Figure 15.1 You Made Me a Monster, performance installation by William For-sythe. Photo: Marion Rossi, Dancer: Nicole Peisl, s© The Forsythe Company.
William Forsythe's Choreographic Installations
Kirsten Maar
Translation by Michael Breslin
and Saskya Iris Jain
Together with the other spectators, I stepped on to the stage of the Berlin theatre Haus der Berliner Festspiele. Cardboard sculptures built from cutout models stood on large tables spread out across the room: strange, fili-greed skeletons of beings that have never existed, their composition defying known anatomical structures. The audience was invited to lend a helping hand, and soon everyone was absorbed in the task of somehow joining the various bones and bone parts: An ankle was attached to a femur, and cervical vertebrae between costal arches created long orthopedic formations of a type never seen before. The assemblages negate the recognized organization of bodies, making it diffcult to distinguish between above and below, front and back.1 It was a while before I noticed the display device by the front edge of the stage, across which parts of sentences drifted, revealing fragmentary accounts of aliens and foreign beings. The dancers David Kern, Nicole Peisl, and Christopher Roman later made their way through the rostra, twisting and turning their bodies, mimicking the sculptures. Their momentum seemed rooted in the objects' own contortions, and their movements translated the asynchronicity of the turning and shifting joints. Noises, amplified and transformed through the microphone, streamed forth from Christopher Roman's mouth: labored, groaning cries, as though the outward projection of an innermost being, or a way of giving voice to the burgeoning skeletons on the rostra.
I found texts laid out around the edges of the rostra. They did not, I realized, merely repeat the fragmented sentences on the display, but rather provided the script of the entire installation: They told the story of For-sythe's deceased wife Tracy-Kai Maier, who succumbed to cancer in 1994 and whose death became the starting point for You Made Me a Monster. In a few sentences, Forsythe describes the discovery of the disease, its progression, and his wife's death; the events he relates bore an uncanny resemblance to a piece he had been working on at the time: Alie/NA(c)Tion. During the rehearsals, his wife, exploring the theme of the foreign within the self, developed an improvisation movement which she named “cancer.” The disease was diagnosed shortly afterward.
Figure 15.1 You Made Me a Monster, performance installation by William For-sythe. Photo: Marion Rossi, Dancer: Nicole Peisl, s© The Forsythe Company.
As the parallels of the story became apparent, an atmosphere of eeri-ness descended over the audience, induced by the realization that we, too, had spent the whole time helping the cancerous tumor to grow. The text recounts how the Forsythe family had received a skeleton cardboard kit as a Christmas present from a friend shortly before his wife's death. Only much later did the choreographer again come across the uncanny gift. Without looking at the instructions, he explained, “I randomly bent, folded and attached the various intricate pieces until there was a model of something I understood. It was a model of grief.”2
You Made Me a Monster depicts the interpenetration of the foreign and the self as an atmospheric threat that penetrates the observers; it demonstrates how an uncanny otherness can destroy the self from the inside out, leading, ultimately, to the elimination of the bodily subject.3 The tumors reached out to and entered the spectators, who participated in this alienation as they built, disassembled, twisted, and then recombined the parts to create eerie monstrosities. In doing so, they played an active role in producing a newly formed assemblage between the dancers and the spectators, between the sculptures, and across the stage.
Over the past few years, William Forsythe has worked increasingly on spe-cific types of spatial arrangements that challenge spectators in unusual ways. With his huge White Bouncy Castle, visitors could experience for themselves the pleasures of movement; in City of Abstracts, a video installation in urban public spaces, the movements of passersby were recorded, distorted, and displayed on a giant screen, enabling them to explicitly direct and play with their movements accordingly; and in the atmospheric installation Scattered Crowd, white helium-fi lled balloons determined the space in which the spectators could move. Finally, in a project carried out together with the architect Nikolaus Hirsch, the temporary transformation of the Theater am Turm's foyer saw the entire space covered in felt modules, which could be arranged at will. In each of these examples, convertible forms of spatiality were created which, rather than determine specific positions, in fact altered the situations in relation to the bodies. Between the planned and that which continuously evolved, a barely defi ned space emerged; it was an architecture of the unpredictable, which opened the door to possibilities of renegotiation.
