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 349

The Journal
of Architecture
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Dancing and drawing,

choreography and architecture
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Steven Spier Department of Architecture, University of

Strathclyde, Glasgow G4 0NG, UK

Collaboration between choreographers and architects still usually takes the traditional form
of the latter designing sets for the former, while research on the relationship between archi-
tecture and dance is scant. One of the few examples of a choreographer working with then-
current architectural concerns is William Forsythe and the Ballett Frankfurt in the late 1980s,
particularly in Enemy in the Figure (1989) and Limb’s Theorem (1990). These pieces show a
profound understanding of and engagement with architectural issues then being addressed
by Daniel Libeskind. Forsythe’s interest in Libeskind was not his ‘deconstruction’, as has
often been asserted, but in his operations on drawing. Their coincidence of intellectual inter-
ests and resulting friendship allows us to see clearly how concerns in architecture were also
explored through the medium of ballet. It is a reminder too of a period, postmodernism,
when architecture led theoretical discussions.

Research on the relationship between architecture
and dance is not only scant but traditional. The lit-
erature from architecture tends to look at the use
of the space of the stage or at historical theories
of the body; that from dance tends to look at set
design or to make facile comparisons between
so-called deconstructivist architecture and some
contemporary dance. Collaboration between chor-
eographers and architects still usually takes the
traditional form of the latter designing sets for the
former. One of the few examples of a choreographer
working with then-current architectural concerns is
William Forsythe and the Ballett Frankfurt in the
late 1980s, particularly in Enemy in the Figure
(1989) and Limb’s Theorem (1990). These show a
profound understanding of and engagement with
architectural issues then being addressed by Daniel
Libeskind. Contrary to common understanding,
Forsythe did not actually collaborate with Libeskind
(though Forsythe did design a piece for Libeskind’s
Groningen Project in 1990), but their coincidence
of intellectual interests and resulting friendship
allows us to see clearly how concerns in architecture
were also explored in the medium of ballet. It is also
a reminder of a time when architecture led theoreti-
cal discussions in postmodernism (a term now often
substituted erroneously for historicism). A seminal
essay from that time, ‘Proliferation and Perfect Dis-
order: William Forsythe and the Architecture of Dis-
appearance’ by Patricia Baudoin and Heidi Gilpin,1
has often been reprinted and the phrase from the
title subsequently used by others. I will argue,
however, that Forsythe’s interest in Libeskind is not
in his ‘deconstruction’ but in his operations on
drawing, and that the consequences for ballet are
not so much to valorise moments of disappearing
but to make ballet’s highly evolved sense of counter-
point central.
Forsythe’s particular engagement in the late 1980s
with then-current intellectual and cultural concerns,

# 2005 The Journal of Architecture 1360–2365 DOI: 10.1080/13602360500285401

 350
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and specifically with architectural ones, is most expli-
cit at the Reggio Emilia Festival Danza (1989),
devoted solely to the Ballett Frankfurt. Such an invi-
tation after just five years of Forsythe’s artistic direc-
torship, and the festival’s extent, demonstrate what
an important figure he had already become: the
company performed eight different pieces over six
nights in three venues, there was a four-volume
programme, a round table discussion in collaboration
with the University of Bologna and an installation of
set designs by Michael Simon.2 Forsythe had been a
freelance choreographer since 1980, was appointed
artistic director of the Ballett Frankfurt in 1984 and
was renowned by the late 1980s, not least for drag-
ging a reluctant ballet world into an engagement
with the intellectual concerns of the contemporary
world. Ballet is an art form that has been much
less affected by contemporary or even twentieth
century theoretical and cultural concerns than
most. Its ‘. . . inherent conservatism as a codified
technique for movement evokes a conservatism of
response, and allows it to remain . . . a marginal art
form that fulfils the function of light entertainment
rather than providing the kind of reflection and
stimulus that is expected of other theatrical or artis-
tic forms.’3 Forsythe’s explicit interest in such con-
cerns, ‘as part of a [then] current intellectual
preoccupation with the hierarchies of categories of
thought and value in western culture that has
become generally known under the all too embra-
cing label of deconstruction,’4 is evident in pro-
gramme notes, interviews and the productions
themselves. It has mostly been treated with
dismay, disdain or regarded as radical within the
ballet world.5
The programme contains the usual list of credits
and works to be performed but unusually also past
reviews, drawings, assorted quotations, interviews,
and essays by, or on, amongst others, Rudolf von
Laban, Libeskind, Paul Virilio, and ontology (Heideg-
ger, Husserl, Gadamer, Derrida) that ambitiously set
the intellectual context for the work. The pro-
gramme notes for Enemy in the Figure in volume
three are a reprint of the second half of Libeskind’s
essay ‘End Space’.6 Of particular relevance for this
paper is programme volume two, Il Disegno Che
Non Fa Il Ritratto. Danza, Architettura, Notazioni.
Its three essays deal explicitly with Forsythe’s
relationship to architecture, Libeskind in particular,
and notation. As we will see, one of Libeskind’s
central concerns was in fact notation or drawing. It
opens with quotations from Libeskind and from
Laban, who devised an influential method of move-
ment notation, Labanotation, and a theory of move-
ment in the 1920s. The first essay is the previously
cited ‘Proliferation and Perfect Disorder: William
Forsythe and the Architecture of Disappearance’,
which correctly asserts the influence of Laban and
the questioning of balletic form.
Enemy in the Figure (Fig. 1) opens with a dancer
lying on her back in a far corner of the stage, the
only part illuminated, with a second dancer crouched
beside her and moving the limbs of the first as if
arranging or experimenting with them. Beside them
lies a heavy rope and there is a squiggly wooden
screen placed diagonally stage left. A brooding,
ticking score is low and repetitive. Dancers period-
ically emerge from and disappear behind the
screen. The rope is periodically snapped and operated
by dancers so that it is straight, squiggles or pulses

