Performance Research

A Journal of the Performing Arts

ISSN: 1352-8165 (Print) 1469-9990 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rprs20

Dance Geometry

William Forsythe & Paul Kaiser

To cite this article: William Forsythe & Paul Kaiser (1999) Dance Geometry, Performance
Research, 4:2, 64-71, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.1999.10871671

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.1999.10871671

Published online: 05 Aug 2014.

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 Dance Geometry
William Forsythe in dialogue with Paul Kaiser

The following dialogue, recorded in 1998 between the American choreographer and artistic director of the Frankfurt Ballet. William
Forsythe, and multimedia artist Paul Kaiser, focuses on Forsythe's use of geometric and algorithmic thinking to create new forms of chore-
ography in ballet. Forsythe trains his dancers to picture the trajectories and trails either left behind or implied by their movements in
space, and he insists that they learn how to manipulate and transform that invisible geometry. He propels his choreography in this fashion,
with spatial transformations the key to his thinking. In 1994, Kaiser recommended that Forsythe use computer animation to render this
geometry visible to the layman through the technique of rotoscoping. This idea was incorporated into Improvisation Technologies, an inter-
active work Forsythe created in collaboration with the Centre for Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, and recently
published as a CD-ROM by Hatje/Cantz. 1 Forsythe and Kaiser, together with Shelley Eshkar, are now collaborating on an artwork to premiere
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in Frankfurt in spring 2001.

Paul Kaiser: Why did you begin using spatial concepts such as rotation, extrusion, inscription, and
refraction to create dance?

William Forsythe: Necessity was the mother of that invention because

our dance company never had a lot of time to make the work. My basic method, developed over a period of IS
years, is to find ways to use what my dancers already know. Since I work primarily with ballet dancers, I
analyze what they know about space and their bodies from their intensive ballet training. I've realized that in
essence ballet dancers are taught to match lines and forms in space.
So I began to imagine lines in space that could be bent, or tossed, or otherwise distorted. By moving from a
point to a line to a plane to a volume, I was able to visualize a geometric space composed of points that were
vastly interconnected. As these points were all contained within the dancer's body, there was really no tran-
sition necessary, only a series of 'foldings' and 'unfoldings' that produced an infinite number of movements
and positions. From these, we started making catalogues of what the body could do. And for every new piece
that we choreographed, we would develop a new series of procedures.
Some of these procedures worked with what is already in ballet. If you analyze the basic ballet position
where the hands are held over the head, you realize that there are two curves involved, one on the right and

Performance Research 4!21, pp.64-71 © Taylor & Francis Ltd 1999

 the other on the left. You can create innumerable transformations from that simple position, which is a given
in ballet, and can act like a keyframe. You can extend it out into space, or let it move through the body as a
natural continuation of the curves. You can also make dancers perceive the relationships between any of the
points on the curves and any other parts of their bodies. What it boils down to in performance is the dancer
+-
QJ illustrating the presence of these imagined relationships by moving.
E
0
QJ And in the process, discover new ways of moving.
~

QJ
What it actually does is to make you forget how to move. You stop
u
c:
thinking about the end result, and start thinking instead about performing the movement internally. That's
ro what pulls your body through its 'rigors', as it were.
Cl

That approach diverges from classical ballet, where the final position is
QJ paramount, as opposed to what goes on internally and in between.
.c
+-
>, Well, I don't know about that. Take the ballet position
Vl

'-
of epaulement, which is the crowning accomplishment of great ballet dancers. It entails a
tremendous number of counter-rotations determined by the relationships among the foot,
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0
u..
hand, head, and even the eyes. As in Indian classical dancing, it dictates rules of gazing past
the body. For me epaulement is the key to ballet because it demands the most complex
torsion. The mechanics of epaulement are what give ballet its inner transitions.
At the Frankfurt Ballet, we' ve created a new 'paradigm of rigors', in which the dancers
maintain very complex torsions during physically antagonistic events. This happens in
motion. For example, you can spin out of a classic position, and as this spinning undoes the
position, you look at the resulting distortions to your body and correct them. You correct
them within the aesthetic rules of ballet- you never lose your balleticism.