However, You Made Me a Monster serves not only to examine the interactions generated between the spectators by its specific constellation, but also to analyze them with regard to the movement sequences of the three dancers, to set the movements of the non-dancers in relation to those of the virtuosos,4 and, at the same time, to take the spatial installation arrangement into consideration. The unpredictable confi gurations, which the interactions displace and form anew, are not merely the result of the ef ort to create a cardboard structure, but are also inspired by the choreographic arrangements and a spe-cific understanding of the body. For, the particular quality is also the result of elusive movements, which af ect the observer in a particular manner.
But what precisely are we dealing with here: installation, intervention, choreography? Since the 1960s, a range of diferent spatial choreographic formats have been tested: As traditional theatres and performances were opened up to diferent spatialities and public places, the relationship between the stage and the auditorium was reinvented. These spaces and the choreographies inscribed in them led to a new division of space and a redistribution of the relations within it; they define the framework for enabling a specific aesthetic experience, characterized by both a kinesthetic and a specific experience of transience, within which the spatial configurations have to be continually reset.
In this chapter I show the extent to which choreography as the art of “writing space” participates in these reconfi guration strategies and in what way these strategies defi ne a “politics of space”—one which, based on the Greek choros (place for dancing5), and according to a specific combination of bodily technique and involvement of the observer, produces a space of interaction between dancers, of relationality between dancers and spectators, and, ultimately, of negotiation of the public sphere or, indeed, the community.6 This raises the issue of how this form of public sphere and community is to be described and what function it should serve.
Choreographies, as a product of graphic operations and as topo-graphies, refer to the “making” (Gemacht-Sein) of space, to their creation out of the arrangement of moved bodies, which leave behind their traces. Their location and form (and therefore also their effect) are bound to the techniques and notations of movements, to the rules that organize the movements through space.
Nevertheless, these spatial configurations can often be described according to the relations characteristic of their surroundings or the assemblage. They are therefore more appropriately ascribed to the fi eld of topology, which, being the theory of structures and relationships, describes relational spaces. As such, space is conceived not as an entity but as a structure. These non-metric relations, which, for example, establish a specific relationship between inside and outside, become effective in dance; for it is precisely in dance, as I hope to demonstrate, that the setting-in-relation creates paradoxical spatial figures (that again involve the observer in a particular manner) and therefore constitutes a key technique. The way in which the optically measured “striated” space becomes a “smooth” space of the close senses can be described by the intersection of topography and topology.7 When favor is given to the tactile aspect, when, rather than survey it, one feels one's way through space, the focus of attention turns to the receptiveness of the hand, as it takes hold of the things “at hand” and becomes productive. In a drawing or diagram, these two moments occur simultaneously, forming the operative unity of lines and zones, tracing unimagined possibilities within relational space. But what does it mean for aesthetic experience when both topographic and topo-logical access to space are conceived together?
These intersections and transformations seem to me to be fundamental to a politics of space. Tied to these considerations are questions concerning the regulations or pre-scriptions that make space legible, and of how the relations that unfold from the interaction between dancers, as well as between dancers and spectators—all of whom apply and interpret these regulations— can be better described. It is thus necessary to ask what specific constitution of space choreographic practice makes possible. Forsythe's work annuls the division of space into auditorium and scene to privilege an intertwining, which ascribes diverse new roles to the observer while always emphasizing her being involved. This leads us to directly question the specific (etymological) affnity between theory and theatre, understood as places of viewing and showing from which observing takes place, and on the basis of which the spectator asserts her power of judgment, as well as the exteriority and distanced control over events. The temporal tension between the different acts of spatial constitution is staged not by a detached observer but by a potential agent. What is the potential inherent in the specific choreographic divisions of space, and which ones do they challenge? What is the connection between the fi ligreed sculptures, the dancers' movements, and the distances between the tables? And what do these arrangements allow or forbid?
