This evening brings together two key works by the choreographer William Forsythe, which conceive of ballet not exclusively as a kinesthetic event but as a product of aggregated semiotic fields.

In the enigmatic duet Of Any If And (1995), the stage becomes the medium for an existential inquiry. The title is drawn from a fragment of Lucretius’ didactic poem De rerum naturâ (On the Nature of Things). While Lucretius intends to describe the dissolution of the body after death as an offering of solace through philosophical understanding, Forsythe attempts to scenographically reverse this process. The choreography thus becomes an ongoing process within the context of an attempt to delay the decay of form.

In Artifact Suite (2004), Forsythe revisits his seminal work Artifact (1984) and condenses it into a strictly formal and energetic variation. In the first section, set to Bach’s Chaconne from Partita No. 2 in D minor, Forsythe uses the device of a falling curtain as a metaphor for the ellipses in ballet history. Just as the intermediate evolutionary periods of classical ballet technique have become obscured over the centuries, Forsythe’s curtain visually mimics the inaccessibility of this genesis and its now remote origins.

In the second section, composer Eva Crossman-Hecht builds on Ferruccio Busoni’s 1893 transcription of Bach’s Chaconne. Her suite of propulsive musical variations ultimately develops a disturbing «Urkraft,» something akin to the most fundamental pressures captured in large, but constrained, physical demonstrations of force.

Suitable for ages 10 and above