Propositions for the Verge ~
William Forsythe’s Choreographic Objects

by Erin Manning

Notes

[1] These instructions are slightly paraphrased. Find the original in Caspersen “It Starts from Any Point”, p. 33.

[2] For Deleuze, thought is always of the body, in movement. He writes: “Do not count upon thought to ensure the relative
necessity of what it thinks. Rather, count upon the contingency of an encounter with that which forces thought to raise up
and educate the absolute necessity of an act of thought or a passion to think. […] Something in the world forces us to think”
(Deleuze, 1994: 139). “It is true that on the path which leads to that which is to be thought, all begins with sensibility. Between
the intensive and thought, it is always by means of an intensity that thought comes to us” (1994: 144).

[3] Choreographic Object by Dana Casperson, William Forsythe and Joel Ryan. Co-production with Group.ie – originally
commissioned by ARTANGEL, London. Premiere: March 26, 1997, The Roundhouse, Chalk Farm, London. For images, see
http://whitebouncycastle.com/de/index_reload.html?bodyFrame=/de/_body/03_pictures.html

[4] Comment by Forsythe translated from the French: “J’ai essayé de créer un contexte chorégraphique qui oblige les participants
à se confronter à une idée qui change leur perception d’un corps en mouvement. Dans Bouncy Castle, les corps devenaient des
boules rebondissantes, ce qui déclenchait de suite un sentiment de bonheur, tout comme dans.” City of Abstracts. 

[5] On the half-second lapse in perception, see Benjamin Libet, "Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in
voluntary action," Behavior and Brain Sciences, 529-266. For philosophical and cultural discussions, see Brian
Massumi’s “The Autonomy of Affect” and “Strange Horizon” in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, pp. 23-25; 177-207.

[6] Choreographic Object by William Forsythe. Music: Dietrich Krüger, Thom Willems. Permiere: May 17 2008, Ursula Blickle Stiftung, Kraichtal.

[7] The aspect of “falsity” often associated to the specious is at its most creative here. It could be thought alongside Deleuze’s concept of the “power of the false:” that which “replaces and supersedes the form of the true, because it poses the simultaneity of incompossible presents, or the coexistence of not-necessarily true pasts” (Deleuze, 1989: 131).

[8] In Perception Attack (forthcoming MIT Press), Brian Massumi develops a theory of mentality (derived from Whitehead’s vocabulary of the mental and physical poles that make up every actual occasion) that addresses the uncanny temporality of propositions in the way I am defining them here. He writes: “The mental pole is the share of the event that is renewable, in the sense that it may reembody. It is the share of the event that is reversible, in the sense that when it renews it will have returned to the beginning, through a terminus recurring, folding back-under to in-form renascent tendency.”

[9] Time-signatures as I am using them here have nothing to do with the ways they are used in musical scores. In musical scoring, a
time-signature refers to the numerical sign placed at the beginning of a piece of music, or during the course of it, to indicate the
meter of the piece. In this case, the time-signature helps to determine the number of beats to a measure. Here, I use time-signature as a means of conceiving the singularity of time in a becoming-actual of its duration.

[10] Whitehead writes: “The problem which the concrescence [the taking-form] solves is, how the many components of the
objec­tive content are to be unified in one felt content with its com­plex subjective form. This one felt content is the 'satisfaction,'
whereby the actual entity is its particular individual self; to use Descartes' phrase, 'requiring nothing but itself in order to exist.'”
(Whitehead, 1978: 233).

[11] This concept was coined by Doruff. See Doruff (2009).

[12] Image reproduced from William Forsythe – Choreography and Dance.

[13] For a development of the concept of prearticulation see Erin Manning “Propositions for Thought in Motion” in Relationscapes:
Movement, Art, Philosophy.

[14] The becoming-body is akin to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theorization of the Body without Organs in their chapter entitled
“How Do You Make Yourself A Body Without Organs” in A Thousand Plateaus. I develop this concept with relation to the biogram in a
chapter entitled “From Biopolitics to the Biogram” in Relationscapes.

[15] Whitehead writes: “The 'locus' of a proposition con­sists of those actual occasions whose actual worlds include the logical subjects
of the proposition. When an actual entity belongs to the locus of a propo­sition, then conver­sely the proposition is an element in the
lure for feeling of that actual entity. If by the decision of the con­crescence, the proposi­tion has been admitted into feeling, then the
proposition consti­tutes what the feeling has felt. The proposi­tion constitutes a lure for a member of its locus by reason of the
germaneness of the complex predicate to the logical subjects, having regard to forms of definiteness in the actual world of that member, and to its antecedent phases of feeling” (Whitehead, 1978: 186; my emphasis). Decision is immanent to the process of concrescence in Whitehead. I use ‘cut’ throughout this paper rather than ‘decision’ to underline the way in which decision operates not from outside the occasion but participates in the difference of its unfolding. A decision is how the event comes to completion. There is no event without decision, and no decision that can alter an already constituted event.