What does it mean to arrange a space? What does it mean to make a decision about a specific arrangement of moving and stationary bodies or to choose one form of presentation over another? The term “installation” has undergone regular changes in meaning since the 1960s, although we will not investigate them in any detail here.8 Forsythe's installations focus on situations of relationality and encounter, yet he always of ers spectators the option to distance themselves and withdraw to a situation of mere viewing.9
How, precisely, does the transformation of spaces proceed? How do our actions af ect the quality of spaces, and what temporal modes do they elicit? How do those “other places,” which are comprised of reality as well as imaginary, utopian moments, become spaces of aesthetic experience that enable processes of alterity, estrangement, and reconstitution?
To clarify the circumstances surrounding such possible types of relations, it is helpful to first cast a glance at Heidegger's observations on a specifically aesthetic intertwining of art and space.10 According to Heidegger, space does not precede places; rather it develops through them, by way of a social and environmental praxis. What is fundamental for Heidegger in this regard is the dual meaning of “making-room” (Einräumen), which is to be understood not only as the unilateral “arranging” (Einrichtung) of placements and “belonging together” but also as the “granting of openness.” In this way, the arrangement of meaningful relations, which comes about through the aesthetic experience, is necessarily based on a process in which these relations are time and again dissolved, and in which the aesthetically configured space does not simply disappear in an “inconspicuous familiarity” but emerges in its potential for performance. This logic, whereby artistic work semanti-cally charges its surroundings—but without ever being able to fully ensure its understanding—draws attention to the fact that the critical potential of an artwork rests in the correspondence between work and observer.11 Things do not occupy mutually indiferent places in a neutral space, but always exist within a context of “praxis and life-form” (Praxis und Lebensform). The relationships within a given place are defi ned through proximity and distance and thus construct multiplicities of indefi nitely varying dimensions. In his thoughts on the relation between sculpture and space, Heidegger conceives the latter as an in-between space. But it is more than that: “Emptiness is not nothing. It is also no deficiency. In sculptural embodiment, emptiness plays in the manner of a seeking-projecting instituting of places.”12 It is from the boundaries of space, he argues, that things receive their being.13 Space is charged by the event that brings together temporality and the experience of presence. Thus, poetics and techné (although not in equal measure) are for Heidegger forms of revelation (Entbergung), which he understands as a yielding or a bringing to appearance of the not-present in the present. Presence can therefore only ever be thought of in the tension between absence and presence. It is in this tension that the disclosure of truth comes to pass and that understanding becomes productive and tied to a mode of knowledge. Crucially for a discussion of installations, the term “enframing” (Gestell) is here linked to that of producing, poiesis. Heidegger referred primarily to completed works of art, and it is only with extreme caution that his theory can be applied to fleeting forms of art. Yet, because a form of temporalization is involved, and because the tension between concealing (Verbe rgen) and revealing (Entber-gen) appears to be a productive notion, it seems appropriate to use this theory to examine the choreographic arrangement of space and the relations within it. As such, enframing is to be understood as a specific aesthetic mode of the work of art, that is, the clash of the deployment (Aufstellung) of a world and the production (Herstellung) of an earth, and as a process which constitutes the constantly changing aesthetic form or shape.14 Earth is not just the environment of a work of art but its very materiality.15
The sculptures built in You Made Me a Monster reveal their meaning only gradually, in the very act of production. But in the alien figurations and the superposition of narrative, the dancers' movements and the sounds, they also always evade or conceal this meaning. It is in this conflict that the potential, or the sense of possibility, unfurls in the work of art. The capacity for action that can be attributed to the sculptures in Forsythe's installation, the potential they deploy within the specific arrangement, how they become “choreographic objects,” and what role they therefore play in creating a dialogical, relational structure for the work of art, or in conceiving a space in which the spectators and performers engage in their respective ways; all of these can be analyzed in view of the specific arrangement (Ein-richtung) of space and objects, performers and recipients. In doing so, the focus comes to shift on the specifically choreographic aspects, the extent to which the movement material, and the way in which it is generated, determine the negotiations in this space.
