Processing Choreography

Front matter

Elizabeth Waterhouse

Processing Choreography Thinking with

William Forsythe’s Duo

Contents

List of Mlustrations e n Soehsgd cn eee odes oa ask Was eas cae ea ee ee 9 AAEN PEE TEE EEA E E MAS big dak E N E E nds 1 Introductióh sses nanes oe ecto a a a a a Sunol a eaaa 17

PART | - ART WORLD

4D TRAINING *+-0' jas a dal ess SUES Cad hay aa ee alee a aes Dae Pane ae eee 10

PART II - MOVEMENT PART Ill - CREATION

10:3: ‘Marion/Marion: (1991) acire a E ane adeeb 227

WS. Becoming: BUO2O1D wi cael sae cant linc ay a havea ete a E alts sa eee ee 280 Bibliography: ae seawaddearsewdseedente E E e a e ra 299

List of Illustrations

Figures 1—4: Figure 5: Figure 6: Figure 7: Figure 8: Figures 9-10: Figure 11: Figure 12:

Figure 13: Figure 14: Figure 15:

Figure 16: Figures 17-18:

Figure 19: Figure 20: Figures 21-28: Figure 29: Figure 30: Figure 31:

Dancers Regina van Berkel and Jill Johnson in Duo.

DUO2015 partners Riley Watts and Brigel Gjoka superimposed. Dancers Brigel Gjoka (left) and Riley Watts (right) performing DUOzo15. Dancers Allison Brown (left) and Jill Johnson (right) in Duo in 2003. Dancers Brigel Gjoka (left) and Riley Watts (right) in DUO2015.

Regina van Berkel (left) and Jill Johnson (right) performing Duo in 1996. The Opera House of the Städtische Bühnen Frankfurt am Main.

The view from the stage. Opera House of the Städtische Bühnen Frankfurt am Main.

Configurable Space of the Bockenheimer Depot, Frankfurt.

Festspielhaus Hellerau in Dresden.

Number of Performances of the Duo Project per Year (1996 — 2018). Locations of Duo Project Performances (1996 — 2018).

Video stills illustrating the movement showerhead. Figure 17: The beginning of the movement. Regina van Berkel (left) and Allison Brown (right) dancing Duo in 1997. Figure 18: The end of the movement. Brigel Gjoka (left) and Riley Watts (right) dancing DUOz2o15 in 2015.

Video still from William Forsythe’s Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye.

Brigel Gjoka (left) and Riley Watts (right) performing Dialogue (DUOz015) in 2018.

Duo rehearsal with Brigel Gjoka (black training clothes) and Riley Watts (blue and yellow training clothes) in 2013.

Screenshot of the website Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced.

Screenshot of the Piecemaker 2 archive of Duo annotations, showing the 1996 key performance and the encoded markings.

Graph showing relative proportion of entrainment modes in Duo longitudinally.

Graph showing duration of movement transformation in Duo longitudinally.

Figure 33: Figure 34: Figure 35:

Figure 39: Figures 40-41: Figures 42-43:

Overview of change and continuity in Duo longitudinally.

Duo longitudinal data at a glance.

Video still of the first rehearsal of Duo, January 2, 1996. From left to right: Jill Johnson, William Forsythe and Regina van Berkel.

Video still of the first studio rehearsal of Duo, January 6, 1996. From left to right: Regina van Berkel, Jill Johnson and William Forsythe.

Video still of the artists talking before the second studio rehearsal of Duo, circa January 6, 1996. From left to right: Regina van Berkel, Jill Johnson, William Forsythe.

Video still of the first stage rehearsal of Duo, January 10, 1996. From left to right: David Morrow, William Forsythe, Regina van Berkel, Jill Johnson.

Video still of the first stage rehearsal of Duo, January 10, 1996. From left to right: Regina van Berkel, William Forsythe, Jill Johnson.

Video still of the second stage rehearsal of Duo, January 15, 1996. From left to right: Regina van Berkel, William Forsythe, Jill Johnson.

