An American dream in dance
Dance
The Barre Project Sadler’s Wells Digital Studio, online
Blessed with one of the dance world’s most subtle and sophisticated minds, the American choreographer William Forsythe has never taken the safe or obvious route, and his latest endeavour shows that at the ripe age of 71 he is still taking risks and turning unexpected corners. The fruit of the pandemic’s lockdown restrictions, The Barre Project is his latest creation: a 25-minute work dreamed up at Forsythe’s home in Vermont, and rehearsed and performed via the miracle of Zoom by four dancers in California.
Its theme has no direct relation to the virus or the attendant tragedies: what interests Forsythe is exploring the significance and use of that horizontal pole that runs around every dance studio, serving as a support for the first part of the morning class, on which every dancer builds their technique. The barre has made an appearance in several other modern dance pieces – notably Jerome Robbins’s Afternoon of a Faun and Harald Lander’s Études
– but Forsythe’s may be the first to ask us to focus on its role, not as something clutched or even held, but something that functions as a stable point of reference, a borderline and a guide.
Driven by James Blake’s pulsating dubstep score, New York City Ballet star Tiler Peck responds to the barre as though it were an electric wire, her sharply angled turns and lightning footwork stretching the classical vocabulary to its limits. This is fast-burn dance, explosive in energy and precise in its complexity: it’s astonishing to learn from an accompanying interview that Forsythe regards himself as “a glacial thinker”, because everything here seems born in the white heat of the moment.
Peck’s is a fascinating talent, and this is a star turn for her. Dancing without pointe shoes, she rules as the ballerina and sets the pace, leaving the three men (Lex Ishimoto, Roman Mejia and Brooklyn Mack, all excellent) to play her dutifully scurrying courtiers, their brief solos and contrapuntal duos covering for her occasional exits.
Peck’s physical type is far from that of the elegant gazelle so beloved of Balanchine, the master chef of her home company. Short and powerful, she has a bullet-proof, high-octane style in which everything is lucidly defined and vividly projected even across a flat computer screen. It’s unsurprising that as a sideline to her ballet career, Peck has enjoyed considerable success in Broadway shows and Radio City Music Hall spectaculars: she blazes with pizzazz. There’s no messing.
Forsythe has clearly been inspired by Peck’s can-do energy both on and off the barre, but he hasn’t stopped there. In a central meditative interlude coloured by Blake’s song Lullaby for My Insomniac, he taps into a more sinuously seductive aspect of her personality. As self-absorbed as a queenly cat, she licks herself and lazily stretches the elastic in her limbs.
The final image, however, is one of human contact, as the hands of the four dancers lie on the barre and fold gently over each other, mutually reassuring. It makes a touching and surprisingly anticlimactic climax: the barre as the dancer’s silent friend. This may be Forsythe-lite – a jeu d’esprit in comparison to the more complex statements of his days at the helm of Ballet Frankfurt. But its clarity and force are irresistible.
This is fast-burning work, explosive in energy and precise in its complexity