✦ Origins ✦
William Forsythe made Artifact in 1984, shortly after being appointed director of Ballett Frankfurt, and it premiered there on December 5 of that year. It was his first full-length work for the company he would go on to run for two decades, and at close to two hours across four parts, with a cast that has run as large as 68 dancers in later productions, it announced his directorship on an ambitious scale. Its musical core came from Eva Crossman-Hecht, who had been Forsythe's rehearsal pianist: she built a partly improvised score around Ferruccio Busoni's piano transcription of the Chaconne from Bach's Partita No. 2 in D minor. Forsythe supplied additional music, sound collage, and text for other sections himself, alongside designing the piece's sets, lighting, and costumes.
Forsythe has since described Artifact as "a story ballet without a story" and, elsewhere, as a kind of thank-you note to George Balanchine - an ode to classical ballet's own history staged through a choreographic language that pulls that history apart in real time.
What Makes It Distinct
Artifact is built around two speaking roles unheard of in classical ballet: a "Woman in Historical Dress," costumed to evoke Marie Antoinette, and a "Man with a Megaphone," whose spoken text punctuates and comments on the dancing rather than narrating it. The piece ends with the Man with the Megaphone announcing "step outside" - a line Forsythe has called a deliberate riddle, given the term's double meaning in ballet vocabulary.
Its most disruptive device is theatrical rather than choreographic: during the second part, the curtain repeatedly crashes to the floor mid-phrase while the music keeps playing, then rises again moments later to reveal the dancers rearranged and the lighting changed, as if a piece of film had been sharply cut. Combined with abrupt blackouts elsewhere in the work, the effect is to keep interrupting the choreography's own continuity, forcing an audience to continually reconstruct what it is watching rather than simply follow it.
Legacy
The New York Times later called Artifact "a manifesto" of Forsythe's intent to investigate and extend the boundaries of ballet technique and convention, describing it as still an ur-text in his body of work. It set the terms for the two decades of large-scale, structurally daring pieces Forsythe would go on to make for Ballett Frankfurt, and a condensed version, Artifact Suite, has allowed the piece's central ideas to travel to companies that could not mount the full four-part original.
The full work has continued to be restaged internationally, including a 2017 production by Boston Ballet - the first full-length Forsythe work performed by an American company - which launched a five-year collaboration between Forsythe and Boston Ballet. Alongside In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated, it remains one of the clearest demonstrations of how thoroughly Forsythe's Ballett Frankfurt years reshaped what a ballet company could ask of its dancers and its audience alike.
See Also
Read the full profile of choreographer William Forsythe.