✦ Who He Is ✦
William Forsythe trained in classical ballet in the United States before joining the Stuttgart Ballet in 1973, the same year that founding director John Cranko died; it was Cranko's successor, Marcia Haydée, who encouraged Forsythe's earliest choreographic work there. In 1984 he was appointed director of Ballett Frankfurt, a position he held for two decades, transforming a mid-sized German company into one of the most influential forces in contemporary dance. When Ballett Frankfurt was dissolved by the city in 2004, Forsythe founded The Forsythe Company, which operated until 2015; he has since worked on a project basis while continuing to license and stage his repertory with ballet companies worldwide.
Forsythe's central project has been an interrogation of classical ballet's own rules — its alignment, its geometry, its relationship to music — carried out using dancers trained in that same classical vocabulary. Rather than rejecting ballet technique, he pushes it past its textbook limits: off-center balances, joints and hips displaced from "correct" alignment, and phrasing that can seem to argue with, rather than illustrate, its score.
Signature Works
In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated (1987)
Created for the Paris Opera Ballet to a pulsing electronic score by Thom Willems, this remains Forsythe's most widely performed work and a repertory staple from the Royal Ballet to Boston Ballet. Read the full profile →
Artifact (1984)
Forsythe's first major work as director of Ballett Frankfurt, a large-scale piece that interrupts its own choreography with spoken text and abrupt blackouts, questioning how audiences construct meaning from movement.
Steptext (1985)
A tautly structured quartet, danced in silence and to fragments of Bach, that became a testing ground for the off-balance partnering and interrupted phrasing that would define his mature style.
One Flat Thing, Reproduced (2000)
Twenty dancers and twenty tables in tight, fast, interlocking formation — later the subject of an influential motion-capture documentation project analyzing its choreographic structure.
Style & Method
Starting in 1994, Forsythe worked with researchers to document the geometric principles he used to generate movement — points, lines, and planes drawn from and around the body — released in 1999 as Improvisation Technologies, a CD-ROM training tool. It became required study in dance schools well beyond ballet, and it captures something central to his approach: choreography as a generative system that dancers can learn and extend, rather than a fixed sequence of steps to be copied.
This has made his work unusually portable. Because the vocabulary is built from classical technique pushed to its edges, ballet-trained companies around the world can stage it convincingly, which is a large part of why Forsythe's repertory — rather than a Forsythe company — has become the primary way most audiences encounter his choreography today.
Beyond the Stage: Choreographic Objects
Alongside his stage work, Forsythe has spent decades developing what he calls "choreographic objects" — installations, sculptures, and participatory pieces that ask a viewer's body, rather than a trained dancer's, to generate movement in response to a structured environment. These have been shown in museum and gallery settings internationally, extending his lifelong interest in choreography as a set of transferable organizing principles well beyond the theatre and beyond dancers as its only possible performers.
Legacy
Forsythe is widely credited with opening the door between the ballet establishment and the experimental dance world of the late 20th century. Choreographers who came up watching or dancing his work, including Crystal Pite — who danced with Ballett Frankfurt from 1996 to around 2001 — carried his structural rigor and off-balance physicality into the next generation of contemporary ballet.
That line of influence runs through several other choreographers profiled on this site: Nederlands Dans Theater's house style and the deconstructed classical vocabulary pursued by younger choreographers alike both owe a visible debt to the structural language Forsythe spent the 1980s and 1990s developing at Ballett Frankfurt.