Frankfurt’s Ballet and Its Pop American : A look at the wit, creativity and controversy surrounding choreographer William Forsythe

Six years ago the Joffrey Ballet sent a succession of dancers in black evening clothes slinking, blazing and flailing across the stage with the bitter energy of spurned lovers. The piece was William Forsythe’s “Love Songs”--to recordings by Aretha Franklin and Dionne Warwick--and it whipped up a storm of controversy.

For people used to seeing contemporary ballets that either celebrated athletic virtuosity or attempted to cash in on the neoclassic purity of George Balanchine, “Love Songs” was an aberration. It wasn’t upbeat, it wasn’t pretty, and its violence struck some observers as downright misogynist.

But Forsythe, now artistic director of Frankfurt Ballet--making its West Coast debut at the Wiltern Theatre Tuesday and Thursday as part of a nine-city North American tour--continues to revel in the unexpected. His work has evolved into a visceral, yet frequently ironic, dance-spectacle that assaults the mind and senses at once. Remaining faithful to classical ballet technique, he uses it in idiosyncratic new ways.

Several of his works have been seen in the U.S. during the past few years. In 1983, the Joffrey introduced “Square Deal”--a 35-minute kaleidoscope of light effects, loud music (by Thomas Jahn), sentences projected on two portable screens and fragmented moments of dancing and acting by a woman in leotards, a master of ceremonies and a group of formally dressed men and women.

Forsythe’s “Steptext” (an excerpt from a longer piece called “Artifact”) was danced by the Lyons Opera Ballet during the Los Angeles Festival in 1987. He has choreographed “Behind the China Dogs” for New York City Ballet and “New Sleep” for San Francisco Ballet, which also dances his “In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated,” made for Paris Opera Ballet.

These are works that tend inspire either loathing or delirium in audiences and critics. In New York last year, Mayor Ed Koch lectured the first-night audience that booed the Paris Opera Ballet’s production of “In the Middle . . .,” saying they probably would have booed Mozart. One local critic wrote that the mayor must have been thinking of the wrong composer, because Forsythe’s work was “as remote in spirit from Mozart’s music as a pneumatic drill.”

Other U.S. audiences in recent years--at PepsiCo Summerfest in Purchase, N.Y., in Los Angeles and San Francisco--have greeted Forsythe’s sensory overload with occasional eruptions of laughter, thunderous applause and earnest discussions about the meaning of it all. And some critics have been strongly supportive of Forsythe’s choreography, celebrating his wit, theatricality, kinetic inventiveness and willingness to take risks.

At the Wiltern, the company will offer two mixed bill programs--five works that give a fairly good idea of what Forsythe has been up to since “Love Songs,” except for some of his newest work. Some pieces, like the full-length “Artifact,” could not be accommodated in the Wiltern--we will see Movements II and III only--and others simply did not appeal to Bella Lewitzky, artistic director of the Dance Gallery, which is presenting the company.

She chose Frankfurt Ballet as the Dance Gallery’s first international dance offering because, she says, “I think (Forsythe) is one of the most exciting choreographers I’ve seen for a long time. I found him non-imitative, with a rich invention of movement, a very free mix of . . . speaking, dancing and gesture, but held under control of a very keen artistic eye. And his dancers can do anything . . .”

In person, the 39-year-old American choreographer looks like the hip guy next door, with a tensile, compact body, close-cropped blond hair and wary brown eyes that radiate intelligence.

After 16 years in Germany, five with his present company, he has retained an evident zest for American pop culture that sits easily with his occasional excursions into the arcane world of French post-structuralist writers. When words temporarily fail him, he falls back on a comic-book-style vocabulary of onomatopoeic noises.

“I sometimes think, ‘Why the hell go to the theater,’ ” he says, “and that’s when I have to reconsider, re-imagine, a theater people would want to go to. People go to a live performance to watch a certain risk being taken, and they go to see people expend energy . . . to see the human body organize and expend, as it were.”

His work is frankly reflective of the multichannel, fast-lane, deadpan quality of urban life around the globe in the late 20th-Century. It also seems deeply involved in questioning the distinctions between “high” and “pop” culture, combining bits and pieces from the grand legacy of Western Civilization and the cheap thrills of our own time to make a new, complex whole.

Forsythe says elements of contemporary culture feed into his “intuition” about what dances can be. “You gotta look at video. You gotta look at TV,” he says. “At visual arts and other disciplines also. I’ll turn on MTV to watch what people are doing to music.”

What he is doing, he says, is “reinvestigating the nature of ballet as a language and how it can be articulated.” In his work, the virtuosity that audiences have come to expect from ballet dancers has become “a scaffold, a support for other events,” he explains. “And that’s so nice because virtuosity had to find its place in contemporary dance. It isn’t so self-aggrandizing. It’s supportive.”

