✦ Origins ✦
William Forsythe created Blake Works I in 2016 for the Paris Opera Ballet, staged at the Palais Garnier, nearly three decades after his landmark In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated for the same company. It is set to a sequence of songs by the British musician James Blake, drawn largely from his 2016 album The Colour in Anything, rather than the abstract electronic scores Forsythe had long favored with longtime composer Thom Willems. By the time of the commission, Forsythe had spent several years working primarily outside large ballet companies, through his own Forsythe Company and various installation and film projects, and the Paris Opera Ballet commission marked a notable return to making work for a large, classically trained ensemble on a traditional proscenium stage.
The piece marks a notable shift in register within Forsythe's own body of work: where earlier pieces pulled classical vocabulary apart at its joints, Blake Works I moves back toward legible, musically melodic phrasing built substantially on pointe work, while still carrying Forsythe's characteristic speed, off-center balances, and structural clarity. Where Blake's songs are themselves built from spare, electronic-tinged production and an unusually exposed vocal line, Forsythe's choreography answers with a comparable clarity of line, favoring clean, legible shapes over the layered, sometimes chaotic ensemble writing found in some of his earlier company work.
Structure
The ballet is built as a suite of contrasting sections keyed to individual Blake songs, alternating full-ensemble passages with duets and smaller groupings. The choreography stays close to each song's form and lyric mood, giving the piece a clearer emotional and musical throughline than the more abstract, structurally exploratory language of Forsythe's 1980s and 1990s work. Costuming and lighting remain spare throughout, keeping focus on the dancing itself. The Paris Opera Ballet's own dancers, trained within one of the most codified classical traditions in the world, brought a particular clarity of line to the premiere, and Forsythe has spoken more broadly of his long-standing interest in how a company's own institutional style shapes the choreography made for it.
Reception & Legacy
Blake Works I was widely praised as a welcome, accessible return to pointe-shoe-driven choreography from a choreographer often associated with dismantling classical technique, and it quickly entered international repertory, including stagings by companies such as Boston Ballet. It is frequently discussed alongside In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated as a way of tracing the arc of Forsythe's own relationship to classical ballet vocabulary, from deconstruction toward a more melodic reconciliation with it. The work's success also prompted Forsythe to extend it: later companion pieces set to further Blake material followed, and the original work is now commonly referred to with the numeral in its title to distinguish it from those related pieces, underscoring how productive this particular pairing of choreographer and musician proved to be.
Seen alongside In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated, the two works bracket nearly thirty years of Forsythe's relationship to classical vocabulary, offering an unusually clear before-and-after case study in how far a choreographer's own language can travel without ever fully leaving its point of origin.
See Also
Read the full profile of choreographer William Forsythe, and compare this work with his earlier In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated.