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Propositions for the Verge ~
William Forsythe’s Choreographic Objects

by Erin Manning

In Moving Memory

Living in time means living through memory. Memory, for Henri Bergson, is not something stored and subsequently recollected. It is the activation of the past in the present. Memory gives a body duration, creating a platform for a body to become an ecology of a multitude of durational times interwoven.

Memory and perception are of a different order yet inextricably linked, “always interpenetrat[ing] each other, […] always exchanging something of their substance as by a process of endosmosis” (Bergson, 1939: 67). When a dancer moves, the movement is implicit in her perception of it, which is itself part-memory. When we watch a dancer move, the movement perceived is already the memory of the previous movement coursing through it. Each movement is alive with a memory that activates the becoming-body. [17] This activation is not a memory of an actual movement: remember to remember a movement and move/perceive at the same time. The memory is a force of activation and stabilization ensconced in the presentness of discovering the feeling of movement again for the first time.

Take the walk. When we walk, each step is already virtually imbued with all previous walkings, all previous proprioceptive tendings and kinesthetic sensings. This virtual plenitude of experience and experimentation assures a metastability of balance, a sensual memory of how the ground touches the foot and the weight shifts as the body transfers from step to step. The memory of having-walked is not an activated memory per se: we are rarely thinking about walking while we walk. It is a memory on the edge of perception, sustaining the movement within its infinite range of potential metastabilities. This is a passive memory [18] active in the folds of the nowness of perception, its time-signature specious. The passive memory of the metastabilities garnered from a lifetime of walking can save us from a fall when the snowy ground suddenly turns to ice or when we almost-trip over the edge of the sidewalk.

In fact we have never been stable. To walk is to move with perception and its continual activation of a million stabilities and instabilities, rightings and unbalancings. Without the interweaving of the past in the present, we couldn’t simply get up and walk – each walking would have to be a relearning of moving through the tiny disjunctive equilibriums we call balance.

The walk becomes a habitual movement through the memory of having walked. We feel the more-than of its habitualness when we suddenly can’t right ourselves. A sore ankle takes the habit out of the walk. We find we have to tweak the metastabilities of our incipient movement toward new angles of comfort. But soon we get the hang of it and before we know it, the walk is walking us once more.

An incipient tendency toward taking a step is felt as a walk when the divergent metastabilities congeal into a singularity – a decisive turn. The flow of the walk now feels less like a stepping than a moving horizontality. Yet this horizontality, like the steps themselves, is composed of an infinity of microtendencies toward verticality, the most obvious being the verticality of the body itself in relation to the horizontal ground across which it moves. The walk: an almost-falling verticality transduced into an inclination for horizontality.

The walk’s unfolding as horizontality depends on finding within its quality of movement the doubleness of its point of virtual departure and arrival. This two-directional betweenness is what gives the movement its horizontalizing consistency. It is through the virtual interval of the walk’s preacceleration that walking is transformed from a step into a movement. [19]

After we have followed the lines of divergence beyond the turn, these lines must intersect again, not at the point from which we started, but rather at a virtual point, at a virtual image of the point of departure, which is itself located beyond the turn in experience; and which finally gives us the sufficient reason of the thing, the sufficient reason of the composite, the sufficient reason of the point of departure (Deleuze, 1988: 28-29).

The virtual image of the point of departure is akin to Forsythe’s idea of thinking-feeling the movement’s contribution to spacetimes of experience even after the displacement has taken place. We move through the future feeling present.

Memory is like having a vision in the future-past. Forsythe explains:

one of our methodologies had to do with identically remembering another person's variation, or sprays rather […] and building a kind of architecture of movement around it, but you [have] to keep seeing this other person dancing in order to perform it, so it [becomes] a way of having a vision. [20]

Memory is visionary in the sense of foresight: a seeing-with-before. Moving someone else’s moving while you’re watching them move is like feeling future movement. You are moving with the incipient future (the always nextness of movement) in the present passing. This is recollection at work. Recollecting is moving the future (the thought becoming memory) through the past in the present. Forsythe calls the experimentation with this recollection-in-movement dancing with “a cloud of form,” and describes it as a proprioceptive gathering of tendencies not actually reproduced but reactivated such that they can take form in relation to their already having taken place. Recollecting produces future memory, it creates visions for movement. Lived experience is the experience of fielding this visionariness of experience. Key to becoming visionary is to move through remarkable points, to catch decisive turns in the making.