Choreography sets the stage for an ecology of movement events. ⋯ Objects are not stable: they forecast the time of an event. ⋯ The choreographic object serves as a model of potential transition from one state to the other in any imaginable space.16
In Forsythe's work, propositions, tasks, and rules play a central role. They create an environment that always has to be configured anew. This is also the case with the cardboard sculptures in You Made Me a Monster. As Erin Manning writes, “The objects are in fact propositions co-constituted by the environments they make possible. They urge participation.”17 According to Manning, they create a temporal in-between space by giving expression to the role objects play in our experience, that is, their resistance. As the spectators of You Made Me a Monster were able to experience, objects have a resonant relationship with the past, one that becomes operative through a mechanism of contrast. They do not only create relations to immediate actions, but also locate these in our memories and resulting anticipations. Manning explains that “the object has to be immanent to the event and active in its unfolding” and proposes describing it using the term “objec-tile.” Like a projectile, the object's force unfolds as it moves toward other objects or people, which it then strikes and alters. Consequently, the choreographic object must be understood as ex tending beyond its actual bodily boundaries, as a relationship to a thing, which first of all introduces the potential for action, and which puts forward a proposition—the possibility for bricolage in Monster being one example. But this object need not necessarily be a thing. Another dancer's shoulder or hip can also become this object of manipulation, characterized by a different resistance. And here we come upon the true potential of choreographic installations.
The dancers of the Forsythe Company work with a variety of imaginative relationship development techniques (which, in turn, only function when precisely coordinated with the others). One of the terms Forsythe uses to describe this space-time-af ected relationalization is “entrainment”: He seeks to develop not a formed but a dynamic multiplicity of (re)acting bodies. It is for this reason that the dancers practice different methods to increase their self-perception of the body, its permeability, and its ability to react vis-à-vis others. The objective is to “produce situations in which it is impossible to coordinate the bodies in the usual instinctive manner.”18 The ephemeral perceptual images with which Forsythe's dancers work, based, for example, upon their own earlier movements, are transformed into an “architecture of disappearance,” according to which the subsequent movement has always already passed.19
The quality of a personal bodily experience overlaps with the experience of the outside and the other. This gap enables the adoption of a specific attitude toward one another; it opens up a sort of improvised “space of action.” However, interaction with the other dancer also requires constant oscillation through time: anticipation, as well as presence. By entrainment, Forsythe means “the process that occurs when two or more people become engaged in each other's rhythms, when they synchronize, ⋯ it is about experiencing someone else.”20 He describes
how intimate and powerful entraining is, as well as how taxing it must be to sustain the level of involvement necessary to remain inside the event. ⋯ More than the physical part, it was the intellectual part that required keeping that amount of information fl owing at that speed ⋯ and not getting habitual. ⋯ It's kind of extra-ordinary counter-coordination. ⋯ Your brain can operate only so fast. That's because you have to split your brain all the time, ⋯ you have to be in the present ⋯ and then you also have to be flowing your body into the next event, so you're always between two events.21
This oscillation between two events, the intertwining of present and future actions, and the constantly shifting in-between space that arises between two or more bodies with the help of another bodily knowledge are therefore also temporally determined. The techniques described earlier require the ability to orient oneself in a different manner. This way of dealing with situations, in which losing one's bearings and the disorientation when faced with the unexpected become constitutive moments of experience, recall de Certeau's “art of doing” and open up a perspective that is central to the improvisa-tional nature of choreographic processes. The navigation processes of which de Certeau speaks encompass uncertainty and disorientation; they characterize actions as unique and protean, and reveal themselves to be resistant and subversively creative vis-à-vis predetermined traces, usages, and codes. Such appropriation and transformation processes make possible negotiations in the first place, during which the respective frameworks of interaction can be differentiated.22 Although de Certeau in fact developed these considerations on the basis of everyday practices in the urban space, they can be readily applied to the spaces of experience that open up in choreographic installations. Equally pertinent is the differentiation de Certeau makes between place (lieu) and space (espace), which is rooted in a promise for action, removed, to begin with, from the artistic space: Whereas a place can be regarded as a con-figuration of st able positions, “space is a practiced place” “composed of inter-sections of mobile elements.”23 In contrast to the visual division of a place, made possible by planning, programming, measurements, and records, the bodily and kinesthetic experience of space can evade the potential exercise of power.24 The internal navigation system that is required here is described by Brian Massumi in relation to the registration of abstract spatialities.25 It operates according to topological relations, the interfolding of inside and outside space, in other words, according to incorporated techniques that affect the development of the near senses, which remain otherwise relatively untrained. This navigation system operates considerably faster than orientation based on sight, since for a solely visual orientation, which would first have to be retranslated, all important physical actions and reactions would come too late. This action/reaction is understood as a responsibility, with each individual dancer dependent on the decisions made by the others. Thus, not only is the movement carried out intentionally, its responsiveness means that it can also accommodate breaches or the unforeseeable. Indeed, it is characteristic for dancers to conceive of movement not as an activity, but rather as a condition, which makes its way through the bodies, thereby linking them up with the entire space.26 The investigation of such bodily conditions suggests that the focal point not only lies in the extremities—as in the Improvisation Technologies and earlier pieces—but is in part completely shifted to the out-side.27 Thus, one of the techniques with which the Forsythe Company works is described using the term “disfocus”: “a way of seeing that does not diminish the field of vision, but rather expands it to include the backward gaze.”28 Dana Caspersen describes it as follows:
The kinesphere is the space that the body's movement occupies. Taking in information within this sphere involves imagining the body where it cannot be seen. ⋯ This ability of the body to create an internal image of itself also allows the body to project itself at a location where it is not. When we disconnect our eyes from their usual functional relationship to the body, as in the method of disfocus, we experience a phantom proprioception—the sense of an extra-corporeal body that acts in relationship to our disassociated eyes. ⋯ It is an inside-out body of angled relationships that fl ows backward from the gaze.29
But what does it mean to “create an internal image” of oneself? Forsythe himself describes it as the reversal of the épaulement, which in classical ballet defi nes the precisely determined relation between the positions of the feet, arms, shoulders, torso, and head. The dancer Prue Lang came up with the notion of internally refracted coordination for the methodically established detachment from one's bodily knowledge, as though projecting a second body with which one's own body is in dialogue.30 The activation and mobilization of the dancers' self-movement originate in the planned and methodically produced split of I and others, body and movement, space and time.31 In his essay “Paradoxical Body,” José Gil describes a variety of techniques by which one's own body can become foreign: “The space of the body is the skin extending itself into space, it is skin becoming space—thus, the extreme proximity between things and the body. ⋯ It is an intensifi ed space.”32 With recourse to Laban's concept of the kinesphere, he develops the blueprint for a body-double, a counter body, which is not to be confused with the mimetic imitation practiced in classical ballet in front of the mirror in order to perfect a specific pose. Rather, it is about adapting oneself to another partner who follows the same impulses, by assimilating gestures and rhythms; it is about considering “the body as a meta-phenomenon, simultaneously visible and virtual, a cluster of forces, a transformer of space and time, both emitter of signs and trans-semiotic—being in space and becoming space.”33
But what consequences does this extension of the body have on the interaction with others, and how does it af ect the spectator? The idea of considering movement as a state that permeates the body, and of working on the extension of the body over and beyond the borders of the kinesphere or the skin, allows for a closer link to space and the movements of others within it. The imagination of spatially inspired perceptual images, which fold inside and outside into each other as grotesque ingrowths, outgrowths and knots, in turn creates body images that forever evade meaning-attribution but nonetheless recall a wide repertoire of images, which must be associated and brought into a relation to one another. It is not only these regular displacements, but also those situations in which dancers, objects, and spectators are brought in close proximity to one another by a significant reduction of the interval between them, that unsettle the spectator and her judgment, obliging her to recognize her involvement, while always keeping open the possibility for her to withdraw and take up an outsider's position.