Video stills of the technical rehearsal of Duo, January 15, 1996. Regina van Berkel, Jill Johnson and technicians.

Video still of the dress rehearsal of Duo, January 19, 1996. From left to right: Regina van Berkel, Jill Johnson and an unknown photographer.

Preface

This manuscript presents a revised version of my dissertation, defended in February 2020 at the University of Bern within the field of dance studies (Tanzwissenschaft). The choice to develop a dissertation about one choreographic piece within the small scholarly field of dance studies—even when focusing upon a well-known choreographer—makes this, like many dissertations, a niche publication. I am thus especially grateful for the financial support of the Swiss National Science Foundation, which enabled me to invest years of study in this research and, by funding open access publication, to bring this text to a sizable public. In the year following my thesis defense, I revised my dissertation into a shorter and gentler book, thinking of the broader audience potentially interested in a dancer’s writing about Forsythe’s oeuvre. The theoretical arguments and footnotes ideally make this both a lively and a critical ethnography, giving insight into dancers’ labor and choreographic theory.

The piece Duo, made by William Forsythe in 1996 for the Ballett Frankfurt, is the subject of this manuscript. This short duet of 10-20 minutes is performed by either two women or two men. It features spellbinding passages of unison movement and captivating sections of rhythmical counterpoint, danced side-by-side. It is a “project” according to Forsythe, because of its longstanding development over two decades—transforming with new performers, stage elements and movement styles.’ Reconstructing this project’s history and finding out how and why the piece changed required years of careful scrutiny and interviews with the participants.

Processing Choreography is written from my unique position as a dancing-scholar and through my embodied knowledge as a former Forsythe dancer. In contrast to the kind of dance scholarship that analyzes the aesthetic style and form of the dance on stage and in performance or interprets ‘a choreography’s unique meaning and affect (Wirkung) on the audience, my approach to examining the Duo project makes a number of noteworthy turns: I examine the project of Duo longitudinally; I foreground the perspectives and testimonies of the dancers; and I establish novel ways of analyzing digital traces, archival documents and memories of dancing in concert. Rather than narrating the history of this piece chronologically, my writing topically addresses different layers of the dancers’ cooperation: considering the occupational culture of Ballett Frankfurt and The Forsythe Company, deciphering the dancers’ movement practices and investigating the creativity that surged in making and adapting choreographic pieces.

While all description is an act of interpretation, in my writing this takes on particular significance. Having sweat and slithered for nearly a decade in Ballett Frankfurt/The Forsythe Company, I write through a unique position and set of competences that influence how I access, understand and perceive my study ‘object.’ My status as a former dancer enabled me to receive copies of precious archival videos and spend long hours in discussion with the dancers. It made it possible for me to enter the dance studio and meet directly with the artists after performances. My research required negotiating my obligations as both a dancer and a scholar. Like Forsythe and the Duo dancers, I love dancing. The intellectual effort required for this book—necessitating distance from my emotional connection to the dancers and many uncomfortable hours sitting at the computer—was difficult for me to sustain. Yet it was a path that I chose because it enabled me to cultivate my voice and share with others the profound embodied knowledge that dancers develop. As the Covid-19 pandemic showed us, physical interaction and bodily presence are seminal to humanity, and it is distressing when they are disrupted. Throughout this manuscript, my reflection is always doubled: I reflect both upon the existing documents and traces enabling reconstruction of the case study of Duo and upon my ongoing relationships with these people, places and traces. The multiple narratives of the dancers and myself—all of us thinking with, through and about Duo—are interwoven by my choices as the author.

