WILLIAM FORSYTHE

As an American working internationally for the last thirty years, William Forsythe is recognized as one of the world’s foremost choreographers. His work is celebrated for reorienting the practice of ballet from its identification with classical repertoire into a dynamic 21st-century art form.

Raised and principally trained in New York, Forsythe arrived on the European dance scene in his early 20s as a dancer and eventually as Resident Choreographer of the Stuttgart Ballet. At the same time he also created new works for ballet companies in Munich, The Hague, London, Basel, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Paris, New York, and San Francisco. In 1984, he began a 20-year tenure as Director of the Frankfurt Ballet where he created many of the most celebrated dance theatre works of our time, such as «The Loss of Small Detail» (1991) in collaboration with composer Thom Willems and designer Issey Miyake. Other key works from the Frankfurt Ballet years include «Gänge» (1982), «Artifact» (1984), «Impressing the Czar» (1988), «Limb’s Theorem» (1990), «A L I E/N A(C)TION» (1992), «Eidos:Telos» (1995), «Endless House» (1999) and «Kammer/Kammer» (2000). Forsythe won the most prestigious awards such as the Bessie (1988, 1998, 2004), Laurence Olivier Award (1992, 1999), Commandeur des Arts et Lettres (1999), the German Distinguished Service Cross (1997) and the Wexner Prize (2002). He has been chosen as Choreographer Of The Year several times by the international critics’ survey.

In 1994, Forsythe virtually reinvented the teaching of dance with his pioneering and award-winning computer application «Improvisation Technologies : A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye» which is used by professional companies, dance conservatories, universities, post-graduate architecture programs and secondary schools. As an educator, Forsythe is regularly invited to lecture and give workshops at major universities and cultural institutions internationally. He served as the first Mentor in Dance in the inaugural cycle of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative and currently co-directs and teaches, with Frédéric Flamand, Wayne Mc Gregor and Angelin Preljocaj, in the Dance Apprentice Network aCross Europe (D.A.N.C.E.) program. Forsythe has been awarded an honorary fellowship from the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance in London and an honorary doctorate from the Juilliard School in New York.

After the closure of the Frankfurt Ballet in 2004, Forsythe established a new, more independent ensemble – The Forsythe Company.