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rhythmically. The dancers push a mobile 5000W
floodlight about the stage illuminating areas,
casting long shadows, making dancers who are
standing or performing in near darkness suddenly
visible; in short, defining space. It becomes
another player on the stage.7 There are periods of
calm. There are scenes of seeming chaos as
dancers run wildly around, sometimes caught in
the spotlight. There is a figure in a fringed black
costume whose movement is almost berserk. There
are levels of seeing and of disappearance and
multiple centres of activity.
Enemy in the Figure almost immediately became
the middle section of the three-part Limb’s
Theorem (although it has often been staged by
itself). It opens in such darkness that one isn’t sure
the curtain has come up. Only gradually do shapes
and sounds emerge out of a seemingly primordial
state; we begin to make out ghostly limbs twirling,
351
The Journal
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a line, movement on the side of the stage. The Figure 1. From Enemy
light comes up slowly to reveal what we had strained in the Figure, (1989),
#Dominik Mentzos;
to see. The line is the edge of a huge silver plane
used with permission.
poised on a single corner. Below twirling arms we
can now see dancers’ lower bodies. An insistent
low hum becomes fuller and louder. The stage
goes dark and then light again, the line of the
plane becomes a point, then a line and a plane
again. A man in trousers and a white shirt sits
demurely on a stool at the plane’s lowest corner
occasionally rotating it, changing the position of
the shadows and the space the dancers are in. It
defines the space of the stage so dominantly that
the dancers seem diminutive, relegated to the
space it leaves over, as they perform solos, duets,
in groups. When two dancers wrest control of the
rectangle from him to turn it themselves he walks
off and all the dancers fall flat on the stage to end
part one. In the third act several of the stage
objects from the first two parts reappear as frag-
ments, and especially prominent is a segment of a
sphere, with its armature extending beyond it,
onto which are projected drawings on how to
draw perspectives. The number of dancers doubles
and there are so many things going on that it is
impossible to watch everything, nor even to see
everything from any point in the theatre. In spite
of this fragmentation, however, the piece presents
a coherent theatrical experience of movement, light-
ing and music, which is part of Forsythe’s genius and
his responsibility as artistic director of a large,
municipal ballet company.
There are obvious attractions for an architect in
the two works, namely the geometric forms, the
rope which becomes different kinds of lines, the
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space-defining lighting. Architects might even intuit
that Limb’s Theorem was explicitly informed by
architectural concerns. Gilpin did, as dramaturge,
assemble a 107-page reader for the dancers, ‘Texts
for the Preparation of “Limb’s Theorem”’ and for
‘General Work and Play’ that is a collection of
mostly post-modern architecture theory.8 But the
most architectural explorations in the two pieces
are actually Forsythe’s permutations and explora-
tions of the balletically trained body (Limb’s
Theorem was originally called The Doctor’s Body 9),
and subsequently of ways of generating move-
ment.10 Forsythe defines what he does as organising
the body spatially: ‘Choreography is about organis-
ing bodies in space, or you’re organising bodies
with other bodies, or a body with other bodies in
an environment that is organised.’11 Classical
ballet connects coordinates in established ways,
which has allowed it to develop a high degree of
formal and technical complexity. By looking anew
at conventions of turnout, placement, verticality,
balance, and spatial orientation,12 one can draw
attention to these conventions and achieve startling
results. His explorations or challenges to ballet come
from the fundamentals of the medium itself, its own
structure and form: ‘I use ballet, because I use ballet
dancers, and I use the knowledge in their bodies.
I think ballet is a very, very good idea, which often
gets pooh-poohed . . . I see ballet as a point of depar-
ture—it’s a body of knowledge, not an ideology.’13
When Forsythe saw the End Space drawings in an
exhibition he had already created Enemy in the
Figure and immediately recognised in them what
he was trying to do with ballet (Fig. 2).14 (He sub-
sequently exhibited them in the foyer of the Ballett
Frankfurt’s theatre during early performances of
Limb’s Theorem.) The diagnosis of the problem
besetting their respective art forms is the same,
and goes much beyond the obvious fragmentation
of form. Libeskind declares in End Space that archi-
tecture has lost its authenticity and spirituality to the
mechanics of its production. To revitalise it he con-
centrates not on building, space or the ideological
context of architecture’s production but on the
drawing itself. He bemoans the reduction of archi-
tectural drawings: ‘they have become fixed and
silent accomplices in the overwhelming endeavour
of building and construction. In this way, their own
open and unknowable horizon has been reduced
. . . in considering them as mere technical adjuncts,
collaborating in the execution of a series made up
of self-evident steps, they have appeared as either
self-effacing materials or as pure formulations.’15
To get to that margin where ‘concepts and pre-
monitions overlap’,16 Libeskind submits drawing to
a process of ‘clarification’, ‘“purification” attempts,
through a series of successive steps, to realise the
elimination of intuitive content and numerical
relations, and lead to ever more encompassing
(spherical) possibilities of configuration.’17 The
return to drawing was then not uncommon, but
instead of figurative, expressive or poetic drawing
to revitalise architecture, such as those of many
architects at the time (eg, Michael Graves, John
Hejduk, Massimo Scolari), Libeskind’s are technical
and projective while still trying to get to wonder
and vitality: ‘If we can go beyond the material
carrier (sign) of the internal reality of a drawing,
the reduction of representation to a formal
system—seeming at first void and useless—begins
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Figure 2. ‘Little
Universe’, from Daniel
Libeskind, End Space
(1980), #Daniel
Libeskind; used with
permission.

