framemaker<35> A choreographer in the traditional sense gives his or her vision detailed form and directs the entourage from A to Z. The dancers’ job onstage is to create the impression that the dance is coming into being on the spot. From the first moment of creation, Forsythe sets his dancers the task of restructuring all material, in method as well as in detail, keeping them in a state of readiness. Music, scenery and light develop in parallel, in the same spirit. [>self-regulation]

decentred<14> Forsythe's mise-en-scènes and compositions know no centrally orienting point. He is fascinated by the perspective and proportions found in cartoons and animation, the rapid changes of scene and perspective shifts of the visual media. His spatial constructions are like planetary systems that circle around a sun like stars around a moon, with bent lines and black holes, shrinking and expanding spaces. He forces a break with the harmonic closedness of a classical and modernist aesthetic not only in the scene's organisation, but also in the dancer's orientation and coordination. For him, movements can be imagined outside the immediate reach and realised with every possible body part. He has thus developed with his dancers an extremely nimble style, a state of readiness between balance and imbalance.

1st amendment<8> The >academic dance is a ‘beautifully abstract’ language of coded movements. The academic technique defines basic movements on the basis of horizontal, vertical and diagonal axes and surfaces in relation to the upright back. The legs are preferably turned out, with the dancer presenting him - or herself diagonally or frontally to the audience. These three points make up the basis for a detailed vocabulary of coded movements. It equips Forsythe's dancers with a common language, a memory for long combinations and a spatial awareness.

2nd amendment<6> A single movement or combination of movements can be used as choreographic building blocks following simple rules of composition. One of Forsythe's favourite choreographic methods is the contrapuntal: a compositional principle borrowed from music for creating and phrasing melodies on top of a basic melody. In dance this form of theme and variation offers more visual diversity than a corps de ballet moving in unison. The contrapuntal instrumentarium depends chiefly on variations in timing, phrasing of the material and elementary changes of direction (left-right, forward-back, diagonals), spatial reflections, canon structures, and built-in repetitions. A choreographer can thus conjure up asymmetries out of perfect harmony, and vice versa, stage splashing waterfalls of movement, take formations apart and weave them together.

3rd amendment<16> Every movement can be cut into pieces, rearranged and transformed as one pleases. Forsythe realised early in his career that movement could be cut and pasted, just as one can remove, shift and endlessly copy letters, words, phrases and paragraphs on a word processor [>Burroughs, William S.]. In collaboration with the dancers, he began to analyse his own material, split it into partial movements, invert sequences and spatial references, and transfer movements from one limb to another.

4th amendment <23> Any body part can trace any observed or imaginary point, line or form. This point-point-line principle elaborates on >Rudolf von Laban's notion of trace-forms. Imagine two points in space and connect them with a body part: the foot sweeps a line backward over the floor, the atlas vertebra traces the contours of the ceiling. Body parts can also describe letters or words. More detailed specifications and restrictions can be given in terms of the number of body parts that come into action in succession or simultaneously, the spatial planes in which movement takes place, the maintenance of a certain volume. For example, 9-point deployment or the cube: a dancer imagines a cube shape around the body, with the spine as vertical axis. Each of the six planes has nine points, at the ends and in the center of each line. Hands, feet, or any other body part can move from point to point.

5th amendment<26> Any gesture, manipulation or other action can be used in a dance. Functional movements (manipulating an object, making a gesture), which originally suppose bodily involvement, are isolated from the meaningful environment one acts in relation to and transformed into abstractions. Forsythe's methods play on the dancers' capacity for imagination, their memories, associations, fantasy and language. [>alphabet]

alphabet<27> A method Forsythe sometimes employs in creating material. An alphabet of movement is formed by a collection of 26 series of abstracted gestures, manipulations and other ('imaginary') actions. For each letter of the alphabet a word can be invented, predominately names, verbs, nouns and adjectives. With each word comes a movement. For example: s = scratch: crab movements. The first word or movement in a series calls up another movement or a subsequent word. For example: scratch = dj > d = disk: from crabs to playing records to kneecap, and/or j = jockey: horse race. There quickly arises an associatively connected family of 26 ‘danced words’.

