William Forsythe (born December 30, 1949)[1] is an American dancer and choreographer formerly resident in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and now based in Vermont.
Recognized for the integration of ballet and visual arts, which displayed both abstraction and forceful theatricality, his vision of choreography as an organizational practice has inspired him to produce numerous installations, films, and web-based knowledge creation, incorporating the spoken word and experimental music.
[4] It was while attending college at Jacksonville University, that Forsythe began his formal training as a dancer with Nolan Dingman and Christa Long.
[2] During the next seven years he created original works for the Stuttgart Ensemble, and for ballet companies in Munich, The Hague, London, Basel, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Paris, New York, and San Francisco.
[4] In 2002, however, the Frankfurt government began to withdraw its support in order to cut costs and to favor a more conventional dance company.
A major retrospective of Forsythe's work was presented at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich in 2006, and in subsequent years, his company toured across Europe, appearing in Paris, Zürich, and London.
[5] Throughout his career, Forsythe has experimented with a freer approach to choreography in which the dancers are allowed to make choices about order and timing comparable to those made by musicians playing a cadenza.
Forsythe has been commissioned to produce architectural and performance installations by architect-artist Daniel Libeskind, ARTANGEL (London), Creative Time (New York), and the City of Paris.
Forsythe has been conveyed the title of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1999) by the government of France and has received the Hessian Cultural Prize (1995), the German Distinguished Service Cross (1997), the Wexner Prize (2002), the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale (2010), Samuel H Scripps / American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement (2012), the Grand Prix de la SACD (2016) and the German theatre prize DER FAUST Lifetime Achievement Award (2020).
Many of his pieces are danced on pointe, but he has used all kind of footwear, including work-boots, socks, and slippers, in order to explore different choreographic results.
Similar to the style of other postmodernists, Forsythe plays with the unexpected, moments of improvisation, and he emphasizes process within the creation of his works.
[9] The extreme positions involved in his ballets require a great deal of flexibility, and, in fact, most of his dancers possess that skill.
This element of counterbalance contrasts with more classical partnering techniques that mainly focus on keeping the ballerina upright and helping her to maintain her balance.
In the second act of Artifact (1984), for example, he raises and lowers the curtains in the middle of the dance, in order to change drastically the environment on stage, and willingly lights the dancers.
Forsythe has been commissioned to produce architectural and performance installations by architect-artist Daniel Libeskind, ARTANGEL (London), Creative Time (New York), and the City of Paris.
His first online program was a computer application titled Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye, which he created in 1994.
Synchronous Objects was launched in 2009, and "One Flat Thing" was reproduced on a digital online score developed by Ohio State University.