American choreographer William Forsythe got Hong Kong on its feet when his interactive installation premiered in Asia last month
William Forsythe is known for taking ballet to extremes, but now the choreographer and former artistic director of the Frankfurt Ballet and The Forsythe Company has turned his focus from professional dancers to the public. Presented by Rolex this July, Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time, Forsythe’s interactive multimedia installation, had visitors bending, sliding, dodging and weaving through hundreds of suspended and swinging pendulums in a piece that examines the boundaries of movement. It was originally created for New York’s High Line, and the Hong Kong version at West Kowloon’s Freespace was the Asian premiere after it was shown in major world festivals and venues, including the 2016 Sydney Biennale and Paris’s La Villette in 2017.
The US choreographer, who won the Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance in 1992, 1999 and 2009, has created some of the world’s most celebrated ballet scenes, and has been compared to George Balanchine. Like that choreographer, Forsythe has also been making a stir in the world of dance, incorporating video projection, spoken word, electronic sounds and extreme physical vocabulary into dance, and dismantling classical ballet concepts since the 1980s. Now 71, Forsythe had a lot to say about breaking the boundaries of the art form as he spoke to Tatler in late June, a few days before the Hong Kong show, which also featured his three dance films and a dialogue with his protégé, Sang Jijia, a graduate of Minzu University of China, a school in Beijing for ethnic minorities, and the first professional Tibetan modern dancer.
What does the installation name, Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time, mean?
Gravity.
What is the message of the installation?
The subject is evasion or avoidance. You can avoid getting hit by the pendulums by not being a part of the system, but if you go across, it can be a more interesting environment where the chances of you disturbing the system are far greater. In German, we call it “kreuzdenken”, which means cross-thinking. That produces a choreography without the audience thinking about it. You will see people move in a certain way that they won’t in a neutral environment. This work is very appropriate on many levels for Hong Kong.
First, we have Covid. Everyone’s trying not to come in contact with the pendulums. Second, it is an abstract of life. You try to calculate your risks of being hit. It could be a financial crash or a political situation. You can decide to not accept the rules and not care if you bump into the work. The work does provide rich metaphors if you choose to apply them to yourself.
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What is the role of the audience?
To bring the work to life. The audience is the subject itself, [and they] are also the spectators. Everything that will happen in there is because an individual is there. The subjects are not dancing, however; they’re choreographic participants. It might look like dance to someone who has an expanded definition of dance, but I don’t see it as dance.
How has the pandemic affected your perception of the performing arts?
Everyone in the performing arts field would prefer to be primarily on stage. But interesting alternatives have shown up and maybe it doesn’t all have to be on stage. When you can’t travel, Zoom is fantastic. So [for the Hong Kong installation] we created an instructional video. Freespace helped make a video of the set-up process, which we didn’t have before because our people were always able to go to the venue and build it. It worked.
In 2002 and 2003, you were the inaugural dance mentor in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. Can you share your experience of mentoring Sang Jijia?
Sang Jijia has by far the most interesting background to me: Chinese folk dance. That was something very different to my own practice, but he also knew ballet, so it was a wonderful mixture of backgrounds. I tried to treat the relationship organically. I figured the best way for him to learn was to watch me make the pieces, a number of which he was in, and so he learnt from the inside. Sang originated a lot of important works and became a valuable member of our community.
How was the mentorship different from ballet school training?
If you think of ballet training, that would be like primary school, and then maybe you get into a second company, and that’s sort of like high school. My situation was more postgraduate: you’ve got your doctorate, and now you’re doing research with me. My goal was to simply work on generating methodologies that everyone could use. For example, I did a tremendous amount of work that did not appear to be oriented towards ballet, like the pendulums in the installation. Being a ballet practitioner is about one’s capacity to look at choreography and see it not as a specific thing but as a larger thing which can be applied to a number of fields. Choreographers [I mentored] took what they felt was valuable and went on to make their own careers.
How do you envision the future of the performing arts?
I’m imagining that the future for the majority of us will be less opulent. As wealth grows for a very small portion of humanity, there’ll be some shrinkage for the rest. Like the pendulums, what is your strategy? How do you deal with this system that has allowed this imbalance to take place? Artists have to not say what they wish things were, but how they operate in a world that is not of their own design.
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