It Wasn't Me Who Redefined The Ballet

“Let me tell you a story,” William Forsythe says by phone from his home in Dresden. “I was moping round the house one day on vacation and my wife said, 'What's up with you?' and I said, 'Oh, nothing, it's just that in three weeks I have to come up with a new work by William Forsythe'.”

There are few names in dance like American choreographer William Forsythe. Critically lauded and awarded, (four 'Bessies', three Oliviers and even a Golden Lion), his often innovative work has been cited for re-imagining ballet and influencing an entire era of contemporary practise. He fronted the revered Ballet Frankfurt for twenty years and has created works that now feature in the repertoire of ballet's biggest brands: Kirov, Paris Opera, Royal Ballet. These days he heads up the German-based Forsythe Company.

For Australian fans, the company's Melbourne Festival season of his 'existential' 2008 work I Don't Believe In Outer Space may well raise eyebrows even further; because, as Forsythe himself jokes, “It starts off crazy and then becomes insane.”

However, it's soon apparent that Forsythe has little time for the critical chatter that has built up around him. On the question of his supposedly post-modernist reconfiguration of ballet, he simply says, “Not at all. That's just something that people say. I mean, mostly that comes from the US or England.” Indeed, Forsythe's principally German-based career and his long association with Dutch composer Thom Willems have imbued his work with a distinctly 'continental' sense of avant garde adventurism and intellectual rigour. Or so the theory goes. “I start with instinct,” Forsythe reveals bluntly. “And since I've been doing this for about fifty years now, it's pretty well honed.”

Yet for …Outer Space the creation process was driven by more visceral reflections; namely, turning sixty and confronting mortality. “I don't think I consciously set about doing that with this work. It's just that when I started to look at it I went, 'oh yeah, there it is',” he recalls. “When you're sixty you can't help but look at it and go, 'Well, I'm not always going to be here. I'm not immortal'.”

With a seventeen-strong ensemble embodying the work in fragmentary bursts, including a silent ping pong sequence, it has been dubbed 'light' and 'less architectural'. Once again, Forsythe enjoys flipping expectation. “I think that comes more from people commenting about it than anything we've tried to do. And again, it's come more from America and Britain where they've got this insistence on light entertainment, on everything having to have an elf or goblin or whatever.”

As they always do, both Forsythe and composer Willems will 'direct' …Outer Space from the back of the auditorium. “We're both on headsets calling the shots on lighting and sound,” Forsythe explains. “We had an opening last week and at the end of it I was just trashed. I mean, my god, your concentration can't waver for even a millisecond.”

As excited as the scribes and fans might be at the prospect of an Australian premiere or a 'new work by', the man himself has a simple antidote to all the William Forsythe talk. “Doing housework,” he quips. “I mean, a clean window is a clean window, there's no interpreting it. I also love to chop wood. It's very physical, y'know. Not at all conceptual.”

Interpret that at your peril.