The virtuosic body techniques described in the previous paragraph can be accomplished only as a result of prolonged group collaboration, through which the necessary familiarity and habit are established. Elizabeth Water-house, one of the Forsythe Company's dancers, describes such forms of collective creativity as “being amidst” others; they require a common understanding of movement material and working methods, which imply processes of self-expropriation and appropriation of otherness (this is valid both on the level of the movement material and for working processes that are spread out over time). In this respect, the relation of body and mind is just as important as that between the self and the world.34
A singular-plural being,35 as it unfolds from the being-extended (Aus-gedehnt-Sein) of the body into the environment that calls for interaction, is also part of the thinking here. And we can now refer back to the earlier question concerning a possible (or impossible) community and the negotiation of the public sphere. In doing so, we should link our question to these generated spaces of experience, seeking also to clarify what relation it bears to the body techniques outlined earlier.
In Corpus, Jean-Luc Nancy develops an infinite, multiple and yet unique body, in which meaning is given and from which meaning emerges.36 As in Gil's work, this body is extended, and this being-extended and being outside of the self is understood as an in-between space (Zwischenraum). With the coupling of “touching” and “being touched,” Nancy refers to the interval of touch, which is here not understood as continuity and immediacy, but rather thought of as dislocation and separation, that is, the effraction (breakthrough): the unachievable, its alterity. It establishes at once intimacy and the impossibility of contact. As such, Nancy pinpoints the two poles between which dance unfolds. For even if the bodies, through touch and distortion, sense the other and draw nearer to an image of one single fluid body, thus seemingly blurring the boundaries with the outside, the difference between the bodies remains intact through the virtuosic interaction of the executed improvisation movements and as a fundamental characteristic of this body technique. The in-between space is “not nothing,” for it yields meaning. It must be constantly reproduced and redefined between the dancers. But, beyond this, the tension affects the spectators and keeps the attribution of meaning in limbo: Presence and absence mutually determine and create one another. Accordingly, space can never be understood as an absolute, but only ever as a space which emerges from the performative interactions. It is not designed to correspond to a fixed form. On the contrary, it is always shaped anew. This is a process requiring the participation and contribution of witnesses, who come upon the challenges of the choreographic object and produce the choreographic installation framework, which itself is not composed of a specific configuration, but produces an ephemeral community structure for the length of the performance. This community must not be thought of as a (collective) body or as a mutual intersubjective recognition that seeks con-firmation of an identity. It is not a mode of being or doing of the individual, closed subject but can only develop through a process of departing from the self, from the obligation to alter oneself; it is not to be found in the stability of the self, but, on the contrary, in loss, withdrawal, and detachment. Members of this theatrical community share merely (and only for a time) the fact that there is nothing to share, that they have nothing in common. Nevertheless, such judgment is made possible only by this sharing together. And, thus, a form of potential critique appears possible only before the framework of the participatory structure.37
Nancy's deconstructive theory of community resists any attempt to ground it permanently. It must rather be understood as a place of contingency, since it does not seek a common determinate goal or work, and can therefore be applied to all relational works of art that incorporate choreographic installations, and which last only as long as the shared time of the performance itself.38 In You Made Me a Monster the combination and interplay of a specific spatial topography, particular rules and functions that structure the event, as well as the unfolding of specific imagined conceptions, contribute to opening a path to the observers.