So it's ballet under stress.

Well, all of ballet is about maintaining decorum under extreme physical

stress, as Kirstein once said. What we do differently from traditional ballet is to focus on the beginning of a
movement rather than on the end.

To see what spills out from there?

Exactly. We use the reflexes that we've learned in classical ballet to

maintain a kind of residual coordination, which allows the body to acquire elastic surfaces that bounce off one
another. This elasticity is derived from the mechanics of torsion inherent in epaulement.

• Stills from Improvisation Technologies

 In a conversation with Michael Girard [http:/ /www.riverbed.com/duoframe/duounreal.htm] he
defined 'grace' as the smoothest and most efficient transition between two positions. This is D.l
...I.

certainly the case in classical ballet, where both positions and transitions are highly formalized.
m
At the Frankfurt Ballet, however, your definition of grace seems to be based on unstable, complex
movements rather than smooth, simple ones. As opposed to traditional choreography, which can
be memorized and duplicated rather easily, your pieces must be much more difficult to teach and
to learn.
The simplicity of classical ballet is precisely what enables it to be
reproduced with such ease. I sometimes think of it as an unconscious mimicry of the printing press in
Gutenberg's time. In fact, there is something extremely alphabetical about traditional ballet figures and
positions: they resemble glyphs. Since today's technology is digital rather than alphabetical, why shouldn't we
go with the flow?

Your choreography does seem to take what is spatial and fixed in ballet and make it temporal and
unfixed.
One of our ideas is to imitate a computer application that can wrap a
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different quality around an existing event, thus altering its very nature. This is another reason why I've stuck
with ballet. It defines a very precise spatial environment, which I've transformed through a series of distort-
ing operations. A lot of what we do in our company is based on states of fold. We teach our body how to fold
and unfold again, at various rates and moving through different body parts. So we create what I call a 'many-
timed body' folding and unfurling towards and against itself.
One aspect of classic ballet is the constant folding and unfurling of just the leg, which the dancer always
brings back to one of the prescribed positions. Our fold differs in that it is not just in the knee but also in the
hips, thus affecting the torso as well. This means that instead of remaining at a 90-degree angle to the floor,
the torso begins to fold down and become parallel with it. An entirely new set of mechanics then takes over,
since the body has achieved a new state of balance.
Since your dancers focus on the beginning rather than the end of a particular movement, how can
they predetermine their final position? And if they can't, isn't this significantly different from
classic ballet?

Well, they still have all the reflexes of the traditional ballet dancer, and
they have essentially the same basic mental training, which lets them picture points in space very precisely.
They orient their positions very quickly within those points. Of course, the mental images we use are not tra-
ditional.
 You recently told me that your body happens to have a high proportion of'fast twitch' muscles,
and that you look for similar bodies in choosing new dancers. In what ways has your physical
constitution affected your choreography?
+- I like the physical thrill of rapid shifts, as opposed to smooth transi-
QJ

E tions, and a 'fast twitch' body allows you to do this. Our company has something in common with sheepdogs,
0
QJ who can herd and change direction so quickly. In classical ballet, in addition to adagio and grand allegro,
l.::J
there is something called petit allegro, which involves small, fast movements made primarily by the feet and
QJ

u
legs. In applying petit allegro to the entire body, I've found that it's possible to move it in counterpoint to
c itself It's more like playing the organ than playing the clarinet: you're not just using one part of your body,
rtJ
Cl you're using it all.
VI

