The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude

Music

Franz Schubert
(Allegro molto vivace, from Symphony No. 9 in C Major, D. 944, “The Great”, 1825-1826)

Choreography

William Forsythe

Staging

Stefanie Arndt

Costume Design

Stephen Galloway

Lighting Design

William Forsythe

Scenic Design

William Forsythe

Duration

11 minutes

Premiere

January 20, 1996
Frankfurt Ballet

PNB Premiere

March 13, 2015

The 2015 PNB premiere of William Forsythe’s The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude was generously underwritten by Jeffrey & Susan Brotman.

Set to the final movement from Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 9, The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude displays all the traditional accoutrements of classical dance: tutus, point shoes, virtuosity, lyricism, and a friendly display of formal manners between the sexes. Originally the last part of the full-length Six Counter Points, the pas de cinq (three women, two men) provides a breathtaking display of classical technique that serves to illustrate the way in which Forsythe sees the ballet vocabulary as part of a range of choreographic possibilities—distilled here to its purest and most brilliant form. An affectionate homage to both Petipa and Balanchine in its courtly partnering conventions, compositional structure (solo variations set amongst pas de deux, pas de trois, and ensemble sections), and speedy, precise allegro work, The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude nonetheless belongs utterly to our time in its overt celebration of the dancers’ ability to make technical difficulty into a triumph of physical mastery and in its self-aware embodiment of a whole tradition of dance.

Notes by Roslyn Sulcas, courtesy of Forsythe Productions. Used by permission.

Artist Biographies

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 theater 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’s choreography and his companies’ performances have won overwhelming audience acclaim and the most prestigious awards the field has to offer, 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.

After the closure of the Frankfurt Ballet in 2004, Forsythe established a new, more independent ensemble­­­­—The Forsythe Company—founded with the support of the states of Saxony and Hesse, the cities of Dresden and Frankfurt am Main, and private sponsors. Forsythe’s most recent creations are developed and performed exclusively by the new company while his previous work is prominently featured in the repertoire of virtually every major ballet company in the world. Forsythe’s choreographic thinking has engaged with and contributed to the most significant international artistic currents of our time, from performance and visual arts to architecture and interactive multimedia.