Finally, it is worth asking what this concept of community enables or excludes. The concept can help to define utopian models, or to project them as an image; places of art, however, provide an opportunity to test these models in a secured space. It is therefore not about a past social state or way of life, or about working toward future ones. Community can be recognized only by virtue of its unattainable target, as a horizon, and it is not something that should be institutionalized. Forever open and unconfined, and as such never “put to work” and realized, it can only deploy its potential as a figure of reflection and open up a space for thought. Yet this temporary nature can conjure overly idealistic images, for a utopia can assume equally totalitarian traits when it conceals the possible dangers, risks, and necessary conflicts of a community. Negotiating the public sphere, within which the status of observers and performers hangs momentarily in the balance, would therefore appear to be an appropriate alternative. Choreographic installations enable one's positioning within a process; they call us to attention as spectators and creators and oblige us to make decisions.
1. I am referring to the performance You Made Me a Monster which I saw on August 26, 2005, at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele during the Tanz im August dance festival.
2. Citation from the text.
3. Susanne Foellmer, Am Rand der Körper: Inventuren des Unabgeschlossenen im zeitgenössischen Tanz (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2009), 309f .
4. Contrary to other contemporary choreographers, who often favor the inclusion of day-to-day movements or non-dance, Forsythe bases his work principally on a repertoire of movement which, especially in his improvised sequences, is characterized by a high degree of complexity. But my use of the term “virtuoso” here should not only be understood in the traditional sense of a technically demanding performance; rather, it refers to the term's rein-terpretation in the framework of post-Fordian theory, which sees in virtuosity a performance without the notion of a fixed artwork, which is nonetheless dependent on the presence of others.
5. According to the myth, Ariadne's thread revealed to Theseus the way out of the architect Daidalos's labyrinth; it marked the “choreo-graphy of the space.” This is repeated on the dance floor (or “place for dancing”), and, through this repetition, a place for a communal culture (of remembrance [(Erinnerungs-)Kultur]) is constituted. See Gabriele Brandstetter, TanzLektüren: Körperbilder und Raumfigurender Avantgarde (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1995), 322f , where she refers to the studies by Karl Kerényi.
6. A space that is also always appropriated via a specific knowledge.
7. Gilles Deleuze und Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Continuum, 2004), 523–551.
8. For more on this see Juliane Rebentisch, Ästhetik der Installation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003).
9. Only indirectly do Forsythe's installations form part of an esthétique rela-tionnelle. With this expression, Nicolas Bourriaud refers to works of art for which encounters are the central component. He refers principally to performative works that take place in the fine arts, such as works by Vanessa Beecroft, Félix González-Torres, and Rikrit Tiravanija. These works do not deal with utopian depictions of reality, but seek to produce real situations of action. Theatre as relational art par excellence has to draw other qualities from these spaces of negotiation. See Nicolas Bourriaud, Esthétique relation-nelle (Dijon, France: Les Presses du réel, 2001). His theory does not address how each of those configurations is individually produced, or the type of actions that they challenge; see Claire Bishop's critique “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (2004), 51–79.
10. I refer here to Martin Heidegger's following essays: “Art and Space” (Die Kunst und der Raum), “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” (Bauen, Woh-nen, Denken), and “The Origin of the Work of Art” (Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks) in Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1997), 100–124.
11. In the context of theatre studies, see the works by Erika Fischer-Lichte, “Discovering the Spectator. Changes to the Paradigm of Theatre in the Twentieth Century,” in The Show and the Gaze of Theatre: A European Perspective, ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte (University of Iowa Press, 1997), 41–60; The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2008).
12. Heidegger, “Art and Space,” in Leach, Rethinking Architecture, 124.
13. Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in Leach, Rethinking Architecture, 108.
14. Heidegger employs the term “World” to describe the horizon of understanding (Erkenntnishorizont) and the term “Earth” for the entirety of beings. Both struggle against and yet interpenetrate one another.
15. Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in Leach, Rethinking Architecture, 108.