QJ
You have invented a procedure you call 'movement alphabets', which you use to help make new
dances. How does that work?
+-
>.
I chose the alphabet because it's simple, familiar, fixed, and arbitrary. We
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'-
0 use it primarily as an index for a database of movements. Everyone knows alphabetical order, and the dancers
u.. can navigate through its sequence easily even if they only do so in chunks. Again, this is not so different from
traditional ballet where each motion and position has its own name. In a similar vein, I created a non-balletic
vocabulary of 135 movements, which I then taught to my dancers until they knew it backward and forward. No
matter where or when the dancers move through the zone of one of those movements, they immediately know
its place in the sequence. It's like rapidly scrolling through a list of names in a computer program.
We use our alphabet in connection with the kinesphere- the total volume of a body's potential movement.
Dancers are always conscious of their kinespheres, which
exist in the air around them. For us, it becomes a huge field
for jogging memory.
Let me give you an example of how exactly how this works.
When I cup the back of my neck with my hand, it's as if I
were swatting a mosquito- and so, using this arbitrary
association, we say that I'm spelling the letter 'I' for 'insect'.
Now suppose that while I'm dancing, I suddenly find my
hand cupped around my knee, which reminds me of the
insect element. Bearing in mind that my focus is always on
the beginning of a movement rather than on its end, I will
have to fold my neck down to that point in space rather than
performing it standing up, as in the original alphabet. Now,
keeping to the sequence of the movement alphabet, I can
perform the movement either directly before or after I - that
is, the movements associated with either H or J. In this kind of dancing, I can lose my equilibrium within a
dance phrase, then remember everything from the point of that dislocation, so to speak. My body exists in the
sphere of its own memory.

In Alien Action (1992), were you performing operations based on the elemental motions repre-
sented by each letter?

Yes. Each letter of the alphabet, which covered as many human con-
figurations as possible, was then modified by the various operations that we've developed over the past 15
67
 years. These modifications reminded us of more letters, which in turn recalled more operations. It was a total :;><;
immersion system. llJ

Your description makes me think of recursive algorithms, where procedures call themselves, ID
....,
modify the results, call themselves again, and so on.

That's right. Alien Action was the first time that I actually began to
produce movement based on recursive algorithms. However, they were fixed variations that we created
through a long, painstaking process, not unlike that of computer programming, where every step has to be
repeated ad infinitum. The dancers in Alien Action face a challenge similar to that of the characters in the film
Alien. Both are trying to find their way in an unknown architecture, and both are using a diagram. The dance
diagram, however, does not depict any concrete or existing space, but rather a potential space - as the piece
forms, its architecture emerges. The goal of the piece, actually, is to form another and smaller stage within the
real stage. This is a drastic scale shift- the whole thing suddenly has to happen on a stage one-eighth the size
of the original stage, a dramatic condensation.
Dancing Alien Action is like navigating levels on the computer. You can't just move directly sideways to the
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desired destination, you have to go down to a different floor, so to speak, and then walk a ways and cross over
and move back up.

Are your methods now more advanced? In Eidos: Telos (1995), for example?

I believe so. In Eidos I was searching for a counterpoint

algorithm. There were also certain emotions associated with Alien Action that led to extremely idiosyncratic,

CONTAMINATE
__..,. RANDOM -- ..
l..ETTER CONTAMINATE
LETTER r--e- PEFFOOM
LETTER
ACCESS BY
PROXIMITY
WITH NON-
ALPHABETIC r--- NEW MAT. WITH
ALPHABET
MATERIAl

t t
ISC»AETRIES OF •
SPEU.NEW
LETTER WORD
SPELL N t MVT.
lETTER/OR
!
I =}.~
IMAGE
OF UNIVERSAL

~
M'v'T.

CHAIN OF
t RANDOM ACESS
1..
LETTERS OF
'MH)
I
ASSOCIATIONS BY PROXIMITY

FURTHER

•
MODIFYING/ANALYTICAl
OPERI\TlONS

W(R)
I
SPEll ANY
OOSERVED

t PHENCJJIENA

ASSIGN
MOVEMENT TO
wrno
'
OPERATIONS ON
LETTER
MOVEMENT

• Flowchart for EIDOS

68
 almost narrative events built into the movement. Eidos, on the other hand, is completely abstract, even
though the scale of the entire structure provokes a powerful
emotional reaction.

