William Forsythe has been called a lot of things in his four decades as a dancemaker: wilful provocateur, ‘pretentious as hell’, even ballet’s Antichrist. But nothing, he claims, to warrant US government officials showing up, unannounced, at his door and threatening him with arrest.
Had he been reported by an angry dance purist, perhaps? After all, this is the choreographer who has done more than any other to push the limits of what ballet can be, the great forward-thinker hailed for his athletic, sometimes bewildering, deconstructions of an art form that goes back centuries. It’s gained him an army of devoted (read obsessive) fans, but also some vocal detractors. One of his biggest, the New Criterion’s Laura Jacobs, ordered him to ‘get his nose out of Derrida and start tending to his tendus’.
It turns out he’d angered someone a little higher up than your average balletomane. He’s still not entirely sure why.
The knock on the door came after 2005’s Three Atmospheric Studies, a passionate condemnation of the war in Iraq. One critic called it the choreographer’s ‘Guernica’; Forsythe, who was born in New York, proclaimed it to be an ‘act of citizenship’. The officials didn’t see it that way.
‘Some friends had told me CNN had run a feature about the ballet — I don’t know, maybe there wasn’t enough news that day,’ he says. ‘Then these government officials turn up [Forsythe was at his US home at the time]. They basically said: “If you don’t let us interview you we’ll arrest you.” It was chilling. Even now, I’m not sure I know exactly what I’m supposed to have done. They hadn’t liked something.’
Three years ago, Forsythe moved back to the States after 45 years of living and working in Germany.
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