One or More Rhythms?

 The taking-form of movement is rhythmic. Rhythm is another way of evoking the multiplicity of time-slips of experience in any given occasion. Rhythm is not added to movement from outside its taking form. Rhythm is its taking form. Because each rhythm is itself a duration, rhythm is what gives time to incipient movement, characterizing that singular movement’s in-timeness. This in-timeness is not a beat [21] or a measure but a quality of becoming that is co-terminous with the incipiency of the movement’s preaccelerationand the elasticity of its unfolding. Rhythm cuts across measure. It is akin to Forsythe’s sounding movement. It makes felt the microperceptual.

Choreography’s ecology is rhythmical. Choreography is composed of an infinity of slightly varying velocities, vibrations, sensations. These qualities are in and of matter, active in the transduction from force to form. These individuating qualities give specificity to the environment, inflecting the ways bodies move with and through it. The movement in turn creates time-volumes that populate the co-configuring atmosphere. Choreography, as Forsythe emphasizes, is not strictly about human bodies. It is about the creation of spacetimes of experience.

Rhythmically, movement evolves in ecological concert with the becoming-environment. Rhythm signs duration, lending duration its time-signature. Bergson insists: duration has rhythm. [22] This virtual rhythm affects how the event’s time-signature is modulated in its unfolding. The time-signature of a jump is vastly different from the time-signature of a float. The jump’s time-signature or rhythm is felt on the verge of experience in the feeling of an inclination whereas the rhythm of a float is experienced in a buoyancy verging on sinking. The feeling for duration experienced through these different time-signatures is the rhythm of their mattering. Rhythm plays on this verging of experience that gives quality to matter. It adds a quality to experience’s taking form. Rhythm textures a becoming-form, bringing a singular quality to its individuation. Rhythm makes felt the singularity of lived experience. Choreographic practice in an open ecology of biogrammatic endurance is rhythm in motion.

The becoming of Continuity

Whitehead writes: “There is a becoming of continuity, but no continuity of becoming” (Whitehead, 1978: 35). A proposition calls forth a becoming of continuity even while it resists the continuity of becoming. Embedded in the actual occasion and immanent to its unfolding, propositions call forth a tendency within the occasion to open itself toward a singularity of expression. Once admitted into experience, there is no longer becoming: the event is absolutely what it has become.

Proposition:  Execute a standard épaulement. [23]

Figure 4 Épaulement

Now recreate the feeling of the épaulement but from behind. “Put your eyes in the back of your head – you can literally invert the épaulement.” (Forsythe) [24] This is a proposition for the becoming of continuity. Just thinking about it, you feel a slight twisting of your torso and a pre-feeling of vertigo. Eyes behind my head? Impossible! But note: you’ve already begun moving. It may as yet be imperceptible, but your shoulder is already starting to lower. You’ve thought-felt the movement’s impossibility even as you preaccelerated into the movement.

As a movement realizes itself, it stops becoming. It perishes along the nexus of thought-feelings. In Whitehead’s terms, it has achieved its satisfaction. There can be no continuity of becoming when an event has taken form. But there can and will be more becoming of continuity: another movement is already folding-through. You will never move through épaulement in quite the same way.

If there were continuity of becoming, there would be no decisive turn where a feeling is strictly what it had become. There would be no experiencing of the time-signature of a movement event. Everything would be process. For lived experience, it is necessary for there to be a cut that brings contrast to duration, a decisive turn through which an actual occasion takes form and is felt as such.

Events emerge from a process immanent to their emergence. When the events have fully taken form, they will forever remain what they have become. This arabesque will forever have been this arabesque. Yet every future instance of an arabesque will be affected by the continuum of the arabesque-as-nexus. The arabesque is both absolutely what it is now and an infinity of qualitative arabesque-contributions toward a dancing future. This means that while there is no continuity of becoming for the event per se, there is continuity of becoming on the durational plane of experience. The arabesque-as-nexus is not an event: it contributes the feeling of arabesque for the subsequent arabesque-event. Whitehead has two terms for the durational or virtual becoming of continuity: nexus and extensive continuum. The nexus is the plane through which the shadow of past events contributes to present activations. [25] Choreographic propositions rely on the relational potential of this virtual stratum.