to appear as an extension of reality which is quite
natural.’18 That is what he calls his ‘enigmatic
reversal’.19
While Libeskind’s quest for an authentic, pre-
rational architecture is romantic, getting there
through interrogating its own highly codified
drawing technique is modern and scientific, and a
similar starting point to Forsythe’s interrogation of
the way ballet organises the human body. (This is
an interest of his that is of long standing: ‘Okay,
it’s good to know ballet, but the gist of the whole
piece [France/Dance, (1983)] is the organisation of
the human body as an art form.’20) It was abetted
by reading, while in hospital with a knee injury,
Laban’s Choreutics and extracting a simple but
powerful insight from the construction of the body
 354

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Figure 3. Drawing by
Rudolf Laban from the
Rudolf Laban Archive,
National Resource
Centre for Dance,
#NRCD; used with
permission.

Figure 4. Drawing by
Rudolf Laban from the
Rudolf Laban Archive,
National Resource
Centre for Dance,
#NRCD; used with
permission.

that is behind Laban’s notational system (Fig. 3).
(This influence of Laban is often cited.) Laban was
one of those curious early twentieth century
figures who was both romantic and modern,
alchemical and scientific, and Forsythe explores his
geometric construct but not his metaphysics. (He
also rejects his turn to expressionism.) Laban postu-
lates a stable, vertical axis for the body around the
centre of which is a three-dimensional kinesphere
marked by 27 points. As one moves the axis tilts
and rotates, the kinesphere moving with it (Fig. 4).
Forsythe recognised that this is well suited for inves-
tigations of ballet, which also assumes a central
point and connects coordinates in rigidly established
ways. Forsythe then poses some simple but highly
provocative questions of ballet’s construction of
the body, namely: ‘What if a movement does not
emanate from the body’s centre? What if there
were more than one centre? What if the source of
a movement were an entire line or plane, and not
simply a point? . . . Any point or line in the body or
in space can become the kinespheric centre of a
particular movement.’21 As Forsythe puts it: ‘What
I began to do was imagine a kind of serial movement
and, maintaining certain arm positions from ballet,
move through this model, orienting the body