As a former Forsythe dancer who gradually ended my work with the ensemble between 2012 and 2015, I chose to write this text because I wished to continue the artistic work of processing choreography using the tools and methods of scholarly study. Academic research and writing were not unfamiliar to me. I had pursued my undergraduate and master’s degrees before dancing professionally. While dancing in The Forsythe Company, I participated in dance studies conference networks as much as my busy schedule as a performer allowed. With my investment into my dissertation, I sought to contribute something still insufficiently grasped in the scholarly writing about Forsythe’s oeuvre: to sensually transfer knowledge about the dancers’ experience of dancing and to elucidate the multiple voices and narratives within a historiography of Forsythe’s oeuvre. By learning from a dance studies perspective how to write about dance practice and by integrating approaches from the social sciences, I was motivated to document what we had practiced—the dancers’ knowledge—in a carnal way that could move the reader.

This manuscript is part of the growing documentation and theoretical analysis of Forsythe’s work, in dance studies and more recently in the context of visual art. My book contributes my insight, based on my perspective as a late-generation dancer from The Forsythe Company and through my attention to other dancers’ testimonies. More generally for the field of dance studies, this exploration serves as an example of how production analysis can be undertaken to learn more about aesthetic practices and artifacts. My writing also demonstrates how ethnography can be employed to collectively remember and thereby to reconstruct the past, and to develop arguments relevant to dance historiography and dance practice. And hopefully it moves my readers, and moves a few more dancers to write about their experiences.

Preface

I would like to thank many people and institutions for making this book possible.

Foremost, I thank the Duo dancers for their investment and cooperation on this project. I could never have rich enough words to honor the brilliance of: Riley Watts, Brigel Gjoka, Allison Brown, Roberta Mosca, Regina van Berkel, Jill Johnson, Cora Bos- Kroese, Francesca Harper, Parvaneh Scharafali, Bahiyah Sayyed Gaines and Natalie Thomas. I am also extremely grateful to William Forsythe and ensemble members Cyril Baldy, Dana Caspersen, Brock Labrenz, David Morrow, Thom Willems, Nicholas Champion, Irene Klein and Tony Rizzi for their investment and care during my interviews and questions. For help with countless questions relating to Forsythe’s documents and history, I thank Alexandra Scott profusely. I also want to thank Bruni Marx for her correspondence and discussion of the history of Ballett Frankfurt.

My advisors, Christina Thurner and Priska Gisler, have provided prolonged support and modeled how thinking with Duo could become inscribed. Our exchange—trying to articulate ideas about dance in different academic languages—enriched this project and enabled dance practice to find a way onto the page. My editor Jules Bradbury partnered the transformation of this dissertation into a book. Through her subtle yet substantial intervention, she gave my voice new clarity and pressured my open-ended writing process to take a final form. I am also grateful to Graeme Currie for proofreading and Claudio Richard for double-checking. Mirjam Galley, my editor at transcript, supported me patiently throughout this process, and made important suggestions about how we could best layout my content on the page.

As in Duo itself, the authorship of this book is shared with a network of significant partners. I would in particular like to thank James Leach, Tilman O’Donnell, Claire Vionnet, Dana Caspersen and Lennart Dohms. All of you invested substantial time reading drafts of different chapters and discussing my ideas as works in progress. I am also grateful to Anne Schuh and Katarina Kleinschmidt, with whom my discussions of this practice-informed approach benefitted considerably.

The best possible way to start writing a dissertation is within a sea of communicative and supportive friends who inspire you to think differently. I had two such groups. First, the core team of artists and scholars of Motion Together: Timo Herbst, Mark Coniglio, Sophia New, Dan Belasco Rogers and Susanne Schmitt. In particular, Susanne Schmitt coached me on ethnographic methods, offering me personal mentorship that was vital to my scholarly vision and approach. Timo Herbst enabled my refined ability to look at Duo videos frame-by-frame and to see the codes that guided its invention and rehearsal. I am also grateful for the exchange during this project with Gabriele Brandstetter and her generous support to embed the project Motion Together within the infrastructure of the Free University of Berlin. The group HOOD, an experiment with eight ex-Forsythe dancers, was a second platform sustaining this research. We were generously supported as ensemble in residence at PACT Zollverein in Essen, Germany, between 2015 and 2018. As HOOD we were: Cyril Baldy, Katja Cheraneva, Frances Chiaverini, Josh Johnson, Fabrice Mazliah, Roberta Mosca, Tilman O’Donnell and myself. The interviews I initiated in this frame developed my understanding of the occupational culture of Forsythe’s ensembles. While these artists are not cited often in this manuscript, many of the ideas were tested in conversations with them, for which I am thankful.

