1973 to 1980 he was choreographer of the Stuttgart Ballet. He became artistic director of the Frankfurt Ballet in 1984, and brought to the forefront of contemporary dance a company whose regular tours have now taken it to all the major cities of the world.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.