English National Ballet, The Forsythe Programme, Sadler’s Wells, April 10, 2025
The program image of the company in William Forsythe’s Playlist (EP) (photo: Laurent Liotardo)
When the curtain opens on the Sadler’s Wells stage at the beginning of English National Ballet’s The Forsythe Programme, it is the figure of Sangeun Lee in Rearray (London Edition 2025), standing sideways to the audience under Tanja Rühl’s luminous, even lighting that captures all the potential energy of the space. Our focus is drawn naturally into Lee’s apparent stillness, anticipating the release of that energy in the lines and angles that her body holds poised within it. In silence, the sinewy machinery of her limbs extends into the space around her and her weight alights on the ground as if dancing a sophisticated dialogue with gravity. There is seemingly no effort, no evident resistance in her movement, even if the entire technique of classical ballet on which it is built is predicated on the natural opposition of the body’s internal forces. Lee’s mastery of stillness and precision means we are free to enjoy the angular, extended choreography Forsythe has created for her; the dancer and the dance have merged seamlessly. This is not always the case, however, with her two partners on this occasion: Henry Dowden and Rentaro Nakaaki. They dance the steps and shapes of the choreography but we also see the physical effort that goes into making them. Roslyn Sulcas, writing in the evening’s program, highlights ’…the idea of ‘line’, which transforms the body into a continuously flowing, harmoniously coordinated whole, with even the most strenuous passages appearing to be effortless.’ When the effort becomes external and visible, however, it has the effect of an overload of electricity that blows the fuse. The choreography doesn’t actually stop, but the dynamics are short-circuited and the lines and angles of the body foreshortened.
Forsythe’s choreography, like that of one of his formative influences, George Balanchine, is built on the kind of technique — and Balanchine trained his dancers to master the technique he demanded — that extrudes the vocabulary of classical ballet through a vivid, geometric imagination that is invested in the joy of movement. There is little else in Rearray(London Edition 2025) to divert our attention — no narrative, no scenery, and minimal costumes. Forsythe sets up a frictionless choreographic system to negotiate David Morrow’s score, and it is then up to the dancers to perform within it without touching the sides. When danced well it is pure exhilaration to watch but not if there’s the slightest friction in the system.
Rearray (London Edition 2025) is followed by a re-staging by Stefanie Arndt and Noah Gelber of Herman Schmerman (Quintet) to a score by Tom Willems. It’s another work in which the men in particular — some of the leading dancers in the company — are doing too much, their shoulders belying any attempt to create a clean line. And with one chance to see it (it will return in ENB’s R:Evolution in October) we have only the program note to assure us that Herman Schmerman (Quintet) ‘is arguably the second smash hit of [Forsythe’s] career, following 1987’s In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated…’
Even in the program photograph of the final work of the evening —Playlist (EP) — the evidence of shoulder strain is clearly on display. What is going on? Why allow damning evidence to appear on a full-page spread in the program? The work has its origins as Playlist(Track 1, 2) from 2018, when Forsythe was invited by former artistic director Tamara Rojo to create it on twelve male dancers in the company. It was extended the following year as Playlist (EP) at Boston Ballet and entered English National Ballet’s repertoire in 2022. Set to ‘an irresistible soundtrack of infectious pop and soul’, it is Forsythe in a major key channeling the company’s dance-floor energy in a series of choreographic permutations that, unlike the first two works, look out at the audience with an irrepressible desire to please. It seems the Sadler’s Wells audience knows what to expect, for the enthusiasm generated by the rising curtain, like the anticipation of the headliner at a rock concert, continues to the end of the performance.
English National Ballet’s new artistic director, Aaron Watkin, is still at the stage of assessing his heritage. With The Forsythe Programme he is able to draw from his own experience as a dancer working with Forsythe to enrich the repertoire, but if, in his own words, he wants to continue ‘to show the different colours of Bill’s choreographic voice’ there’s work to be done on refining the company’s vocal chords.