+- All this supports my notion that your dancers have to think

QJ

E even faster than they move - and they move very fast.
0
QJ

l!:J Yes, but don't forget that

QJ visceral thinking is something that's acquired over a long period of
u
c: time. Even so, the first act of Eidos requires an encyclopedic
0
1'1)
command of a huge kinetic field. The dancers must be able to
recover any part of the piece instantaneously, since there is always a
physical 'accident'. When the force of gravity throws them into
QJ

.s::: another configuration, for example, they have to analyse themselves

+-
and their current state in relation to the entire piece. In this sense,
VI
they are always in a 'possessed state', whether it be Apollonian or
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0
u..
Dionysian.

I know that you've spent a good deal of time creating and manipulating drawings, processes that
you've likened to that of choreographing for dance. Let's take this scene from Slingerland, for
instance. What I see here is not exactly a tracing, but an extrapolation of lines from a still photo-
graph.

This kind of drawing is an attempt to mask origin. It does work by

extrapolation. Where it diverges from the original photograph is in its repetition of elements that get in the
way of one another, which creates an unusual kind of architectural space that emerges entirely from itself It's
a proliferating space, and also a space of loss: you've lost any sense of the concrete, leaving you with nothing
but indications of its origins.

In an earlier conversation, you spoke about colonizing a photograph as if you were an alien
element.

That's exactly what we're attempting to do when we take one cultural

event and use it as a host in order to create something entirely different. I'm sure that the makers of the film
Alien could never have .imagined how we would use it as a model for our own mechanics.

In this drawing, you're colonizing yoursel( You're taking off from a still of one of your own pro-
ductions. Whereas the photograph shows a stage space that's fixed in the usual way, your drawing
creates an architectural space that's precisely unfixed.
Well, I think the space was potentially there, and it was just a matter of
choices. The drawing suggests that from that space there could have been these vectors generated. Recently
I've also appropriated (or 'colonized') some Tiepolo drawings, which I found in a Dover book. The figures in
the ink and charcoal drawings are like knots of figures hovering in the air, suspended and tangled in the sky.
From their limbs, heads, shoulders, arms, wrists, knees, and butts, I drew rather complex vectors.
I used this as the basis for a dance, which took the form of the following task. Given these complex,
knotted, puzzle-like configurations, the dancers were asked to 'solve' these configurations by unknotting
them via the vector paths I'd drawn. Each separate page became a key frame. Using the vectors, the dancers
had to invent a transition to the next frame they entered.
69
 Let's talk about the future. In your 30 years of dance-making, you've discouraged people from
writing books or making films about your ballets. Yet here we are exploring the possibilities for
making virtual dances. Such works are made not of flesh, not of paper, not of celluloid, but of
rD
numbers. In principle, at least, they could last forever. ....,

