Inside The Machine

William Forsythe shows what ballet is made of.

- Jennifer Homans

William Forsythe’s “A Quiet Evening of Dance”—which I saw at the Venice Biennale earlier this year, and which comes to New York’s Shed arts center on October 11th for two weeks— concludes with a joyful balletic piece to music by the eighteenth-century composer Jean-Philippe Rameau. It is the kind of dance we rarely see anymore, one that leaves audiences elevated, energized, overcome by the sheer pleasure of movement and music. Who would have expected this from an American choreographer who has spent the past four decades in the trenches of the European avantgarde, deconstructing ballet’s fundamental premises? Forsythe’s tendency to push his dancers to physical extremes, and his use of electronic sound scores by his longtime collaborator Thom Willems—to say nothing of his taste for German Tanztheater and French post-structuralist thought—have led some critics, especially in this country, to dismiss his work as a violent and pretentious attack on the body and on balletic form.