On the Post-Classical Modernism of William Forsythe's Choreography

The choreographer begins exactly as stated by Alain Badiou in Logics of Worlds, with a body made up of points, moved by its fidelity to the Event. In the case of dance, the event is an indefinitely prolonged return to stillness. To free the body from its neurotic tics and pulsations and discover grace within a certain "animality", which is an animality not unlike those of Kafka, because it includes a certain dignity. "From a Classical Position" does not follow rules that are particularly clear (in spite of Forsythe's numerous attempts to notate or clarify his "technique"), but rather proceeds through and in the virtuosity of the dancers (Forsythe and Dana Casparsen). It works through the tenderness and the ambivalent tensions evoked (almost as if through mime, but evading the tendency to turn into mime as with Mats Ek). Dance can never reduce itself to the exhibitionism of a beautiful body, just as the unattractive, out of shape body stands to benefit from the productions of dance as much as any athlete. Dance at its basis is a purely geometric perversion of spacetime and movement. Dance seduces us for an originary spacetime, whose prism is the catalogue raisonné of the body itself, the history of the human body. Dance takes this history and throws it off its axis, threatening to escape description, it becomes that defiant modernist arrogance (an aristocratic arrogance) which (and this is practically figured into From a Classical Position) continually withdraws from all judgement, no matter how instinctual or prejudiced. The most prejudiced, discriminating gaze would find in Forsythe's work (assuming it has the capacity for understanding ballet) perhaps only the arrogance and miss the genius. Alas, when one tries to judge the aesthetic from such an elitist squint, one loses sight of the target. 

Aphorisms: The sinuous piano score seems to build, like a child, a step-wise structure out of blocks, which the dancers repeatedly knock down. But as a child or domesticated animal learns the difference between aggression and play, there is also a sense that they coddle, with their acutely tuned arms, this music whose playfulness turns it into their child or pet. 

The delicateness of dance, which is perhaps its primordial hermaphrodite, its siamese twin, one half of which lives in an elevated bourgeois sphere, the other half living among the detritus of society. Here dance risks turning into universal humanity. It does, but then it becomes tired of it and goes back to what it was doing before it turned into universal humanity. Perhaps Universal Humanity is a club, to which dance sometimes has access and sometimes not, sometimes Dance itself is shown the door by Universal Humanity, which can go on partying without it. 

Dance is a demonstration of itself, a way of representing something whose voice only speaks in a tangle of limbs, a spasm of meaning, an ultimate holocaust of gestures. The dancers are corpses electrocuted and then raised, like Lazarus, over and over, on loop.