Dance Geometry

Abstract

The following dialogue, recorded in 1998 between the American choreographer and artistic director of the Frankfurt Ballet, William Forsythe, and multimedia artist Paul Kaiser, focuses on Forsythe's use of geometric and algorithmic thinking to create new forms of choreography in ballet. Forsythe trains his dancers to picture the trajectories and trails either left behind or implied by their movements in space, and he insists that they learn how to manipulate and transform that invisible geometry. He propels his choreography in this fashion, with spatial transformations the key to his thinking. In 1994, Kaiser recommended that Forsythe use computer animation to render this geometry visible to the layman through the technique of rotoscoping. This idea was incorporated into Improvisation Technologies, an interactive work Forsythe created in collaboration with the Centre for Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, and recently published as a CD-ROM by Hatje/Cantz.¹ Forsythe and Kaiser, together with Shelley Eshkar, are now collaborating on an artwork to premiere in Frankfurt in spring 2001.