My research is marked by the extensive and creative effort of programming artists Florian Jenett, Monika Hagar and Mark Coniglio, whose vision went into the graphics of section 9.2. Without their persistence, I would never have been able to imagine Duo in such minute detail. I also thank Karin Minger for her collaboration on the graphic in Appendix C, which visualizes the pairs’ history.

My approach to working with interviews, similar to methods used in oral history and ethnography, required accurate and extensive transcription. This is time consuming and difficult work. I am grateful to all those who produced these transcripts: Katja Cheraneva, Tilman O’Donnell, Selina Hauswirth, Anne-Marthe Kühne, Nadja Rothenburger and Regula Schelling.

Before becoming my doctoral research, this project was supported by two frames: Monica Gillette integrated a preliminary investigation of the topics addressed here within the project Stérung-Hafra’ah in 2015 and has been an important conversation partner. Bettina Blasing, with whom I began my Duo research in 2013, has buttressed this project since its inception; I value our collaboration more and more with each passing year.

The administrative personnel who have assisted this project are its golden angels: Rosemarie Backwinkel, Jacqueline Devincenti, Pia Zühlke, Ursula First and Sabine Hausbrandt. Thank you especially for helping me across language barriers.

And without the support of my parents, my friend Angela Koerfer-Biirger, and movers Chris Lechner, Eliane Eicher and Susane Canonica, I would never have been able to sit well and happily to write these pages.

This book is dedicated to the Duo dancers.

In the small space just in front of the curtain, just at the edge of the stage, Duo is a clock composed of two women. The women register time ina spiraling way, making it visible, they think about how it fits into space, they pull time into an intricate, naked pattern in front of the curtain, close to the eyes of the audience. The pattern grows and unfolds as they tumble, shear, strike, reverse. Their bodies brilliant in a shimmer of black, the women fly with reckless accuracy, their breath sings of the spaces in time. Distant music appears and vanishes as the women follow each other through the whirling, etched quiet. A clock which regards the limitless by returning to where it began.

—Dana Caspersen!

Program note from the Ballett Frankfurt tour to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, June 17-19, 2004.

Figures 1-4. Dancers Regina van Berkel and Jill Johnson in Duo.

Photo © Agnés Noltenius.

When I look at photographs of Duo, I feel kinesthetic memories of moving together. These photos, taken by Forsythe dancer Agnés Noltenius in 1996 (see Figs. 1-4), are shot right up close to the dancers, so that their bodies extend beyond the frame. Their limbs shift from sharp focus—capturing elbows folding, forearms aligning—to borders that blur with action—as ribs twist and legs fold. The eye of the camera is held at the level of the dancers’ eyes. Thus, as when dancing with someone in one of Forsythe’s works, you rarely meet your partner’s eyes. When dancing together, your glance captures only a touch of her facial signatures: such as her mouth, her profile or the back of her head. Rather than prolonged eye contact, you sense your partner through co-movement—with different senses than the eyes. I can almost hear the camera shutter snapping moments, while Noltenius—as a dancer—reaches around her colleagues’ bodies and follows their rhythm. The dance studio is in the background with its smooth, featureless floor. In Figure 4 we can make out the line of the ballet barre, used daily for warming up.

