CultureThis was published 3 years agoThe acclaimed choreographer explores the interplay of music and movement in this year's Melbourne is only after my interview with Bill Forsythe, as I walk back from Sadler's Wells Theatre in London to catch the Tube home, that I realise I have spent at least a quarter of my allotted time with the world's leading ballet choreographer talking about animals. About the bears he avoids by dabbing on cologne before he goes hiking in the woods, about stags that can put a hoof through your skull, about the beavers, the herons, hares the size of dogs that live around his home in the mountains of Vermont. About the barn owl that was waiting on the gate when he and his wife were coming home from dinner, about the coyotes! "When they do a kill and they are all yowling away at night, it's an amazing sound, their singing," he says. Forsythe is very attuned to sound. He says you can learn a good deal about timing – about time, in fact – listening to birdcalls. The roll of the seasons teaches other lessons. "The number of cycles of flowers that come through from the spring to the fall in Vermont is extraordinary and magnificent. It's a composition, really."Choreographer William Forsythe ''You see how music interacts with motion.''CreditDominik MentzosWilliam Forsythe – as he seems to be known by absolutely nobody, but is the name under which he became famous – is a spring-heeled 68. He talks about these wild things in a soft rush of words. Minutes before, he spoke with the same fervour about counterpoint – of which more later – and the long and surprising history of ballet. Do I know a book called Apollo's Angels, by the dance historian Jennifer Homans? Well, it's great, especially the part about the rapid evolution of classical ballet in the 17th century. "You feel like you're reading about your family," he says. "You really do. It's just fantastic."Bill Forsythe's own history is quite fantastic, in fact. He started dancing in clubs, only beginning to study dance formally at 17; he went to the Joffrey Ballet in his native New York and then to Stuttgart. He was only 35 when he took the helm at the Frankfurt Ballet and made innovative, spectacular works such as Artefact and Impressing the Czar on the troupe of exceptionally precise, valiant dancers that gathered around Johnson and Christopher Roman in Catalogue, part of William Forsythe's A Quiet Evening of Bill CooperCritics spoke of William Forsythe as the new George Balanchine, although he thought his work was very different from "Balanchine's way of organising". Anyway, he added, "you can't imitate Balanchine". Meanwhile, his work surged towards the further shores of contemporary practice. In 2004, he left Frankfurt Ballet to form the leaner, boundary-busting Forsythe crunch came 10 years later. In 2015, Forsythe disbanded the company that bore his name, saying they were all burned out. After all those decades in Germany, he went back to the US. Just as remarkably, he went back to making work that was unequivocally ballet, including having dancers en pointe."I don't feel there is any break in the work I have made," he told the Financial Times earlier this year. "But I am back on board with ballet and how I can help valorise this deep, deep knowledge that ballet people have. It's a big historical thing. I am very interested in what will keep it relevant."The break with his European career is not quite as cataclysmic as it sounds. The artistic partnerships endure; some of the dancers presenting A Quiet Night of Dance, the program that has brought him to Sadler's Wells, have worked with him for 25 years. And he continues to work all over the world. When this run finishes he is off to Antwerp, then to Boston, then to Moscow. And although he lived in Germany, he and his wife Dana Caspersen – once a dancer in his company, now an expert on conflict resolution – have been retreating to Vermont for years. Life goes on much as normal, in fact. "Someone asked 'where do you live most?'," he says. "And I said 'Seat 21 B on Lufthansa'."Jill Johnson and Christopher Roman work from the waist up, touching parts of their bodies that are usually forgotten in Bill CooperMeanwhile, A Quiet Night of Dance moves to Melbourne next week as part of this year's Melbourne Festival. Divided into two very distinct halves, it is indeed quiet some of the dance episodes in the first half, which consists of three prelude pieces culminating in a reworking of the 1996 work Duo, are silent apart from the dancers' set to the muted tweeting of birds, shows a pair of dancers Parvaneh Scharafali and Ander Zabala in an escalating exchange of movements. In Catalogue, a second pair Jill Johnson and Christopher Roman work almost entirely from the waist up as they touch parts of their bodies that are usually forgotten – their ears, for example – without accompaniment. Then comes Epilogue, in which five dancers overturn these individuated experiments to shadow, engage or simply watch each other to the well-spaced piano figures of Morton Feldman and more sounds of Yasit and Parvaneh Scharafali in Seventeen Twenty Bill CooperThis is very much a cerebral investigation, but there is humour, too it is surprising how funny the familiar business of ballet can be. And there is the remarkable hip-hop dancer Rauf "Rubberlegz" Yasit, who scampers on to the stage apparently trying to untangle himself from a skein of his own second half of the program, called Seventeen/Twenty One is a series of short but ravishing duets and trios set to a blast of horn and harpsichord from 18th-century French harpsichord composer Jean-Philippe Rameau, which rises like a shimmering efflorescence of the moves we have seen Roman and Rauf Yasit in A Quiet Evening of Bill CooperI want you to get it. I want you to go I love this'.William ForsytheForsythe's intentions here are gently didactic. He sees the pairs and groups in the first half as ballet masters; in the second, we see what comes of their work. "So after all that demonstration – this prelude where we are preparing you to watch, showing you how to watch – you've been gussied up, a wig has been placed on your head and powder dusted on your face and you're sent off to the ballet, where we put these things in the context of music and watch how they come into another kind of focus the same material, but radically recontextualised," he says."And suddenly you're going 'oh, I get it!'