The extensive continuum is more vague. It is the withness of the vastness of durational plenitude. Singular movement develops out of this extensive continuum, emergent in relation to all of the micropotentialities of pastness and futurity that make up an event. “This extensive continuum is one relational complex in which all potential objectifications find their niche. It underlies the whole world, past, present and future” (Whitehead, 1978: 65).

We cannot know extension as such, and yet extension underlies each of our perceptions. It is an infinite relational network of potential through which singularities emerge. It does not connote a before or beyond of experience. It is closer to an outside in the Deleuzian/Foucauldian sense – a force field for experience’s experimentation in the now. In actualization, each singularity is independent of all other singularities yet virtually interconnected with the force of becoming-event. Thus each singularity is intrinsically connected to the web of potential which modulates its taking-form. Form and force, infinitely co-arising.

Once an occasion has reached its subjective form (its singularity), it perishes. [26] Its singularity will never become other than what it is, in this particular time-signature. But the force of its persistence within the web of relations that create the potential for singularity will live on in the folds of experience.

Movement folds time. In a recent discussion with Forsythe, he commented on the ineffable quality of movement. “All movement is subtraction”, he said. “To move is to fold.” [27] A given movement is a subtraction from the infinity of movement’s extensive continuum. Movement can never actualize its fullness of potential: each actualization will be a germ in the becoming of continuity. This becoming of continuity will in turn fold into the nexus of perished occasions. Movement folds through its infinite potential to create a multiplying form-taking that rhythmically makes time.

Forsythe writes: “You cannot organize these things from outside. You have to be inside the event.” [28] Movement flows from within its own eventness. It folds through this eventness carrying within itself the potential of infinite extension. From within and yet in an absolute outside: on the verge.

Verging on the continuum is a proposition for rhythmic duration. In this process of narrowing through rhythm, an event takes form through a divisional turn that cuts duration. The rhythm of an event’s taking form is replete with extensity and intensity. The continuum pervades it and it pervades the continuum. But in the time of the event’s actualization it becomes ‘this singular rhythm’. We feel the event not through the infinity of the continuum but in the time of its rhythm. This rhythm is an ecology: it partakes of the infinite potential of all the durations that might have gathered into this expression of singularity. But it is strictly this singular time-signature – a sonorous relational matrix of the here and now. This rhythm of the here and now is ecological because it carries within its taking-form the unrealized expressions of all the times of its making. It carries them not as decisions to exclude, but as propositions for the verge.

Propositions for the Verge

“And because I like to think algorithmically, I like to think […] of these prescriptions as little language machines that produce these things called arabesques or tendus or pirouettes.” [29] Propositions can be language machines. But they are not language-based in the sense of working denotatively. Propositions are platforms for relation that can find their conduit in language.

Forsythe’s language machines are more than language. They are propositional algorithms. Algorithms are iterative equations that can evolve through the randomness of their difference in repetition. In computer systems, drift is often expressed through built in randomness in the algorithm that, over time, causes a tweaking of the primary conditions. These are known in mathematics as probabilistic algorithms. Key is that randomization is part of their logic.

Forsythe’s algorithms are a tool for the creation of choreographic propositions. “Algorithms! Algorithms are little machines made of language and they’re very complex and they’re very beautiful and they’re not like many things I’ve seen before. They naturally take things apart and put them back [together] in very unexpected ways.” [30] The algorithms Forsythe creates generate an ontogenetic field. This ontogenetic field seeds the conditions for ecologies of experience. For Forsythe, these ecologies are often populated by dancing bodies. But in the case of his choreographic objects, he may focus instead on an ecology of matter. Either way, the ecological field organizes bodies. [31] This mode of organization is not a situating of bodies in stable spacetime. It is an activity that creates the conditions for the creation of spacetimes of encounter between bodies and ground, between air and sound, between light and movement. This constant recombination of matter-form calls forth certain iterations which are in tune with the randomized effects of the algorithms. Here, the proposition of the algorithm is immanent to its unfolding in spacetimes of experience: its algorithmic uncertainty occasions the appearance of qualities of relation never before ascertained.