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towards the imaginary external points. It’s like ballet,
which also orients steps towards exterior points
(croisé, effacé, . . .) but equal importance is given to
all points, non-linear movements can be incorpor-
ated and different body parts can move towards
the points at varied rates in time.’22
The result of this simple yet clever insight was to
challenge the very assumptions of ballet, the
harmony, balance, and façade of effortlessness that
classical dance presents: ‘. . . the torso and arms
have lives of their own, contributing to the momen-
tum and direction of the movement instead of acces-
sorising the lower limbs, and the entire body is used
with a disregard for the vertical planes to which
classical technique adheres, pitching the dancer
into unknown extensions and astonishing muscular
articulations, changing the dynamics of partnering,
and introducing a notion of disequilibrium that clas-
sical ballet has traditionally spurned as anathema.’23
But ballet is still the basis for linking movement in
Forsythe’s choreography, for ‘the reflexes that
we’ve learned in classical ballet [to] maintain a kind
of residual coordination . . . This elasticity is derived
from the mechanics of torsion inherent in épaule-
ment’, which for Forsythe is the ‘crowning accom-
plishment of great ballet dancers.’24 It is also of
great help for another key device in linking move-
ments, namely counterpoint.25
Forsythe’s operations, as he calls them, on classical
ballet are a challenge to classicism but also a rejec-
tion of expressionism, the two poles the twentieth
century tiresomely bounced between. This central
problem is explored already in Forsythe’s Artifact
(1984), where the beauty, rigour, artifice and organ-
isational possibilities of classical ballet are set against
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The Journal
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the primal beginnings of dance, explicitly rep-
resented by a woman in historical costume and an
Ur figure. It is the trap to be avoided between the
desiccation of classical ballet and the various twenti-
eth century attempts to escape it, which include
expressionism, free dance and Martha Graham’s
psychological musings. This position is shared by
Libeskind and the excerpt from End Space in the
Reggio Emilia programme begins by rejecting an
either/or approach of abandoning formal structures
in order to retrieve an intuitive understanding:
I am interested in the profound relation which
exists between the intuition of geometric struc-
ture as it manifests itself in a pre-objective
sphere of experience and the possibility of forma-
lisation which tries to overtake it in the objective
realm. In fact, these seemingly exclusive attitudes
polarise the movement of imagination and give an
impression of discontinuity, when in reality they
are different and reciprocal moments . . . We
cannot simply oppose the formal to the non-
formal without at the same time destroying the
mobility, variation and effectiveness incarnated
in the very nature of formalism.26
Libeskind writes further that drawing must seek ‘to
reflect . . . the inner life of geometrical order whose
nucleus is the conflict between the Voluntary and
the Involuntary.’27 Indeed, the End Space drawings,
while technical and cool, were drawn in a kind of
altered state, to the extent that Libeskind cannot
remember the method for making them.28
Another of Forsythe and Libeskind’s shared con-
cerns and approaches is their interest in mathe-
matics and specifically geometry. (Libeskind came to
study architecture from music and with a developed
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Figure 5. Sketch for

‘The Loss of Small
Detail’ (1991) from
Forsythe’s notebook
circa 1990, #William
Forsythe; used with
permission.

interest in mathematics.) Forsythe says that ‘I enjoy
the geometric inscriptive qualities that [ballet] has.
So I just think of ballet as a geometric inscriptive
art form.’29 In Gilpin’s previously cited ‘Texts for
the Preparation of “Limb’s Theorem”’ there are
eight pages from a book on how to construct per-
spectives. Forsythe’s notebooks from the late
1980s and most of the 1990s are filled with
geometric drawings—intersecting geometric frag-
ments, projections and spatial layering, and notes
on mathematical and geometric processes (Fig. 5).30
Indeed the programme for the first season of
Limb’s Theorem at the Städtische Bühnen Frankfurt
am Theatreplatz has replications of such kinds of
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Figure 6. ‘imagining
lines’, from William
Forsythe: Improvisation
Technologies,
screenshots #ZKM
Karlsruhe and William
Forsythe; used with
permission.
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drawings (though drawn with a knife) as well as
fragments from writings by Aldo Rossi (about
fragments) and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
This understanding of the body in space as a geo-
metric construct (‘I could see your hand as a gesture
. . . but I simply see it as a configuration and the best
way to describe that configuration for me is from a
mathematical point of view.’31) is made explicit in
Forsythe’s instructional CD-Rom ‘Improvisation Tech-
nologies. A Tool for the Analytic Dance Eye’ (2003,
1999, prototype 1997). Created to help him teach
his movement vocabulary and way of thinking to
dancers new to the company, some of the demon-
strations could fruitfully be used with architecture
students. For example, starting with two points,
drawing a line from them, moving that line
through space and extruding a plane from it
(Fig. 6). A ballet dancer is already trained to
imagine lines, planes, and vectors in order always
to know precisely where he or she is in three-
dimensional space.32
Forsythe’s interest in mathematics is not only
manifest through a geometric understanding of
ballet but more theoretically through limit. As with
that mathematical term, ballet can be understood
as an idealised construction which a dancer is
always approaching but can never reach:
Arabesque is a prescription in space, a projection
that dancers move towards. They imagine it and
try to embody it and occupy it although it is absol-
utely impossible. It is not supposed to be done it is
only supposed to be approached . . . It’s a bit like
arctic exploration where people move towards
nowhere assuming they are going to arrive
somewhere but that can’t be described. It is very
beautiful this kind of journey.’33
(Arctic exploration is a reference to his work, ‘die
Befragung des Robert Scott’, 1986, 1990.)
Getting dancers to understand the spatial and
formal knowledge of ballet through geometry
gives Forsythe a vocabulary by which to set them
any number of operations, as he calls them, on
ballet. Rather than tightly focused and formal geo-
metric exercises or steps he has created improvi-
sational processes. This was an especially strong
interest of his in the late 1980s and the 1990s. At
its most basic Forsythe would change details,
music or the order of sequences at the last minute.
But more fundamentally he experimented with
methods of improvisation that empower the
dancers to generate movement, though always
within prescribed parameters. This is not just
dancing around. For Limb’s Theorem there were
two main improvisational techniques: room writing,
which involved working directly with Libeskind’s
drawings, and DAT time. Then Frankfurt Ballett
dancer Nik Haffner describes being given one of
the End Space drawings and being asked to trans-
late it into movement, to go from two to three
dimensions: ‘The same drawing on a sheet of
paper is translated in a different and individual way
by each dancer. The timing of the movement is
determined by the manner and speed with which
I, let us say, “read” a drawing. It is a matter of
how much time it takes to go through certain
parts of the drawing.’34 This is an unravelling and
then translation of what Libeskind had done. For
while his drawings are dramatic representations of
space they are after all two-dimensional and static.
Furthermore, they are analytic in their technique