Well, you raise a number of points. Let me start by saying that up until
recently I've created works specifically for the stage, and not for the page or the screen. The quality oflight
and of sound, not to mention the physical presence of the dancers, cannot be reproduced, so I've wanted my
productions to stay intact as live performances. Recently, however, I have made two short films, Solo and Duo,
with the specific aim of bringing viewers closer to the dancing.
Now, people often ask, where is the book of photographs of the Frankfurt Ballet? Ballet has been blessed
and cursed by the profusion of coffee table books, each with ever more beautiful pictures of graceful bodies
frozen in air. But our work is about moving between positions and passing through
positions, not maintaining positions. This is actually a fact of ballet in general, new and old: one moves
through a position with greater or lesser accuracy.
No one has ever done arabesque, they' ve passed through an approximation of it. Arabesque will always
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remain primarily a prescription, an ideal. I mean, there is a good arabesque and a bad arabesque and a phe-
nomenal arabesque, but arabesque is about passing through. It' s more about time than it is about position.
Now to answer your question about the future, I'd say that the virtual dance is certainly not for posterity,
it's for now. As Balanchine once said, the dance of today will not be the dance of tomorrow.
We'll see about that! That certainly isn't the case for other temporal arts like music or literature,
where reproduction is not a problem.
In any case, what interests me about your virtual dance ideas is that my
thinking has mysteriously or surprisingly coincided with developments in computer programming. In reading
your dialogue with Michael Girard and Susan Amkraut [see http:/ /www.riverbed.com/duoframe/
duounreal.htm] I've noticed that the questions are virtually the same. In fact, it reads like my diary- as if I've
come across messages I wrote to myself! When you talk about phases of movement shifting through parts of the
body, and about their visible duration and rates of decay- that's dance. That' s exactly what we talk about at the
Frankfurt Ballet. All of us seem to be posing the same kinds of questions about how to organize kinetic events.
Some choreographers create dance from emotional impulses, while others, like Balanchine, work from a
strictly musical standpoint. My own dances reflect the body's experiences in space, which I try to connect
through algorithms. So there's this fascinating overlap with computer programming.
For Eidos, I gave my dancers- and myself- the following general instruction: Take an equation, solve it;
take the result and fold it back into the equation and then solve it again. Keep doing this a million times.
Recursion again! Where is all this heading?
If you look back over the last couple of centuries, the dominant
paradigm for what I call the temple arts- music and dance- has been counterpoint. Now once you begin to
analyze the nature of an event carefully, as we did with ballet, you begin to see completely new possibilities for
counterpoint. We looked at ballet and asked, what makes this function? We looked at something classical,
Symphony in C by Balanchine, for example, and the logic of its functions began to emerge. This logic is
simply about creating ways to connect.
Now we find that these ways to connect can be algorithmically redefined- infinitely. Since we're no longer
restricted to the prescribed classical methods of connection, we're open to an extraordinary leap in connec-
tion, which is just a matter of defining connective space.
70
 That's where your focus on spatial procedures and the architecture of movement maps so well onto
computer algorithms and virtual spaces. As you said before, it's as if we're all on the same quest.

How do you define that quest?

.....
Shelley Eshkar and I have spoken about it as the search for a new art form, which seems about to
"'E
0 emerge from this odd confluence of the dance, visual art, and computer worlds. I imagine that
"'
l!J this new form will fuse performance and recording and notation - three strands of the performing
arts that have always been separate. So that you can have the notation shaping the performance,
"' the performance shaping the recording, the recording shaping the notation, and so on. Perhaps
c:
ro this new process, which builds on itself, can bootstrap a new way of making art.
D

I'd start with the score. What's been missing so far is an intelligent kind
of notation, one that would let us generate dances from a vast number of varied inputs. Not traditional
"'
..c:
notation, but a new kind mediated by the computer.
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NOTE
0
LL 1. William Forsythe's Improvisation Technologies is now published on CD-ROM as a special issue of ZKM Digital Arts
Edition with the support of the German Dance Archive, Cologne. Divided into 60 video chapters, the CD-ROM is made up
of lecture demonstrations in which William Forsythe shows the essential principles of his improvisation techniques. Dance
sequences, performed specially by Frankfurt Ballet members Christine Buerkle, Noah D. Gelber, Thomas McManus and
Crystal Pite, can be called up as further illustrations. Also included is a document of improvisation practice: Forsythe's per-
formance of Solo, filmed in 1995 by Thomas Lovell Balogh.The CD-ROM is in English only, and is accompanied by a richly
illustrated English/German booklet [56 pp.] that features an interview with William Forsythe, with an essay by dance critic
Roslyn Sulcas and photographs by Dominik Mentzos.
William Forsythe: Improvisation Technologies- A Tool for the Analytiml Dance Eye, ed. ZKM Karlsruhe and Deutsches
Tanzarchiv, Cologne/SK Stiftung Kultur CD-ROM (Mac/PC), ISBN 3-7757-0850-2 [price: DM 58/US$ 40]. Order
via a bookshop or at [www.hatjecantz.de], [[email protected]] or at [www.amazon.de]. Review copies available on request. For
information contact: [[email protected]].

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