I can begin this post by saying something positive about Facebook in an academic context– namely, that after discovering a few days ago that The Forsythe Company has a fan group on Facebook, which delighted me in a dull-witted way, I received a message informing me that William Forsythe is to hold an online symposium at 3:00 PM EST as part of the launch of his new interactive project hosted by Ohio State, “Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced.”

Since the readers of this post may not be as informed about The Forsythe Company as I am—I must admit that they are one of the principal subjects of my dissertation “After Aura: Media, Movement, and the Performance of Withdrawal,” and I have been studying their work during my research residency in Germany—it would be best to provide a brief introduction.  Despite the fatuous superfluity of this statement, I would broadly say that William Forsythe is probably the world’s most important living choreographer.  He is American, but has been in Germany since the inception of his career—part of an ongoing leaching of American performing talents by Europe due to the atrocious conditions of arts funding—and currently works in Frankfurt and Dresden.  Forsythe is one of the few choreographers that a theatrically uninitiated public is most likely to know.  As befits the two decades he devoted to developing a self-exhausting, hypercomplex form of ballet, most people associate his work with ravishing cerebral intricacy rendered into a virtuosic display of physical performance.  By the way, a notable development in his ballet was his eventually necessary recourse to custom-designed computer programs in order to keep up with the complexity of the possibilities compacted into his choreographic systems, which has been partially released in a CD-ROM as “Improvisation Technologies.”  Since 2004, when conservative forces in the Frankfurt city government succeeded in pulling the plug on funding for Forsythe’s Ballett Frankfurt, his work has undergone a decisive shift, moving, in his words, from ballet to “dance,” and ultimately integrating a variety of other elements, notably insidiously distopian, technically sophisticated uses of language and electronic sound.  I provide a detailed analysis of these developments in “Forsythe’s Box: On the Afterlife of Choreography,” in the current issue of PAJ.  There is also a brief discussion of his 2006 work, “Heterotopia,” (which is enticingly named after Foucault’s influential essay, which is also available gratis on the web) on this site.

Enough with the introduction.  Aside from the collision of Facebook, a live streaming conference occurring today, and an ambiguous, obligatory reference to electronic sound, or his enterprising collaborations with computer scientists, neuroscience, and supposedly, his planned collaboration with Brian Massumi, whose name is virtually synonymous with Deleuze and the virtual  what does this choreographer have to do with the subject that animates HASTAC’s audience, technology?

As I begin to explore in my essay, Forsythe’s choreography stands at the forefront of emerging efforts to articulate a concept of theatricality that understands itself in relation to media rather than in opposition to technology.  I prefer the term “media” to “technology” because media—although not “the media”—suggests the history of material mediation that has existed as long as there have been techniques of conserving and disseminating language.  In particular, I find that Forsythe’s choreography has begun to surpass theatre’s traditional resistance to technologies of reproduction by seeking out grounds to stage events that no longer conform to the present as predicated by dramatic unity—a heterotopian exposition, which is decidedly not utopian…

If you only can name one living choreographer, it should probably be William Forsythe…

PS

The Synchronous Objects website at OSU just went live.  I will update this post in a few days after having played with it…

Click on the image to visit the Théâtre du Soleil's website, where you can find their new work, Les Ephémères.

The Théâtre du Soleil currently has put what seems to be their entire latest production on the Internet!  This is a tremendous treat, as du Soleil is one of the most influential experimental theatre groups of the second half of the 20th century, and their work, even after living in France for eight months, has always eluded me.  It is also playing at the Lincoln Center Festival this summer, and presumably in light of recent financial troubles, ticket prices have been reduced– from a hundred to only seventy-five dollars!  This is a scandalous amount of money, especially given the group’s French Socialist roots and populist sentiments, and the Lincoln Center’s upper class pricing scheme prevented me from seeing their last work, Tambours sur la digue.

In short, this is a vast improvement, and I will post a response here as soon as I find time to watch their three hour epic…

Sometimes distraction, even boredom, leads to little discoveries.  While “killing time,” following a circuitous route through digital territory– from the transmediale09 festival to the website of Montreal-based new media artists AElab to Wikipedia’s entry on Georges Simondon– led me to the biannual online journal Appareil.  Appareil was founded last year, and currently has three issues, “Le milieu des appareils,” “La ville dans les sciences humaines,” and “Autour de Simondon, ” which correspond to its media-oriented emphasis on contemporary strands of aesthetic theory.   The particularly exciting feature of the journal is that it provides full access to general users and also appears to be holding a high level of academic production, exemplified by readers (Georges Didi-Hubermans or Robert Harvey) and more importantly, writers (Eric Méchoulan and Jacques Rancière) whose names jump across the Atlantic gap.

I’m enthused.

The word “appareil” is not easy to directly translate into English.  I prefer “device,” in the sense of electronic or mechanical equipment– l’appareil photo (camera) being a common example.  In its masthead, the journal discusses the term as an organizational concept for the thinking of the event, calling the “appareillage” of art’s technical, institutional, and social history a “condition of possibility, the momentary opening of their manifestation, their event.”  It continues to define l’appareil not a fixed principle, but a mobile set of practices, “an agency of heterogenous elements that constitutes at a given moment the appearance of the visible.”  And it is not without significance that the authors touch upon the poetic, “the poetic of an epoch,” which les appareils generate by means of “en appareillant” its diverse compositional components.

I’m enthused.

First up for me is Rancière’s “Ce que ‘medium’ peut volouir dire: l’exemple de la photographie,” which promises to address the ongoing research for my upcoming paper at PSi #15 in Zagreb, “Murmurs, Mispronunciations, and Malentendus: The Medium of Language in Recent Choreography by Mantero, Hay, and Forsythe”…