Dozens of similarly stunning photographs of dancers fill the pages of Noltenius’s book tribute to the Ballett Frankfurt, combined with her own words and citations from choreographer William Forsythe.’ The images I’ve included here, with her kind permission, show the dancers enacting the duet Duo. This piece is the subject of this manuscript: a duet made in 1996 by Forsythe for the Ballett Frankfurt. The dancers are Regina van Berkel and Jill Johnson, both of whom are cisgender women. In these photos, we see them in their black Duo costumes, the long sleeve leotards, as well as wearing their practice clothes. They are in the Ballett Frankfurt studio on the seventh floor of the Opera House, with natural rather than stage lighting. To my eye, they are enacting Duo’s movements a bit differently than in performance—as they are closer, brought together for the camera lens, on the verge of touching. This staging of Duo, with Noltenius, brings out what the dancers feel as they dance this duet: a particular art of togethering. In this moving together, micro-movements and subtle timings are substantial. Noltenius’s camera cuts through time into these transient experiences, showing them intimately in passing.

Figure 5 presents us with another picture of Duo—made by digital collage. Dancer Riley Watts’s image of his Duo was made over twenty years after Noltenius’s photos, in 2019 when Watts was at home between tours. The image shows Watts’s body fused together with the body of his partner, Brigel Gjoka. Both dancers are cisgender men. They are wearing their Duo costumes: tank tops and sweatpants. Watts produced this picture by manipulating video stills. The pixilation was caused by Watts zooming in extensively—coming close to his body and overlaying his torso upon that of his partner. Watts describes this picture as corresponding to the essence and feeling of Duo, based on many years of practice together.” As with Noltenius’s Duo photographs, the figuration of the face is absent. The image frames the common torso, core and arms. The dancers’ bodies are different yet amalgamated: together.

Compared to the stage photography of Duo in performance—in which the dancers appear distant, two-dimensional and crisp in geometric positions—I have chosen these dancers’ own images of their practice as an invitation to “step inside” my reconstructive ethnography of the Duo project.’ As a former Forsythe dancer, I bring to this narrative my insight of the dancers’ corporeal practice, foregrounding the dancers’ understand-

1 Noltenius, Detail.

2 Riley Watts, phone conversation with the author, February 27, 2019.

3 This invitation cites spoken text in Forsythe’s Artifact (1984). See Sulcas, “William Forsythe Pushing at the Boundaries of Ballet,” p. 5.

Figure 5. DUO2015 partners Riley Watts and Brigel Gjoka superimposed.

Photo © Riley Watts.

ing of their bodies, work and partnerships. These photos give initial glimpses into the practice that I will be considering.

Duo has been performed in various iterations since its premiere in the Ballett Frankfurt in 1996. My research commenced in parallel to Forsythe’s resurgence of interest in the duet in the last years of The Forsythe Company, which led to a revival of the work for performers Watts and Gjoka in 2015. Duo was retitled DUO2015 for this occasion to distinguish a version developed for and with these specific dancers. Let us examine this duet more closely.

Watching DU02015

DUO2015 begins as overhead and front stage lights are slowly brought up, revealing two dancers—red-bearded Watts and brown-bearded Gjoka—moving together at the front of the stage (see Fig. 6). The theater is dark around them. They are standing side-by-side, less than an arms length apart. Shifting the angle of their bodies while

4 Here | describe the archival video of Riley Watts and Brigel Gjoka performing DUO2015 in the touring program Sylvie Guillem — Life in Progress. The video recording was undated. The performers remember it was a performance in London circa summer 2015. See Appendix F, section 2.

Figure 6. Dancers Brigel Gjoka (left) and Riley Watts (right) performing DUO2015.

Photo © Bill Cooper.

remaining frontal to the audience, they participate with concentration in performing similar movements, primarily with their arms. The joints of their bodies supplely fold in response—hips shifting, necks turning, knees flexing, ankles adjusting. As they move, the performers shift their eyes between the positions of their outreached arms and the space around them. They turn their heads to see directions within the space above, behind and beside their measured gestures. Both dancers wear informal practice clothes that are individually chosen to fit Gjoka’s muscular and Watt’s lithe bodies: grey and maroon sweatpants, black and pine green tank tops, dark colored socks. There is no music. The audience is expectantly quiet.