algorithm<28> Rule or collection of rules for the generation of successive configurations. The rules prescribe things like number of repetitions, length, nature of variations and space for possible external interventions. Examples of elementary formal-geometrical operations include each phrase ‘multiplying’ (repeating) itself, being extended with a version of itself reversed in time, being extended with its own spatial mirror image behind the original, and being 'multiplied' by another dancer at a steadily reduced speed. The contrapuntal method [>2nd amendment] is a specific formal-geometric algorithmic design. Connections can also be created via word associations, as in a game of dominoes: find a word that begins with the last letter of the previous one and so on. Such procedures lend themselves to associative development. With the introduction of such choreographic systems the choreographer in a sense lets the reins go. He or she determines the parameters, beginning conditions, context; the actual development, often unpredictable in its details, unfolds according to the rules of the game and the choices of the performers. [>self-regulation]

fragmented body <18> Body image in which the discrete parts have achieved a high degree of independence. Characteristics: hyperextensions, shoulder and pelvic joints turned almost out of their sockets. Two variations have developed in parallel: one grafted onto anatomy and physiology, and a formalistic variant. In the latter, researched and developed by Forsythe, the body is imaginarily constructed - but never in fact amputated. Arms, legs, heads, fingers, knees move as if in isolation in relation to points that can be located even outside the body. [>decentred] In contemporary dance the fragmented body was elevated in the '80s to a social metaphor or manifestation of isolation, social or emotional repression. It potentially constitutes dance's answer to the manufactured body of biotechnology, plastic surgery and fitness culture. At the moment it is an aesthetic remainder standing on its own, now that deconstruction in dance is a widespread stylistic form independent of ideology. Thanks to fashion and lifestyle magazines' flirtation with heroin chic, anorexia and self mutilation, the deformed body has entered a broader cultural visual language.

quadriceps<10> Ballet is a technique which strongly shapes a dancer's consciousness of form and space. It is chiefly through muscular control that the skeleton can bring forth a clarity of line. In the Belgian tv documentary I Think the Body Likes to Move Forsythe referred to the sensibility of muscles. The muscles inform a dancer 'where the limbs are'. The quadriceps can be used to pick up the leg. Recent findings suggest it is most advisable to use the deeper-placed muscles. This is not just for reasons of stability and healthy use of the body. Aesthetically, a bodybuilder's turbo-thighs would be of little avail to a ballerina.

slipping away<11> The more you can let go of your control, and give it over to a kind of transparency in the body, a feeling of disappearance, the more you will be able to grasp differentiated form, and differentiated dynamics. You can move very fast in this state, and it will not give the same impression - it won't give the impression of violence. You can also move with tremendous acceleration provided you know where you leave the movement - not where you put the movement, but where you leave it. You try to divest your body of movement, as opposed to thinking that you are producing movement. So it would not be like pushing forward into space and evading space - it would be like leaving your body in space. Dissolution, let yourself evaporate. Movement is a factor of the fact that you are actually evaporating. (William Forsythe 1995, programme of the ballet Eidos: Telos)

self-regulation<47> From Forsythe's way of creating it could be concluded that he would - or should - give up his position as author in the near future. His methodology could make him superfluous, since his compositions unroll unpredictably. The next step in the evolution of Forsythe's work would probably be to name the dancers co-authors of a creation. But for now it is the master himself who signs the work, along with the composer and designer. Forsythe develops the plan and the specific connotations and concentration (‘atmosphere’) of a piece; the dancers give the details form. (Forsythe himself likens this relationship to that between a chief editor and his writers.)

Willems, Thom<1> Composer of Dutch origin. Since 1985 house composer of the >Frankfurt Ballet. Willems studied electronic and instrumental composition at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague. Forsythe and Willems are like a right and left hand. One word is often sufficient for them to understand each other. Side by side they developed their >structural thinking in dance and music.

Laban, Rudolf von (1879-1085)<24> Expressionist choreographer, teacher and dancer. Utopian striver for the universal development of humanity. Von Laban sought spatial frames within which a person could move harmonically (point-point-line). His theory of movement, set forth in various theoretical works and textbooks, is one of the most detailed in the history of dance. Von Laban developed the Labanotation and the Effortnotation, two detailed notation systems for movement and its execution in all forms of human activity from dance to industry.

