Ballet Two Ways

The ballet equivalent of a visit from Halley’s comet takes place in the Twin Cities this month. American Ballet Theatre, arguably the best classical ballet company in the United States, performs at Northrop on March 13. Two days later, William Forsythe, a leading avant-garde ballet choreographer, brings his company to the Walker’s McGuire Theater. What’s more, it’s been a decade since ABT’s last local performance and nearly twice that since Forsythe has shown work here.

ABT, founded in 1940 and based in New York City, has no single choreographic vision, but instead performs works from all eras of ballet, from Swan Lake to Mark Morris. To do this, ABT has to have dancers of incredible skill and flexibility. If a dancer excels at the ballet taught in thousands of schools around the world, he or she could end up in ABT—but that barely scratches the surface of these performers’ abilities. Consider how technical mastery is just the foundation of a great pianist’s skills, and you’ll get the idea. ABT’s dancers can not only do the extremely difficult steps the classical ballet canon demands, they can reach beyond the steps. Plenty of great dance happens on the edges and outside of ballet’s exacting form, but when that form is fulfilled, the result is sublime—men and women elevated beyond themselves, beyond the limits of the body. “Our mission is to create, preserve, and present the best in classical dance,” says Kevin McKenzie, ABT artistic director. “We do the classics and we do new work. In both cases it’s our duty to make them relevant to today’s audiences.” In the Twin Cities, ABT performs Mark Morris’s playful Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes, Twyla Tharp’s Sinatra Suite, Kurt Jooss’ 1932 antiwar ballet The Green Table, and a classical pas de deux.

Where the dance from ABT works essentially as emotional metaphor—the dancers’ struggles and victories are our struggles and victories in love and life—Forsythe’s work investigates the forms and rules of ballet. Forsythe, an expatriate American choreographer who directed Germany’s Ballett Frankfurt in the twenty years before its recent demise, uses classical ballet as the vehicle for the avant-garde art that’s more typical of modern dance. Dana Casperson, Forsythe’s partner, a leading dancer in the company, and a Minneapolis native, says that Forsythe thinks of ballet as “an intricate, useful set of ideas about dynamic motion, an infinitely malleable language of energetic relationship.” If that sounds complicated, think of it this way: Forsythe explores ballet the same way many modern poets are exploring formal poetry, their explorations influenced by recent insights from cultural theory.

The work is intellectual, but not dry. On the contrary, Forsythe’s intellectual investigation depends on the body and its changing moods. His “choreographic interests are quite wide-ranging,” Casperson says. Of the four pieces the company is presenting, all chamber works for a small number of dancers, Casperson says, “The works reflect some of the different kinds of thinking that we have been engaged in—the intricate, the torqued, the playful, the torrential.” Expect movement like thought and thought like movement, and don’t count out beauty and joy. Says Casperson, “In our work, we have been thinking about the classical as a conduit for the ecstatic.”

ABT and Forsythe aren’t opposites in the ballet world—ABT has previously performed Forsythe’s work. This isn’t an occasion for comparing two different directions for ballet, but for celebrating a great art form. As Casperson says, Forsythe “just plain loves ballet.” This week, he won’t be the only one. ABT: March 13, Northrop, 84 SE Church St., Mpls., 612-624-2345 ; Forsythe: March 15–16, Walker, 1750 Hennepin Ave., Mpls., 612-375-7600

Reach Lightsey Darst at lightseyd@msn.com.