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and while composed of recognisable architectural
elements they are only ambiguously represen-
tational. Like the dancer’s translation of that material
into movement, the drawings are both highly
personal and improvised, and operate within a
strict order, though one we cannot quite fathom.
The technique for interpreting Libeskind’s draw-
ings is named room writing, and again the process
resembles the ambiguity in the End Space drawings
between their universal and personal meanings.
‘The task during the piece [“Limb’s Theorem”] was
to translate the architectural information into move-
ments. This information is available as an offer to
every dancer when improvising, the dancer decides
what to select . . . In Limb’s Theorem it got as far
as us working from our memories with the archi-
tecture we know from home—be it our kitchen,
bedroom or living room, any room of which we
had a clear picture.’35 The dancers were also
given eleven pages of directives called U-lines from
which to generate movement phrases. These are
short phrases to interpret (eg, I’m not talking to
you, You meet yourself, Cheers you up, To spite
you), mathematical terms (eg, divides, delineates,
functions, planes), verbs and adjectives (eg,
deviate, follow, reject, implode, partial), and
playful or almost nonsensical phrases (eg, U invert
difference, U arc indivisibly, U project solids, U soli-
dify angles, U extend impulse). Such methods are
later explicated in ‘Improvisation Technologies’:
In ‘room writing’ you’re going to imagine a room,
its architecture and its contents, and you’re going
to analyse the architecture and the contents for its
geometric content. In other words, a doorknob is
a circle, for example, so I might describe this with
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two points. So I have this imaginary doorknob in
front of me and with room writing, in one case,
we’re going to take this doorknob and knock it
off the door. Now the purpose of doing this is
simply to take me off place.’36
The dancer must be playful with the process:
You can establish a line with a gesture . . . I can
establish a line by making a crumbling gesture.
I can establish a line on the floor with little hops.
I can establish it by rubbing it into the floor . . . by
making little tiny dots, or between two dots . . . I
could probably smear it, slide it, tap it, swat it,
kick it. A line or a point is there in space and
how you establish it or how you manifest it is
really up to you. It is very important that this
part of the process remain extremely playful and
extremely imaginative. Don’t restrict yourself to
strict drawing of lines like you’re drawing with a
knife or a pen for that matter. You have to use
the surface of your body and your imagination
about how lines could form and how you could
manifest these things with your body . . .37
Another improvisational method that became used
often but was first used on stage with Limb’s
Theorem, is DAT time. ‘It is based on the fact that
the music to Limb’s Theorem provides very few
clues regarding the timing of the movement. For
this reason, a “time code” is displayed on monitors
for the chronological orientation of the dancers
throughout the entire piece . . . It can be used to
fix the time at which a certain action is to place,
for example, that I, as a dancer have to go over
there after 10 minutes, 6 seconds and carry out
such and such a task, or that the entire group has
to do this and that.’38 In Self Meant to Govern
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(1994), for example, six clocks on the stage, each
with twelve letters representing a combination of
movements, instruct the dancers what combination
of movement they must perform and how long it
should take. The sequence of the combinations is
variable.
This invention and use of improvisational tech-
niques became a regular part of Forsythe’s choreo-
graphic process. Sometimes he continued to work
with drawings, such as those of Tiepolo for the
making of Hypothetical Stream (1996): ‘There are
all these human knots that Tiepolo had floating
about as sketches. I drew vectors from these
figures and said, these are hypothetical solutions
to these human knots. Are these possible? And so
Hypothetical Stream is simply people trying to
solve these problems, unravel these knots . . . [But]
we are departing from Tiepolo. The initial tableaus
he had drawn are irrelevant.’39 Many of Forsythe’s
systems for generating movement are re-generative,
making variations on themselves like algorithms (the
dictionary definition of which can be found in
Forsythe’s notebooks from the early 1990s). The
first piece that used recursive algorithms was Alien
Action (1992).40 For example, a dancer might be
asked to generate a movement alphabet by conjur-
ing alphabet figures—small, short, gestural move-
ments that are intuitively associated with a letter.41
These become the basis of a phrase and the physical
configurations or operations that make up that
phrase become what the dancer’s body remembers.
They become the building blocks for further choreo-
graphy, duos, group dances, or become altered to
inform the choices dancers make in a structured
improvisational setting.
Forsythe’s fellowship with Libeskind’s work devel-
oped into a friendship and they gave talks to each
other’s dancers or students, sometimes publicly,
sometimes together. They never actually worked
together except for Libeskind ‘s project to celebrate
Groningen’s 950th anniversary in December, 1990,
‘Marking the City Boundaries’.42 Libeskind was
appointed in the Spring of 1989 to draw up a
master plan for his proposal to mark the city’s
boundaries, which he called The Books of Gronin-
gen, with ‘emblems whose marks outline the spiri-
tual destiny of the City’. Nine signs for the city
were related to the letters of its old name, Cruo-
ninga. Each letter of that name was linked to a
muse and other themes, and assigned to a particular
site of the nine arranged clockwise around the city.
Forsythe was invited to design site ‘N’, with the
given characteristics being dance, mechanics,
3 pm, streets, red, flame, erato (Fig. 7).43 The
design is a long line of trees bent over so that they
gracefully arch over the canal, bending as if in a
permanent wind, or sheltering the canal, or even
like the arm en haut in ballet’s fourth position. The
design process was strikingly similar to what was
common in progressive architecture schools at the
time and included using the photocopier to abstract
drawings by changing their scale or making them
scaleless, and drawing with a knife and then
scrunching the paper from the sides to create
form.44
The relationship between Libeskind’s End Space
and Forsythe’s work of the late 1980s and early
1990s, especially Limb’s Theorem, is based on a
similar set of concerns and perceived crises. Both
artists worked within the highly formal constructions

