From the Vault:
William Forsythe and Lyon Opera Ballet Play With Ballet’s Lines

Lucile Goupillon-Villefort

Classical, neo-classical, or contemporary dance? William Forsythe is hard to pin to any one style. The American choreographer, known for deconstructing classical technique, has never stopped playing with the ballet idiom, consistently testing its limits and possibilities. Researcher Lucile Goupillon-Villefort examines Forsythe’s reworking of classical lines through two photo series documenting Lyon Opera Ballet’s performances of The Second Detail and One Flat Thing, Reproduced. These images bear witness not only to the development of Forsythe’s idiosyncratic style, but also to the Lyon-based company’s evolution toward contemporary dance.

American choreographer William Forsythe has been credited by critics with “renewing ballet” and “deconstructing ‘classical’ dance.” Described by some as a “genius artist” and by others as a “genius opportunist,” over the past four decades he has become one of the most prominent figures in the dance world. Forsythe's prolific body of work draws on and combines a wide range of choreographic and theoretical influences, resulting in an exceptionally diverse repertory. While some works are abstract and firmly rooted in the ballet idiom, others bring together dance, singing and theatre. Elsewhere, Forsythe interrogates musical structures or pursues distinctly contemporary approaches to choreographic research and movement.

The Second Detail, created in 1991 for the National Ballet of Canada, is one of Forsythe’s most “classical” works. Set to a score by Thom Willems, it is often associated with the neo-classical tradition. This selection of photographs by Laurent Argueyrolles documenting Lyon Opera Ballet dancers performing the piece demonstrates the longstanding bond between Forsythe and the Lyon-based company. 

Forsythe’s earlier work, Steptext, also entered the Lyon Opera Ballet repertory during their 1995–96 season. The piece was responsible for the choreographer’s first major breakthrough in France, and was performed in Lyon only a few months before the resounding triumph of Forsythe’s seminal 1987 work In the Middle Somewhat Elevated at the Paris Opera.

At the time, Forsythe was the artistic director of Frankfurt Ballet, a position he had held since 1984, and choreographed regularly for world-renowned companies. Yet his works had received only lukewarm reactions from French audiences. It was his partnership with Lyon Opera Ballet, and the combination of his interest in the resources and possibilities of classical ballet with the company’s expansion into contemporary dance, that proved instrumental in establishing his work in France.

These photographs of Lyon Opera Ballet’s restaging of The Second Detail highlight Forsythe’s preoccupation with ballet aesthetics, and in particular his interest in the more or less pronounced alteration of its codes.

The first notable element is the stark simplicity of the costumes—grey unitards, leotards and tights by Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake—which enhance the visibility of the ballet technique embedded in the dancers’ bodies. Lines, figures and steps from classical ballet are highly legible, yet are stretched to an extreme degree or punctuated by unexpected breaks. An interest in using the dancers’ hypermobility to explore a full range of movement verging on distortion is also evident.

Forsythe’s interest in playing with form is also visible in his alternation between turned-out and turned-in positions, which twist steps and curl bodies, introducing numerous deviations from the ballet norm. In addition, his staging of weight transfers, enhanced by pointework, aims to intensify the play between being on and off balance, once again pushing beyond classical forms. Frequently, dancers travel on pointe in asymmetrical stances or stand on pointe outside the gravitational axis.

Throughout his career, Forsythe has sought to test the plasticity and resistance of the classical ballet vocabulary. Some of his pieces push it to the point of exhaustion, until only a few identifiable features remain.

That’s the case with One Flat Thing, Reproduced, which he created in 2000. Added to the Lyon Opera Ballet’s repertory in 2004, the piece is often perceived as contemporary. Yet Forsythe himself describes it as highly classical, owing to its use of geometry and perspective.

This piece forms part of Forsythe’s ongoing investigation into classical ballet vocabulary as an ideal. As the perfect or absolute figure does not exist, classical material in Forsythe’s work becomes a pretext—a starting point for manipulation and improvisation. The resulting movements are playfully layered and transformed until their source material is almost erased. In these photographs, corresponding geometric forms and fleeting, inverted poses performed in unusual spaces reveal the presence and near-erasure of ballet’s foundations in Forsythe’s work.

Seen together, these photographic series shed light on the diversity of Forsythe’s body of work and the breadth of his artistic project. They also offer an opportunity to observe the parallel and mutually beneficial evolution of the choreographer’s work and the repertory of the Lyon Opera Ballet.

Lucile Goupillon-Villefort is a dancer and certified ballet instructor who has been teaching ballet in French conservatories for many years. She also holds a PhD in Arts, History and Theory from EHESS and defended her doctoral dissertation, William Forsythe, déconstruire et renouveler la danse classique (William Forsythe, deconstructing and renewing ballet) in 2021. She continues to interrogate what lies behind the logic of borrowing, circulating and hybridization in the various practices of 20th- and 21st-century ballet.

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