More recenty, Forsythe has extended this process to participatory installations. Like the algorithms before them, these choreographic objects are propositions for the generating of qualities of relation: they are propositions for relational movement. [32] Relational because “pieces can be developed from any point, and any point within a piece comprises the fullness of the whole” (Casperson, 2004: 108). Relational movement because they create ecologies of encounter. Propositional because they “constitute a source for the origination of feeling which is not tied down to mere datum” (Whitehead, 1978: 186). Propositional because they co-constitute actual occasions, always immanent to their unfolding as events.

Like his choreographies, Forsythe’s choreographic objects are created with very precise immanent conditions for movement: they insist on the precision of parameters for movement without divesting the movement of its potential for eventness. They are unforeseeable in their effects yet carefully crafted toward participation. They are objectiles thrown into the world, invitations to move-with. Forsythe speaks of seeking physical solutions to dramaturgic propositions. [33] The choreographic objects are designed to provoke physical solutions that tend toward habit even as they divert us toward the contrast of the new. This new emerges relationally, activated by propositions embedded into the choreographic objects’ potential deployment. These act not on individual will: they move the relation.

Forsythe is interested more in the folding of space than the form-taking of bodies. [34] His choreographic propositions begin with this folding, activating a creative tension between the virtual extensity of a durational rhythm and the actual intensity of a moving in time. From creating environmental conditions for performance to creating propositions for relational movement, Forsythe’s work remains an activity that folds forward into a complex ecological nexus. As a choreographer of missiles of movement, Forsythe’s work makes felt movement’s relationality as a force of matter itself.

“You don’t need a choreographer to dance.” [35] What you need is a proposition. Propositions are ontogenetic: they emerge as the germ of the occasion and persist on the nexus of experience to take hold once more through new occasions of experience. Forsythe’s choreographic objects are propositions in just this sense.

Take Scattered Crowd (2002). [36] This choreographic object involves four thousand white balloons suspended in a wash of sound. The balloons themselves are not the proposition. The proposition is expressed through their uncanny volume and its contribution to the creation of singular spacetimes of experimentation. Scattered Crowd is about moving-through quality – whiteness, airiness, lightness – such that the co-constituting spacetime of experience becomes a moving-with: relational environment invites relational movement creates ecology of event.

For Scattered Crowd how the room’s volume evolves is synonymous with the constituting of event-time. The changing of the affective tone of spacetime is not willed by individual participants. It happens in a relational becoming: the room moves the participants to alter the composition of event-time. Here we see precision of proposition meeting unpredictability of event. To achieve a singularity of experience, the enabling constraints immanent to the proposition have to be both concise and open-ended. When it works, the whole atmosphere is moved.

Figure 5 Scattered Crowd

Scattered Crowd is an indoor weather system, a platform for becoming-environmental. As Forsythe describes it, it is “a choreography for people and open space […] It is like the representation of a solution; it is about perfect distribution in a room.” [37] Time literally flies. White airiness active in incipiency, the balloons entice, altering the sense of the room’s containment, shifting the ground. The balloons qualify the space, easing movement into its own voluminousness, the white balloons calling forth the folds of molecularity, the ineffable spacetimes of experience that matter our movement.

Take Two – Counterpoint Algorithm, Kitchen Party (Montreal 2008)

Proposition: Effect an orientation shift. Walk down the street. Feel the shape of your walk. Transduce your street walk into a staircase walk. Sit down with this staircase feeling. Take off your boots.

Proposition: Drop a Curve. Glance into the living room. Note the single empty space on the couch. Feel the shift in equilibrium as your body begins to curve toward sit-ability. Take the tendency to curve and shift it into a walking feeling. Even as you walk by the living room, feel the curving potential of couching.

Proposition: Unfold with Inclination Extension. Extrude a line from your walk. Trace its extension. Leave the line in place and manoeuver around it. Find yourself in the kitchen.

Proposition: Experiment with the fridge’s couchability.

Figure 6 Couch