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within their respective disciplines and with highly
developed geometric sensibilities. The result in
both cases is very complex spatially. In Enemy in
the Figure and Limb’s Theorem the effect on move-
ment of posing such questions as how ballet puts
steps together and the formal structures behind
that construction, helps produce thrilling and
radical work that is still, though, recognisably bal-
letic even as it drags that art form close to its own
dissolution. Baudoin and Gilpin in their essay cited
earlier use the term disequilibrium but go farther
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Number 4
to state that Forsythe’s choreography is ‘the concen- Figure 7. Sketch for
trated, almost meditative act of finding those points ‘The Books of
Groningen’ (1990) from
where the balance is lost and the fall begins. This
Forsythe’s notebook
state reveals what is always in the process of disap- (‘number 33’) circa
pearing; the dancing thereby highlights the conti- 1990, #William
nuous vanishing moments of movement.’45 But Forsythe; used with
Forsythe’s ‘deconstruction’ of ballet can be over- permission.
stated, especially in the theoretically heady days of
the late 1980s and early 1990s. For the movement
is not primarily about disequilibrium, violence
versus beauty or discord over harmony. The most
interesting thing is what holds the movement
together, what happens between movements, and
that is based in classical ballet. Forsythe understands
his responsibility as choreographer to set the limits
for improvisation and to make the different
elements that the dancers generate cohere into a
performance, just as Libeskind’s drawings are coher-
ent though made up of fragments. Forsythe’s most
profound connection to Libeskind is not in the
formal vocabulary but in starting with geometry
and drawing, from which they subsequently devise
similar methods.
Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges the support of a
CRF/RSE Visiting Research Fellowship which allowed
him to return to his work on dance. He was a guest
in the spring of 2003 of the dADI (Dipartimento di
Teorie e Pratiche delle Arti e del Disegno Industriale)
at the IUAV in Venice. The research for this article
also had the support in 2004 of an award under
the UK’s AHRB Small Grants in the Creative and
Performing Arts.
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Notes and references
1. This was later reprinted in PARALLAX (Frankfurt,
Städtische Bühnen Frankfurt, Ballett Frankfurt,
November 1989). The publisher is William Forsythe
and the editors Patricia Baudoin and Heidi Gilpin. The
five articles in volume one include, in addition to
Baudoin and Gilpin’s, a selection from Libeskind’s
End Space, and an article about Libeskind’s drawings
by R.E. Somol. On the cover was a reproduction of
Libeskind’s Micromegas, ‘Vertical Horizon’, 1980. No
subsequent editions of PARALLAX were published.
Gilpin pursues her argument in ‘Aberrations of
Gravity’, in Any, vol. 1, No. 5 (March/April, 1994),
pp. 50 –55; and, ‘Wo die Balance Schwindet
und das Unfertige Beginnt’, in Parkett, Nr. 45
(1995), pp. 12– 17. The original article has most
recently been reprinted in G. Siegmund, ed., William
Forsythe. Denken in Bewegung (Berlin, Henschel
Verlag, 2004).
2. The complete list of pieces performed is: Impressing
the Czar (1988), Time Cycle (1979), Step-Text (1984),
Love Songs (1979), Artifact (1984), Behind the China
Dogs (1988), die Befragung des Robert Scott (1986),
and Enemy in the Figure (1989).
3. R. Sulcas, ‘William Forsythe: The Poetry of Disappear-
ance and the Great Tradition’, Dance Theatre Journal,
9, 1 (Summer 1991), p. 7.
4. Ibid., pp. 4–7, 32 –33.
5. The reasons for this are no doubt complex but I find
the following compelling: ‘Dance has largely
divided itself into two spheres—the classical and the
modern, [and] the presence of two mainstream
forms has meant . . . that classical choreographers
and dancers have not even had to conceive of
integrating into their work the doubts that any
perpetuator of an inherited art must feel in
relation to the past and the present.’ R. Sulcas, ibid.,
pp. 4–7, 32 –33.
6. Daniel Libeskind, End Space: An Exhibition at the
Architectural Association (London, The Architectural
Association, 1980).
7. ‘That light became the primary player in the piece . . . The
entire stage becomes a lighting instrument. . . . And
the wall, which divides in the middle of the stage,
basically reflects light or obscures light. The whole
stage is a big spotlight. This lighting is the architecture
of the piece and creates a projected architecture.
The piece does not exist without this light.’ William
Forsythe. Seeing your finger as a line, interview by
Christopher Cook for BBC Radio 3, broadcast 14
March, 1999; with Deborah Bull, William Forsythe,
Daniel Libeskind, Ann Nugent, Roslyn Sulcas. (The
Ballett Frankfurt had performed at Sadler’s Wells
Theatre, London, November, 1998.)
8. Heidi Gilpin, ed., Texts for the Preparation of “Limb’s
Theorem” and for General Work and Play (unpub-
lished, dated March 2, 1990). The complete contents
comprise selections from: Gregory Ulmer, ‘The Object
of Post-Criticism’, in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-
Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Washington,
Bay Press, 1983); Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Post-
modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge; Jürgen
Habermas, ‘Modernity—An Incomplete Project’, in
The Anti-Aesthetic (op. cit.); Gaston Bachelard, The
Poetics of Space (New York, Orion Press, 1964);
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
(third edition, New York, Macmillan, 1958); Aldo
Rossi, ‘Fragments’; pages on how to construct per-
spectival drawings from a German book on drafting;
Patricia Baudoin and Heidi Gilpin, ‘Proliferation and
Perfect Disorder: William Forsythe and the Archi-
tecture of Disappearance’ in Parallax (Frankfurt,
Städtische Bühnen Frankfurt, Ballett Frankfurt,
November, 1989); Barbara Johnson, ‘Nothing Fails
Like Success’ in Parallax (Frankfurt, Städtische
Bühnen Frankfurt, Ballett Frankfurt, November,