. And I want you to get it. I want you to go 'I love this' but also to know why you love it. Because you see how music interacts with motion, how it underlines things and changes the quality of action of what you see."Rauf Yasit brings a hip-hop vibe to A Quiet Evening of Bill CooperPart of this derives from his engagement with Homans, who has inspired Forsythe to strip back centuries of wallpaper from ballet's classical edifice, looking for origins and identifying passing fashions. In the time of ballet patron Louis XIV, dance was often unaccompanied. Or it might be mapped on to different scores, depending on the whim of the orchestra or dancers, something Forsythe sometimes does himself."There was a lot of improvisation, things weren't glued down," he says. "There was music or there wasn't music ballet was drifting away from music and having its own independent life, you know. So there were all these different periods where it was being pulled one way or the other and we sort of give you all of those in one go."As far as he is concerned, ballet still isn't glued down. The great 19th-century works were contemporary in their own time. "We're talking about social products. Ballet is a language like any other, spoken as it needs to be spoken in any given epoch."To that end, Forsythe has worked consistently with hip-hop dancers; they may not have the same skills as ballet dancers, but they bring others with them."Rauf Yasit is a very skilled composer of abstract breakdance," he says. "We spent a couple of months teaching him all the fundamentals of Catalogue but also of ballet. He's actually been able to acquire quite a bit."Both these varieties of dance, he says, are based on elements that can be recombined and reconfigured. "In the particular kind of work that Rauf does, there is a great deal of complicated enfolding or weaving – threading, it's called. And it turns out that we have also threading in Duo."Counterpoint – a dialogue between choreography and music, or between performers, that maintains the individuality of each element – is central to hip-hop; it is also Forsythe's analytical focus. "You start to see how these things overlap, that one practice can lead easily towards another. They are definitely allies."Younger dancers have a particular musical sensibility, he says, having grown up to a constant soundtrack. "Everyone has a device, everyone has earphones or a headset, so certainly that generation is submerged in music," he says. "That means musical sophistication is more widely spread."Ballet students used to be geared to the piano music they heard all day in the rehearsal room and the great ballet scores."This generation, someone living in Budapest hears the same music as someone living in LA in that age group. It means that people are sharing their sensibilities, which is a very lovely thing right now, and very nice for the choreographers."Forsythe's work has always been resolutely abstract. Talking about dance, he speaks of choreography as "organisation" and dancers as "a medium to work with"; the works themselves are never built around stories or themes, because the striving of mind and body is theme enough."Human beings love to narrate," he says. "I'm not good at explicit narrative … I don't feel any desire to tell a story that could be better written in a book."He has always read a lot of literary fiction, he says. Stories belong elsewhere in his choreography is a narrative in itself movement is played out over a given time. He illustrates this idea by knotting his hands and pulling up his fingers very rapidly in turn; it took him 15 years to master this movement, he says with a grin, but you couldn't watch it for 15 minutes without falling asleep."Why? Because no more information is coming out. It doesn't matter how much effort I've made. But if I go like this" – he sticks out one finger mid-twiddle and holds it aloft – "you snap to attention. Your brain goes 'Oh … anomaly or trend?' That is the beginning of narrative."And thus begins my own education. Forsythe is convinced we can all "get it", that we can learn to see the patterns and disruptions in dance in the same way we can hear key changes in a song. "Everyone is perfectly capable of understanding a narrative in a piece of music – oh yeah, it starts here and changes there, you can get that – and ballet has the exact same properties," he says. "It's just that people listen to music more than they watch ballet. You just need to practise."Not that most people watching A Quiet Night of Dance would realise they were being taught anything; by the end of it, everyone around me was grinning with joy. Besides, it's about then that we start talking about voles and moles, beavers and bears, getting lost in the hills of Vermont. Forsythe glows with renewed interest here we are, bounding into new Quiet Evening of Dance is at the State Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne, October 17-20, as part of Melbourne Festival. The Age is a festival media Viewed in CultureLoading