The dancers articulate movement positions while audibly breathing and occasionally murmuring undertones. Using gentle force, they carry on with unhurried precision. The pairing of their movements proposes relations between forms: for instance, one dancer with his left shoulder elevated, the arm falling away like a foreign limb as he plays with extending and refolding his left hand; the other dancer simultaneously grasps and pivots his left elbow into various shapes, as he adroitly transfers his weight, shifting the angles of his feet. The dancers appear to be observing their bodies morph, while at the same time voluntarily and inquisitively manipulating them. They produce similar forms and cooperatively shape motion dynamics. The men appear deeply connected as they intimately share this dance practice together, and they tell me that they really are deeply in tune with one another. Duo is, according to Gjoka, “a dialogue supported by attention and listening.” It is not, in the dancers’ view, a gendered dialogue but rather a human one.

Interchanging movement and breath, the dancers performing the opening passage of DUOz015 remind me of the detached yet ebullient cool of jazz players feeling their own groove. I see surprising variations of simple moves of their arms: lift, place, fold, flop, rotate, unfold and pivot. These little gestures spill out with a sense of ease. Sometimes their arms quote ballet positions. Though the dancers do not touch, lock eyes or exchange words, the performers do swap sideways glances to reference one another. These suggest that they are composing relations between them—such as one dancer’s outstretched forearm and the other’s inclined shoulder, or one dancer’s lifted hip and the other’s slanted leg. The dancers’ casual movements appear to be a common idiolect sharing a joint grammar, apparently improvised on a foundation of experience and movement forms: a dance exploring the realm of a dyad’s commonality. I find out later in my research that what I am watching—the beginning of the piece—is an improvisation, which allows each night’s performance of DUOzo15 to find its singular reiteration of practiced moves in concert.

Rhythm and time are a shared framework for this dialogue. The dancers quietly punctuate accents, accelerate, decelerate, take turns, insert short pauses and occasionally add a longer fermata. They ‘tick’ together in this rhythmical way—as the audience, politely hushed, attunes. Watching the dancers, I feel time suspending. I sense moments extending, becoming subtle and nuanced with the micro-possibilities of movement relationally unfolding. The performers seem held in the particular logic of their practice: invested in the rigor of their working relationship, encompassed by the electric atmosphere generated by the audience. Then they suddenly latch into identical movements, in synchrony, and a new phase of the dance unfolds. What comes to mind is author David Foster Wallace’s description of critical moments in a game of tennis: “the world’s whole air hung there as if lifted and left to swing.”

Researching the Duo Project

This manuscript presents an investigation taking flight from close study of the piece Duo by choreographer William Forsythe, introduced in the short description above. As the title Duo suggests, the work is a duet performed by a pair of dancers, either two women or two men; the dancers imagine that, in the future, the dance could unfold to encompass new expressions of gender, in response to changing times. The partners’ way of dancing together, without touch or explicit narrative, is a contemporary example of partnering, one that emphasizes cooperation and dialogue rather than the storytelling and gendered role differentiation typical of the balletic form of the pas de deux (dance for two). Duo is a long-term “project,” according to Forsythe.’ Since its creation in 1996 for the Ballett Frankfurt, Duo has been performed over 148 times in over 19 different countries.® Under Forsythe’s direction, it has been danced by eleven artists, with various costumes and sound scores, under the titles of Duo, DUO2015 and Dialogue (DUO2015).

6 Wallace, Infinite Jest, p. 166. 7 William Forsythe, phone interview with the author, January 30, 2019. 8 This counts performances between 1996-2018.

Processing Choreography These vicissitudes—constitutive of one project—are the focus of this book, in which I examine the dancers’ role and perspectives.

Figure 7 (left). Dancers Allison Brown (left) and Jill Johnson (right) in Duo in 2003. Figure 8 (right). Dancers Brigel Gjoka (left) and Riley Watts (right) in DUO2015.

Photo © Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos (fig. 7) and Bill Cooper (fig. 8).

