The art of subtraction

A stripped stage, sparse light and dancers creating metaphor and beauty with unbridled movement define the work of choreographer William Forsythe, who reveres classical ballet even as he deconstructs it with mesmerizing defiance.

Forsythe’s celebrated Frankfurt Ballet will present four of his works at the Orange Country Performing Arts Center on Friday and Saturday. The dances are explorations of time, space and synchronized thought that exemplify the revolutionary style Forsythe has been refining for two decades. He’s a minimalist, peeling away the trappings of theater until, as he puts it, there are just bodies.

“Ballet appears to be grammatical and is much more grammatically flexible than what the classical era ever imagined,” says Forsythe, 54, the American-born artistic director who trained with the Joffrey Ballet and is a leading voice in contemporary dance. “I’d like to be like [playwright] Samuel Beckett. We see language already transformed as it’s being spoken.”

Wiebke Huester, a prominent German dance critic, says Forsythe’s choreography invites the audience into a game in which it can linger among the “strange movements” he gives the human soul. “Sometimes he likes to be a little mysterious,” said Huester, a reviewer for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “He tries to empty the theater of all connotations. It’s extinguishing a memory and then refilling it. He’s a student of dance. He knows classical ballet. He knows what he demolishes.”

Forsythe’s vision has resonated in Europe, which, when he moved to this west German city in 1984, was more receptive to new dance interpretation. But last year, he found himself at an unenviable confluence of politics, money and a battle between the classical and the avant-garde. Now, after 20 years with the Frankfurt Ballet, he is leaving the company this summer to head a private, nonprofit dance group. The decision was prompted when Frankfurt -- facing financial difficulties like many German cities -- threatened to cut its nearly $6-million subsidy to his 37-member troupe.

Questions over funding led to matters of aesthetics. Some in the Frankfurt government, which has the highest per capita arts spending of any German city, had grown less enamored with Forsythe’s work and sought a return to the classical forms and elaborate scenery of the tutu set. The artistic dust-up attracted Mikhail Baryshnikov and other dancers in support of Forsythe. The city relented and agreed to extend his funding, but Forsythe decided it was time to find something new.

The debate underscored not only Forsythe’s uncompromising determination to take ballet to new levels but also how shortages in public funding are beginning to shrink cultural budgets across an economically struggling Germany. This atmosphere has led to questions about what type of art can survive in times of financial austerity, especially when most audiences favor conventional music and dance over experimental programs.

When compared with the situation in the United States and much of Europe, German public funding for culture -- mainly through city governments -- is generous. Reverence for dance troupes, orchestras and opera is as ingrained in the German character as the passion for nature articulated by the 19th century Romantics. National per capita spending on arts programs last year was about 99 euros, or roughly $120 at the current rate of exchange, down from 101.50 euros in 2001. In the U.S., the per capita average in 2003 was $1.10.

“Culture is not an event to decorate everyday life,” Hans Joachim Meyer, a former arts minister for the state of Saxony, said last year. “It is a basic need of mankind that keeps memory alive and makes creativity possible.”

Still, many cities -- notably Berlin, all but bankrupt from the east-west reunification that began in 1990 -- are facing financial peril. Their predicament coincides with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s attempts to overhaul the welfare state, a move Germans fear will undercut the social pillars their government was founded on after World War II. (The forerunner of the Frankfurt Ballet was started in 1948.) In the land of Marx and Beethoven, public funding is eroding for everything from doctor visits to orchestra subsidies.

The climate has resulted in some wacky sideshows. Violinists in the Bonn Symphony Orchestra were met with chuckles and derision recently when they filed a lawsuit to increase their salaries, claiming that since their ranks were thinned from 23 to 17 two years ago, they now work harder than the percussionists and harpists.

But there have also been some serious consequences for the arts. In Berlin, cultural funding has fallen from 500 million euros in 1995 to 370 million euros this year.

“The problem is city budgets,” said Gerald Mertens, secretary of the German Orchestra Assn., the union representing musicians. “Thirty-three percent of the Berlin budget is personnel costs. But 85% of an orchestra’s budget is personnel costs. When Berlin cuts personnel costs, it hits us hard. Almost every orchestra in Germany has to look for different money. This has been going on for the last two years.”

Theater director Claus Peymann told the daily Hamburger Abendblatt that the arts community is also at fault. “We theater people are to blame for the misery: The esotericism, egocentricity and career-obsession of many theater people are leading to a complete alienation of audience and theater,” he said. “There is no utopia at all, and this puts poorly attended houses in the line of fire of the politicians.”

A slight man with an infectious laugh and a face of reddish stubble, Forsythe sat in a hot office the day before he left on the trip that would bring him first to New York and then to Los Angeles. The battle over the Frankfurt Ballet, he said, “was illuminating. You contemplate the forces behind culture and its evolution, its rise and fall.”

He also found a certain irony in talking about German arts budgets.

“In my opinion, we’re in a state of phenomenal luxury,” said Forsythe, who danced in the Stuttgart Ballet in the early 1970s. “We have funding. We probably have more in Frankfurt than in the entire National Endowment of the Arts. The funding itself, I never took for granted. I came from the States, so I always considered it to be a windfall. In 1984, I said, ‘I can’t imagine the future being more opulent.’ I assumed there would be a steady decline in support for theater, given the rise of new media. You can smell it. So your only strategy is to reinvigorate the medium until you’re necessary to some degree.”

Forsythe has accomplished that. His new private company of 16 to 18 members, which will begin officially after his contract with the Frankfurt Ballet expires this summer, will be based in both Frankfurt and Dresden. Forsythe will lose the institutional memory of his repertory but attain a new freedom to experiment with movement and meaning, and he will continue his quest to shrink the trappings of theater so that its structure seems almost nonexistent.

“My goal right now,” he said, “is to migrate from traditional theater space more and more.... If you want to make a relevant [artistic contribution], I think that theater is going to have to move out of theater.... I’ve reduced sets and lighting and all the accompanying baggage to just about zero. I really work with just bodies.”

Those bodies sometimes move with jarring rhythms that force classically trained dancers to discover uncharted angles and fluidity. A program description of “(N.N.N.N.),” one of the works to be performed in Orange County, reads: “ ‘(N.N.N.N.)’ appears as a mind in four parts, four men in a state of constant, tacit connection. Underscored by the sudden murmured flashes of Thom Willem music, the men enter into a complex, intense inscription. Their arms, heads, bodies and legs become singular voices, each tuned and in counterpoint to the other.”

“Swan Lake” it’s not.

When asked to describe what he sees when he choreographs, Forsythe smiled.

“I think mathematically,” he said. “A lot of the evolution came out of geometry, but from geometry you move into other areas. I look to literature a lot. You’re trying to define the language of dance experience. That’s philosophy.”

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Ballet Frankfurt

When: Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 and 8 p.m.

Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

Price: $20-$75

Contact: (714) 740-7878

Petra Falkenberg and Christian Reztlaff of The Times’ Berlin Bureau contributed to this report.