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1989); Elizabeth Dempster, ‘Women Writing the Body:
Let’s Watch a Little How She Dances’, in Grafts: Fem-
inist Cultural Criticism, ed., Susan Sheridan (London/
New York, Verso, 1988); Kent Bloomer and Charles
Moore, Body, Memory and Architecture (New
Haven/London, Yale University Press, 1977); Michel
Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Dis-
course on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith
(New York, Pantheon, 1972); Susan Sontag, ‘The Aes-
thetics of Silence’ and ‘Against Interpretation’ in A
Susan Sontag Reader (New York, Vintage Books,
1983); Bernard Tschumi, ‘De-, Dis-, Ex-’, in Remaking
History. Dia Art Foundation Discussions in Contempor-
ary Culture, no. 4, Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani,
eds (Seattle, Bay Press, 1989); Craig Owens, ‘The
Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism’,
in The Anti-Aesthetic (op. cit.); and Frederic Jameson,
‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ in The
Anti-Aesthetic (op. cit.).
9. Kathryn Bennets, long-term ballet mistress with the
Ballett Frankfurt, telephone conversation with the
author, 24 July, 2003.
10. For a general discussion of this topic see my
article, ‘Engendering and Composing Movement:
William Forsythe and the Ballett Frankfurt’,
The Journal of Architecture, 3 (Summer, 1998),
pp. 135 –146.
11. ‘A Conversation between Dana Caspersen, William
Forsythe and the architect Daniel Libeskind’ at the
Royal Geographical Society, London, 7 March, 1997.
Peter Cook substituted for an ill Libeskind. See also
M. Figgis (Director), ‘Just Dancing Around?: Bill For-
sythe’, Channel Four Version, Euphoria Films, 50’59”,
1996; broadcast 27 December, 1996, Channel Four,
19.30.
12. R. Sulcas, ‘William Forsythe: Channels for the Desire
to Dance’, Dance Magazine, LXIX, 1 (September,
1995), p. 52.
363
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Number 4
13. R. Sulcas, ‘Kinetic Isometries: William Forsythe on his
“continuous rethinking of the ways in which move-
ment can be engendered and composed”’, Dance
International (Summer, 1995), p. 9.
14. Interview with the author, 17 April, 2004, Frankfurt
am Main.
15. Daniel Libeskind, End Space, op. cit., p. 18.
16. Ibid., p. 24.
17. Ibid., p. 24.
18. Ibid., p. 20. (Also quoted by Forsythe at the interview
with the author, 17 April, 2004, Frankfurt am Main.)
19. Ibid., p. 26.
20. S. Driver and the editors of Ballet Review, ‘A Conver-
sation with William Forsythe’, Ballet Review, 18.1
(Spring, 1990), p. 96.
21. Patricia Baudoin and Heidi Gilpin, ‘Proliferation and
Perfect Disorder: William Forsythe and the Architecture
of Disappearance’, in Il Disegno che Non Fa il Ritratto:
Danza, Architettura, Notazioni, a cura di Marinella
Guatterini, Volume II (I Teatri di Reggio Emilia, 1989),
p. 74.
22. R. Sulcas, ‘Desire to Dance’, op. cit., p. 56.
23. Sulcas, Ibid., p. 56.
24. Kaiser, Paul, ‘Dance Geometry. William Forsythe in
Dialogue with Paul Kaiser.’ Performance Research, 2
(1999), p. 65.
25. Caspersen and Forsythe, interview with the author,
London, 1997; and, Caspersen, interview with the
author, Brussels, 1999.
26. Daniel Libeskind, End Space, op. cit., pp. 22 –24. This
long quotation was picked out of End Space by For-
sythe and read aloud during our interview in Frankfurt
am Main, 17 April, 2004.
27. Ibid., p. 30. This was quoted to me by Forsythe
during our interview in Frankfurt am Main, 17 April,