The Duo project is a small but important thread in Forsythe’s now four-decades of choreographic activity, which has brought him international status as one of this century’s leading choreographers—recognized in the fields of ballet, contemporary dance and, in the last decade, also in visual art. His reputation as a “willful provocateur, ‘pretentious as hell’, even ballet’s Antichrist” is part of this acclaim.? Though Duo is comparatively unprovocative in comparison to works such as Kammer/Kammer (2000)—which I remember performing with The Forsythe Company as the French audience protested loudly with claps, boos and by walking out dramatically—aspects of Duo have also been reported as challenging.’ For one, the female dancers in the Ballett Frankfurt version of Duo, who dance close to the audience at the front of the stage, wear black long sleeve leotards that are sheer at the top in which their breasts are visible (see Figs. 7, 9-10). On occasion these costumes have incited catcalls from the audience and concern from theaters about how to advertise the performance.” Additionally, the spare and dissonant usage of composed music by Thom Willems, or of no music at all, may also disorient spectators accustomed to stage dances that traditionally exhibit harmony with the music chosen.” Lastly, the sparse structure of the choreography, focusing on the interrelation of the dancers’ actions can seem “formal” and “academic” as opposed to culturally resonant or entertaining.’ All of these are related to cultural norms and conventions of dance performance, which vary in the contexts that Duo has toured.

9 Byrne, “Ballet’s Antichrist.” 10 Performance of The Forsythe Company, Montpellier Dance Festival, June 29, 2005. 11 For example, on the public billboards advertising the Ballett Frankfurt tour to Orange County near Los Angeles in 2004, one Duo photo was reproduced with the women’s nipples airbrushed away. 12 Compare to André Lepecki’s citation of a civil case against the International Dance Festival of Ireland for the choreography of Jérôme Bel, in Lepecki, Exhausting Dance, p. 4. 3 Kisselgoff,“Dance Review; Loud Tables, but Not a Restaurant,” p. 1.

=

Figures 9-10. Regina van Berkel (left) and Jill Johnson (right) performing Duo in 1996.

Photo © Dominik Mentzos.

Anne Kisselgoff’s review for the New York Times in 2004 directs attention to the unusual power of Duo in performance: the peculiar force of this composition of movement, breath and music. She describes:

Allison Brown and Ms. Johnson wear black shorts and are bare breasted under see-through black tops in Duo, an intimate formal exercise. They are more than admirable in their concentration as they move in and out of classical alignment and into ballet’s classroom positions.

Despite its bare-bones academic air, Duo has a subliminal power. A phrase on the piano rises up into an electronic swell as the increasingly breathy dancers isolate parts of their bodies into extreme postures. Unison alternates with counterpoint, collapsible limbs contrast with light skips.'4

Kisselgoff’s review attests that Duo’s dynamism is contingent upon the dancers’ concentration—an awareness cultivated through precise practice of timing movement. The Ballett Frankfurt program text for Duo, written by dancer Dana Caspersen and reproduced in the opening epigraph, also poignantly describes the duet’s intimate timing. Caspersen writes: “The women register time in a spiraling way, making it visible, they think about how it fits into space, they pull time into an intricate, naked pattern in front of the curtain, close to the eyes of the audience.”” Sharing time together, the dancers’ interaction is an aesthetically motivated composite of sound, space, movement and relation. Because the piece involves sections with little music, the quiet invites the audience to prick their ears and attune to this sensitive dancing. Duo is thus an important example of sensitive interaction and spectatorship, where subtle gestures take on meaning as the dancers and the audience sustain coming closer and become interested in nuances of partnership.

14 Ibid. 15 Program note by Dana Caspersen from the Ballett Frankfurt tour to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C., June 17-19, 2004.

The dancers memories of enacting Duo and their reflection upon their close relationships will be brought into focus in the writing that follows. By turning to the dancers’ testimonies and studying traces of Duo in rehearsal and performance, I will explore more general questions about the emergence of aesthetic events and their realities for the artists who take part in them. As a dancer myself, one who did not perform this work during my time with The Forsythe Company, I was most interested to discover: What was it like to dance Duo? How did the dancers contribute to this piece? What did they become, through dancing Duo, and also what did Duo become, through and with them?