Viewers of Forsythe’s ballets enter a strange new world of multiple dance and non-dance events that happen simultaneously onstage. There are virtuosic dances that move so fast you can’t see what the steps are. There is loud, often assaultive electronic music. Stage sets and even theater curtains are liable to be used in deliberately jarring ways that shatter the convention of theatrical illusion.

“All artists are pulse-takers at some point,” he says. “Perhaps we’re geologists discovering potential cracks in the surface and pointing them out. And theaters can be little volcanoes or epicenters, as it were, of underlying unrest . . . “

Dancemagazine’s West German correspondent, Horst Kogler, says that in Frankfurt, Forsythe “has built up a completely new audience, exclusively of young people who don’t go to any other performances (at the opera house) but his.”

But for the older, more conservative opera crowd--whose subscriptions include a sampling of ballet performances--”it’s hard to survive only on Forsythe’s loosely constructed ballets and not have ‘Swan Lake’ or ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ ” Kogler says. The state-supported company is the only ballet company in town, and it doesn’t do the classics.

Back in 1982, when Forsythe presented a piece called “Gange” (reportedly inspired by the first sentence in a book by nouveau roman author Alan Robbe-Grille), walkouts diminished the audience from 1,900 to 600. Forsythe’s works are still booed on occasion--at the premiere of “A Loss of Small Detail” last year about one-third of the audience reportedly voiced their disapproval.

Yet he thinks the Germans, who had to “re-create their lives and reimagine them on order to go on (after World War II),” tend to be particularly open to the novel aspects of his work as opposed with the tendency of Americans “to associate the arts with classicism. . . a most infantile fear of losing contact with Mother Europe or something.”

Meanwhile, the civic gods smile on his company. This year his contract was extended for six years. Beginning with the 1990-91 season, his company will no longer be considered the stepchild of the city’s opera company, but a full-fledged entity in its own right. He was also promised more dancers--the company has 40 now--and expanded studio facilities.

Life in Frankfurt’s state-subsidized theater may sound like heaven to American dance companies used to having to scrounge for money and adequate facilities. But Forsythe says he is very conscious of the responsibilities involved in using tax money.

The annual production budget--$75,000 to $80,000--”occasionally” gets blown on “one big thing,” he says, “but that’s why a lot of pieces you see are without a lot of (extra accouterments).

“You see (American) Ballet Theatre and (New York) City Ballet, and everyone’s pushing for the big event because they think they need it. They don’t need it. Balanchine didn’t need it . . . If the opera house had unlimited resources, (my work) would require less imagination at some point.”

Balanchine’s name comes up with surprising frequency in discussions of Forsythe’s work. Some commentators view this work as a denial of the supreme musicality and neoclassical invention of the great American-transplanted choreographer. But others see echoes of Balanchine’s individualism in Forsythe’s approach to ballet.

“He puts steps together very much the way Balanchine did,” says Lewitzky. “The unpredictable combination of them. The endless invention. Balanchine was full of unexpected small things in his works . . . But Forsythe uses (this ability) for a totally different purpose--sometimes bitterly, sometimes ironically and sometimes just explosively.”

Despite all the other components of Forsythe’s work--including elaborate lighting schemes, which he sets himself--moving dancers around remains his central concern.

He once told another interviewer how, years ago, after reading Rudolf von Laban’s “Space Harmony,” he began working out a basic model of movement that would enable dancers to create their own variations on his style. The exact way this operates remains rather mysterious, as does his practice of creating computer-generated alternatives to a particular movement sequence, for dancers to interpret as they wish.

“Love Songs,” which was made in 1979 for the Munich Ballet and set on the Joffrey in 1983 was recently shown on PBS’s “Great Performances” series in a new, MTV-influenced version for the Joffrey. In his eyes it is “a sort of bizarre journalism, a parody” that “reinterprets the facts behind” the song lyrics.

“It works viscerally because it works on a choreographic level. The whole thing’s ballet from beginning to end. Every single step. We may apply the hands in a less civilized manner. But it’s a very very very technically difficult ballet.”

“Same Old Story” (on the Tuesday program), is, on one level, an amalgam of several familiar fairy tales updated into a mockery of a courtroom drama. A woman’s identity metamorphoses from Little Red Riding Hood to Goldilocks to Rapunzel under the relentless questioning of an interrogator with a portable loudspeaker.

But while this plot is burbling along, 15 dancers in black are doing all sorts of rapid movements on the periphery of the stage. “It’s unbelievable in terms of coordination,” Forsythe says. “The dancing is what counts.”

And the story? “The story is fine for Mr. and Mrs. Joe Burger, who are not going to get off watching that kind of dancing for 25 minutes. At the same time, it provides a context. Ja, and a bit of distraction.”

He is always aware, he says, of needing to construct dances that work on several levels, for fellow choreographers as well as for people who “just want to have an experience.”