2004 and earlier by him in my interview with Dana
Caspersen and William Forsythe, 25 March, 1997,
London.
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28. Daniel Libeskind, interview with the author, 20 May,
2004, New York City.
29. William Forsythe. Seeing your finger as a line., op. cit.
30. The notebooks are not currently available to research-
ers. The author has had access to them during his
numerous visits to Frankfurt.
31. William Forsythe. Seeing your finger as a line., op. cit.
32. ‘A Conversation between Dana Caspersen, William
Forsythe and the architect Daniel Libeskind’, op. cit.
33. William Forsythe. Seeing your finger as a line., op. cit.
34. Nik Haffner, ‘Forsythe und die Medien’, Tanzdrama
Magazin, Köln, Nr. 511, Heft 2 (2000), pp. 30 –35.
The English translations are taken from the Ballett
Frankfurt website.
35. Ibid.
36. ‘William Forsythe: Improvisation Technologies’, eds
ZKM Karlsruhe and German Dance Archive, Cologne,
CD-ROM, 1999/2003.
37. Ibid.
38. Nik Haffner, ‘Forsythe und die Medien’, op. cit., pp.
30 –35.
39. William Forsythe. Seeing your finger as a line., op. cit.
40. Paul Kaiser, ‘Dance Geometry.’, op. cit., p. 68.
41. D. Caspersen, ‘It Starts From Any Point: Bill and the
Frankfurt Ballett’, in Choreography and Dance, vol. 5,
part 3 (2000), pp. 25 –39.
42. ‘Marking the City Boundaries’, in Art & Design Profile
No 24, in Andreas Papadakis, ed., Art & Design,
Vol. 7, 1/2 (1992).
43. The other sites were designed by, respectively, art and
architectural historian Kurt Forster, economist Akira
Asada, dramatist Heiner Müller, visual artist Thom
Puckey, visual artist Leonhard Lapin, Libeskind,
architect John Hejduk, architect Funnar Daan, and
philosopher Paul Virilio.
44. As described by Forsythe in interview with the author,
17 April, 2004, Frankfurt am Main.
45. Patricia Baudoin and Heidi Gilpin, op. cit., p. 75.
Sources
Valerie A. Briginshaw, Dance, Space and Subjectivity
(Basingstoke, New York City, Palgrave, 2001).
William Forsythe, interview with the author, Frankfurt am
Main, 17 April, 2004.
William Forsythe: Improvisation Technologies, eds, ZKM
Karlsruhe and German Dance Archive Cologne: CD-
ROM, 1999/2003.
Paul Kaiser, ‘Dance Geometry. William Forsythe in Dialogue
with Paul Kaiser’, Performance Research, 2 (1999),
pp. 64 –71.
Daniel Libeskind, End Space: An Exhibition at the Architec-
tural Association (London, The Architectural Associ-
ation, 1980).
Daniel Libeskind, interview with the author, New York City,
May, 2004.
Thomas McManus, ‘Enemy von innen’, in Gerald Sieg-
mund, ed., Denken in Bewegung (Berlin, Henschel
Verlag, 2004).
Johannes Odenthal, ‘Danced Space. Conflicts of
Modern Dance Theatre’, Daidalos (15 June, 1992),
pp. 38 –47.
William Forsythe: Reggio Emilia Festival Danza, in four
volumes (Reggio Emilia, I Teatri di Reggio Emilia,
23– 28 September, 1989). Volume I. l Designo che
Non Fa il Ritratto: Danza, Architettura, Notazioni, a
cura di Marinella Guatterini. Volume II. Itinerario, a
cura di Marinella Guatterini. Volume III. Sulle Proprie
Tracce, a cura di Marinella Guatterini; Positions di
Patricia Baudoin e Heidi Gilpin. Volume IV. I Teatri
di Reggio Emilia, 1989. (All English translations are
from the programmes themselves.)
Gilpin, Heidi, ed., ‘Texts for the Preparation of Limb’s
Theorem and for General Work and Play’: dated 02
March, 1990; unpublished.
William Forsythe, Seeing your finger as a line, interview by
Christopher Cook for BBC Radio 3, broadcast 14
March, 1999.