16. Erin Manning, Propositions for the Verge: William Forsythe's Choreographic Objects, http://www.senselab.ca/infl exions/volume_3/node_i2/manning_1. html (accessed August 4, 2011).
17. Ibid.
18. Dana Caspersen, “Der Körper denkt: Form, Sehen, Disziplin und Tanzen,” in Gerald Siegmund (ed.), William Forsythe: Denken in Bewegung (Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 2004), 107–116.
19. Patricia Baudoin and Heidi Gilpin, “Proliferation and Perfect Disorder: William Forsythe and the Architecture of Disappearance,” http://www.hawick-ert.de/ARTIC1.html (accessed August 4, 2011).
20. Here, Forsythe is referring to Edward T. Hall, The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time (New York: Anchor Books 1983), 177.
21. Steven Spier, “Engendering and Composing Movement: William Forsythe and the Ballett Frankfurt,” Journal of Architecture 3 (Summer 1998), 142. Even if the imaginative relation development techniques described here come from very different periods of the Forsythe Company's work, in particular Forsythe's Ballett Frankfurt, as it was then, certain constants of movement technique span the work. These remarks by Forsythe refer to earlier choreographies, but I believe they are valid for all of his installation works.
22. Both Heidegger and de Certeau describe the relational structures which are instituted in space. But de Certeau applies those movements to everyday experience and its subversive realignment, whereas Heidegger considers explicitly the aesthetic context and investigates the ontological question of art's connection to truth. Implicitly, therefore, they uphold different understandings of a politics (or ethics) of the work of art. For Heidegger, the constantly renewed meaning-attribution is context-dependent, defined by the struggle between Earth and World, while de Certeau's reference to an extra-aesthetic is linked to everyday knowledge, which can undermine the notion of autonomy.
23. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 117. Emphasis in the original.
24. De Certeau's concept can only be conceived within the framework of a spatial science, as developed by Michel Foucault, that is, in the tension between mechanisms of power, which nonetheless or therefore make subversive action possible.
25. See Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Af ect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), chapter 8: “Strange Horizon: Buildings, Biograms, and the Body Topologic,” 177–207.
26. Caspersen, “Der Körper denkt.”
27. Improvisation Technologies was developed in 1994 at the ZKM Karlsruhe. It was used as “analytical tool,” particularly for dancers who were new to the Forsythe Company. With the help of sketched lines on movement videos , they spatially represent the imagined movement processes. This approach enables the visualization and analysis of developments and correspondences.
28. Casperson, “Der Körper denkt,” 109.
29. Ibid., 110f. My emphasis.
30. Another approach is described as shearing: “A state that the body enters where no physical or vocal action is ever made directly” (Ibid., 115). This indirectness enables the cross-cutting of movements. The distortions also reach out toward the face or the voice, “so the body becomes a stage for plural bodies in one body.”
31. Sabine Huschka, “Intelligente Körper. Bewegung entwerfen—Bewegung entnehmen—Bewegung denken,” in Bernhard Boschert, Franz Bockrath and Elk Franke (eds.), Körperliche Erkenntnis: Empirie und Theorie (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2006), 135–156.
32. José Gil, “Paradoxical Body,” The Drama Review 50:4, T192 (Winter 2006), 21–35, 22.
33. Ibid.
34. I draw here on a discussion with Elizabeth Waterhouse in September 2009 and a lecture given at the conference titled Theater ohne Fluchtpunkt. Konfigura-tionen von Raum und Bewegung im Spannungsfeld gegenwärtiger Kunst Wis-senschaft und Politik in Hellerau in April 2007, hosted by Gabriele Brandstetter (Zentrum für Bewegungsforschung) and Birgit Wiens (HfBK Dresden).
35. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
36. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). He investigates these ideas further in his conversations with the choreographer Mathilde Monnier, in Allitérations—Conversations sur la danse (Paris: Gal-ilée, 2005).
37. Nancy, Being Singular Plural.
38. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
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