William Forsythe, A Quiet Evening of Dance, Sadler’s Wells, October 4
Brigel Gjoka and Riley Watts in A Quiet Evening of Dance (photo: Bill Cooper)
William Forsythe tells Sarah Crompton in her program interview that his goal is ‘to make people see ballet better’ but it is immediately apparent in A Quiet Evening of Dance that in order to make us see ballet better he is also making us hear ballet better. The program is divided into two parts, the first of which has four sections and the second just one. The title of each section in the first part is related etymologically to the Greek logos, or word: Prologue, Catalogue, Epilogue and Dialogue, though not a word is spoken; they are performed in silence, to birdsong or, as in Epilogue, to a solo piano score by Morton Feldman. Costume designer Dorothee Merg adds to the sense of silence by muffling the dancers’ footware in lightweight brightly-coloured warmers or thick socks. The effect of silence concentrates our visual appreciation of the movement as if we are watching mime, an effect heightened by Merg’s covering the dancers’ arms in long, coloured gloves. If the costumes aid the silence, so does the lighting of Tanja Rühl. The denuded space of the Sadler’s Wells stage is like a light box that casts no shadows and maintains an even intensity that give individual shapes and colours a consummate clarity.
In a visual environment that celebrates and enhances movement, Forsythe engages our attention in his plastic deconstruction of choreography into a catalogue of its structural components that he then rearticulates into diverse possibilities. For Forsythe, ‘choreography’s manifold incarnations are a perfect ecology of idea-logics; they do not insist on a single path to form-of-thought and persist in the hope of being without enduring’. In this way, action becomes visible as spatial duration, from its emergence to its disappearance or mutation into another movement that generates a further action — a modulation of bodily thoughts, and felt motion that communicates through and across bodies. This ‘physical thinking’ is what links a compelling evening, from silence to sound, and from choreographic logos to rich expression.
Forsythe’s dancers are classically trained but have a muscular elasticity that allows them to explore his range of physical ideas to a degree that stretches beyond accepted classical form. In the opening Prologue Parvaneh Scharafali and Ander Zabala engage in a play of gesture that moves effortlessly in space but with Jill Johnson and Christopher Roman in Catalogue Forsythe enlarges the play of gesture to a successive articulation of the entire body. As they stand side by side Johnson and Roman engage in a form of extended pas de deux without the partnering: a long adagio in which they constantly exchange and challenge physical ideas, a couple of short variations, and a coda. It lasts long enough for us to grasp the rules of the game and perceive in its full catalogue of logos moments of flamboyance, nonchalance and wit.
Epilogue is a cumulative development in which Scharafali, Zabala, Johnson and Roman are joined by Rauf “RubberLegz” Yasit in a vibrant use of body shapes and accented colours to layer responses to Morton Feldman’s piano music. The introduction of Yasit, as his moniker suggests, mixes up the vocabulary into a choreographic puzzle that would test any notator. This is the kind of unexpected conundrum in which Forsythe revels. Dialogue introduces two more dancers, Brigel Gjoka and Riley Watts, whose exploration of space is a corporal dialogue of beginnings without ends, a fluid stream of ideas that coil classical ballet around the most contemporary dance and yet astonish in their unruffled virtuosity. They finish their dialogue neatly in fifth position with arms casually held behind their backs.
After the intermission Forsythe’s most recent work, Seventeen / Twenty One, beams with confidence, colour and music that are infectious from the outset; the choreographer is in scintillating and effulgent form. With the music of Jean-Philippe Rameau he has taken the ballet idiom closer to its courtly origins, but this is Forsythe’s baroque not that of Versailles; when Johnson enters for a duet with Roman she’s wearing a baseball cap. All the dancers generate a joy in the complexity of their tasks that matches the exuberance of Rameau’s orchestral miniatures; the score comes alive through their musicality. And if you think hip hop can’t be courtly, Forsythe gets “RubberLegz” Yasit to tie himself with exquisite musical timing into elegant knots from which he emerges serenely as if summoned suddenly by the King. In an evening of intellectual sensuality it’s a scene that brilliantly coalesces Forsythe’s exploration of choreographic form and ideas.