Frankfurt-am-Main<13> Capital of the German federal state of Hessen, one of Europe's financial centres. It experienced a sudden blossoming of culture in the 1980s thanks to exorbitant injections in the art world. During this time Forsythe became the artistic leader of the Ballett der Städtischen Bühnen Frankfurt, as it was then known. He managed to ease the previously conventional company free from Schauspielhaus construction and transform it into an independent, contemporary company.

Burroughs, William S. (1914-1997)<21> Twentieth-century American writer. With Byron Gysin he tried to incorporate into literature montage and collage techniques from the visual arts. They developed the cut-up method: pages of text from different origins (the Bible, Shakespeare, newspaper articles) are snipped down the middle and the left side of one page is attached to the right half of another. The result may be somewhat ‘corrected’, and sometimes cut and assembled again. The cut-up method tinkers with the building blocks and grammar of language: a number of words are cut apart in the caesura (vai | nly, harm | onious) and nonsense words appear (vaionious, harmnly). The syntax of the sentences in this new text is disrupted, semantic relationships are broken and rearranged and new meanings arise. Narrative perspective and temporal relationships are also twisted. Foreshadowing and flashbacks can pop up anywhere. Hallucinatory fields of word and meaning are created. [>3rd amendment]

analytical dance <3> Alternative designation for the work of a number of >postmodern dancemakers, sometimes called movement research. Characteristic is that the work is fed by a study of movement and the body from a biological, medical, sociological, or (linguistic-) philosophical perspective. The research produces material and generates ideas for composition and production. Much analytical dance arose out of a struggle for emancipation or an attempt to get a discourse started.

academic dance<7> Ballet technique, probably originating in folk dance, which developed through different artistic periods. Courtly dance (danse du cour) developed simple, elegant steps to perfect spatial patterns. The mathematical purity of its geometry legitimised further emphasis on vocabulary, with the invention of point shoes as culmination of the straight line - now the foot, too, could be stretched out straight, so that leg and foot formed one line rising from the floor. In this century, influences from jazz dance have again put the accent on the joints, breaking the straight line.

Académie Royale de Danse (Versailles, 1661) <12> Probably the first professional dance education in the history of European dance. Until then dance was practised mainly for one's own enjoyment as part of social life, - at court and in the tavern. There was a short period in the French and Italian courts of the late Renaissance in which courtly dance was a duty associated with a noble status and way of life. Control and grace in serene dances were proof of nobility. Dancers strode in ingenious floor patterns with lightly undulating steps, like heavenly bodies. Daily practice was required, and private tutors instilled knowledge and skill. The Sun King, Louis xiv, who starred in a few ballets himself, established the Académie Royale de Danse. The appointment of others - actors, singers, dancers - to perform in grand scale productions, spectacular events of music, dance and story, ultimately replaced lifestyle with professionalism.

postmodern (dance) <15> In the early 1960s a collection of dancers and choreographers turned against the conventions and restrictions of expression and composition in the dance of their contemporaries, which at that time was predominately modernist expressionism, early-romantic ballet, or charming musical ballets. In place of maintaining the agreed-upon fiction of illusion or the coded emotionalism of dance, they strove to lay bare the medium itself: movement, sound, image. The visions of what the medium itself was proved varied. Some treated movement primarily as a plastic, artificial form; others devoted themselves to movement in everyday actions; others gave over their own bodies to the domain of dance. Their work reflected this diversity, from the repetitive-minimalist dance of Lucinda Childs, the 'chance choreographies' of Merce Cunningham, the formal experiments of people like Trisha Brown, to performance-inspired soli, and happenings and events staged in galleries, studios and public life. The term ‘postmodern’ actually does no justice to the diversity of these dancemakers, because they hardly shared a definite vision. What united them, in hindsight, was the artistic revolt of anti-illusion and anti-aestheticism, their being in the same time and place and their rediscovery of movement.

Balanchine, George (1904-1983)<5> Russian choreographer who went to the United States in 1933. He was co-founder and house choreographer of the New York City Ballet. In his youth Forsythe visited the nycb as often as possible, devouring one Balanchine choreography after another. Balanchine shunned story line and visual ornamentation; his dance was dominated by the music. Composer and compatriot Igor Stravinsky was Balanchine’s artistic companion throughout his career. Both incorporated academic, folkloric, constructivist, jazz and show elements in their work.