But some commentators have complained that they can’t find enough recognizable ballet dancing in his works. Some critics have linked Forsythe with the dance-theater of German choreographer Pina Bausch, which stems from German Expressionist modern dance, rather than ballet. (Forsythe himself credits Bausch with helping to “liberate” him to see that “There are probably an infinite number of hybrid states of theater. The borders have dissolved.”)

A few writers simply have consigned Forsythe to a rubbish bin labeled “Eurotrash,” along with fellow American expatriates like John Neumeier, artistic director of Hamburg Ballet, or Europeans like Maurice Bejart.

Martin Bernheimer, The Times’ music and dance critic, has viewed Forsythe’s choreography with a mixture of respect, dislike and mild bemusement. “Steptext,” he wrote, “wasn’t fun, and it certainly wasn’t easy. But it did seem original . . . and it did provoke the complacent viewer with bold impulses and brash images.” In “Behind the China Dogs,” however, he found that “the pop sensibilities are wooed flashily and rather nastily.” And he wrote of “New Sleep” that “one couldn’t be sure what the thing meant. One didn’t necessarily care. But it was amusing.”

Forsythe’s response to his critics is weary and impatient. There are, he says, “a lot of writers in ballet who are not fluent in the language. A majority of the articles written simply say there was or there wasn’t ballet (in a given piece).”

“Skinny,” which he co-choreographed with company member Amanda Miller, was a reaction to the American bombing of Libya in 1986. Forsythe told an interviewer at the time that “every time you walk into a public building, you always think, well, this could be it.”

In the piece, the dancers become more and more agitated at an unseen peril, finally forming a bucket brigade to quench an invisible fire. “It imitates this state of emergency,” Forsythe says, “but it’s like a roller coaster. You have this feeling of falling, all that terror, but you’re still . . . safe.

“Someone wrote that there is no movement intention in ‘Skinny.’ Well, I’m sorry. There’s an immense amount of incredibly complex movement. There are some very chaotic kinds of micro-organizations . . . When one group misses one count there are”--he claps his hands--”terrible collisions. . . .

“Ballet is basically a descriptive act, and what we’re describing is up to you. . . . It’s like a game where not only can the rules change but the rules can re-invent themselves. The rules change on you when you’re playing. . . . Sometimes I’ll know I’m making a piece but I have absolutely no idea what this piece is. That’s when your tools save you. Once you have a structure, you can go back and do whatever you please with it. . . .

“Ballet . . . has always been about one person’s ability to imagine an organizational body. Basically, what we’re doing here is showing how a ballet organization can transcend its origins to be what the dancers imagine it to be. Not what I imagine it to be. Because what we produce comes out of the dancers.”

Indeed, Joffrey Ballet dancer Leslie Carothers remembers the rehearsals for “Square Deal” as “a very, very creative time. (Forsythe) likes very much to collaborate with (the dancers) he is working with.

“Sometimes choreographers have everything they want in their minds and they just teach it to you. We all created together. We’d do improvisation things in the studio to try to come up with different ideas.”

Born in 1949 in Hempstead, N.Y., Forsythe used to dance to “American Bandstand” on TV as a child. Later on he appeared in high school musicals. But he had no formal dance training until his freshman year at Jacksonville University in Florida.

There he discovered ballet and modern dance, and in 1969 he left college a few credits shy of a degree to accept a scholarship at Joffrey II, the farm team for the Joffrey Ballet. He filled in every now and then when somebody got sick in the main company, and learned the entire repertory.

Several years ago, the late Robert Joffrey remembered Forsythe as the bearded old man in “Petrushka.” The young dancer was “so involved in the role and so original that it was a brilliant cameo performance,” he told an interviewer. “To me it was the beginning of his creating. Billy’s ideas flow so quickly and he’s so flexible, like a chameleon.”

When he was about to join the company formally, he hurt his knee and changed his mind. “I had wanted this so badly for so long, but I said, ‘You think you want this but you don’t.’ ”

What he did seem to want was to work in a completely different environment. So he joined the Stuttgart Ballet. In 1976 he choreographed his first ballet, “Urlicht.” Shortly thereafter he became principal choreographer. His early work was neoclassical in style, but three years later, in “Time Cycle,” he began peppering the ballet vocabulary with seemingly out-of-control gestures and movements.

“Orpheus” (1979, music by Hans Werner Henze) brought him his first major acclaim. The following year, Forsythe left the company. “I was getting a lot of ideas,” he says, “and I realized this was not the place where I was going to get support for my more radical things. It’s like kids getting ouf of their parents’ house.”

After free-lancing for the Joffrey and other companies, he was hired as the Frankfurt Ballet’s artistic director in 1984. Three years later--when fire gutted the Frankfurt Opera House--several of his most ambitious works were lost, because they could not be accommodated on smaller, less well-equipped stages.

But instead of mourning the loss, he celebrates the opportunity to improvise. And in any case, he takes a surprisingly hard-nosed view of his own work.

“When I go, I want all of it to go,” he says. “Boom! And leave room for somebody else. Make room for the young people.”