[16] I develop the concept of preacceleration in a piece entitled “Incipient Action: The Dance of the Not-Yet” in Relationscapes. In
this piece, the concept of preacceleration emerges through the question of how a movement can be felt relationally when two people move together. In order for the movement to be activated in the togetherness of a ‘now’, the relation itself has to be moved. For this to happen, a preacceleration of the movement must be felt. This kind of dynamic is keenly felt in Argentine Tango, which builds on improvised deviations of the walk.

[17] In the watching of dance, there is a similar qualitative transformation of what a (perceiving) body can do.

[18] Deleuze refers to this as passive synthesis. See Difference and Repetition.

[19] The process of moving through the metastability of verticalising and horizontalising balances walking requires is very apparent in
children learning to walk. The first stage of walking tends towards a falling back: from sitting to standing to sitting. Verticality is tended
toward as a limit that throws the movement back. In the second stage, a tottering occurs whereby momentum is gathered forward-falling. This translates into saccaded steps, each step its own dynamic form. For walking to ensue, the steps themselves must become absorbed into the horizontal advance of the movement. This backgrounds the steps, allowing the momentum of horizontality to take over.

[20] Transcript of the John Tusa Interview with William Forsythe BBC 3.

[21] About Pierre Boulez, Deleuze and Guattari write: “Boulez distinguishes tempo and non-tempo in music: the ‘pulsed time’ of a formal and functional music based on values and the ‘nonpulsed time’ of a floating music, both floating and machinic, which has nothing but speeds or differences in dynamic. In short, the difference is not at all between the ephemeral and the durable, nor even between the regular and the irregular, but between two modes of individuation, two modes of temporality” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 262).

[22] Bergson writes: “En réalité, il n’y a pas un rythme unique  de la durée; on peut imaginer bien des rythmes différents, qui, plus lents ou plus rapides, mesureraient le degré de tension ou de relâchement des consciences, et, par là, fixeraient leurs places respectivent dans la série des êtres. Cette représentation de durées à élasticité inégale est peut-être pénible pour notre esprit, qui a contracté l’habitude de substituer à la durée vraie, vécue par la conscienc, un temps homogène et indépendant…” (Bergson, 1939: 232-3).

[23] In Ballet, épaulement is defined as the use of the head to complete the line of the body during a movement. Generally, the head inclines towards whichever foot is in front.

[24] Conversation with Forsythe, Amsterdam, June 3 2008.

[25] Whitehead defines the nexus: “a nexus is a set of actual entities in the unity of the relatedness constituted by their prehensions of
each other, or what is the same thing conversely expressed constituted by their objectifications in each other” (Whitehead, 1978: 35).

[26] The actual occasion’s perishing is also its objective immortality: “An actual entity is to be conceived both as a subject presiding
over its own immediacy of becoming, and a superject which is the atomic creature exercising its function of objective immortality.
It has become a 'being'; and it belongs to the nature of every 'being' that it is a potential for every 'becoming' ” (Whitehead, 1978: 71).

[27] Conversation with Forsythe, Amsterdam, June 3 2008.

[28] In Mike Figgis, Just Dancing Around.

[29] Transcript of the John Tusa Interview with William Forsythe.

[30] ‘William Forsythe in the Middle - Interview between William Forsythe and Julie Copeland’.

[31] Forsythe often refers to his choreographic work as “organizing bodies.” With reference to his collaboration with Thom Willems,
Forsythe says: “He always wants to know what are we thinking and I say nothing, we're just […] organising bodies” (Transcript of the
John Tusa Interview with William Forsythe)

[32] I begin to develop the concept of relational movement in relation to the improvisational aspect of Argentine Tango in Politics of
Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty.

[33] See Peter Boenisch for an example of how Forsythe invites his students to participate in creating physical solutions to dramaturgic
propositions in ‘Decreation Inc.: William Forsythe’s Equations of Bodies before the Name,’ p. 20.

[34] Conversation between Forsythe and Gerard Sigmund in Ballett International/Tanz Aktuell.

[35] Conversation between Forsythe and Sigmund in Ballett International/Tanz Aktuell.

[36] Choreographic object by William Forsythe. Music: Ekkehard Ehlers. Premiere: March 15, 2002, Halle 7, Messe Frankfurt, Frankfurt am
Main. For extraordinary images, see http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1126/537174230_bd3a903801
.jpg%3Fv%3D0&imgrefurl=http://flickr.com/photos/37945735%40N00/537174230/&h=375&w=500&sz=147&hl=en&start=93&um=1&usg=__
vjbRBELlwxf_BEV823ok7sean5Y=&tbnid=9rwnmh0e-Ws0QM:&tbnh=98&tbnw=130&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dwilliam%2Bforsythe%26start%3
D84%26ndsp%3D21%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den-ca%26sa%3DN

[37] Frankfurter Rundschau 15. März 2002. See http://www.artsandletters.fau.edu/humanitieschair/scattered.html

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Caspersen, Dana. “Der Körper Denkt: Form, Sehen, Disziplin und Tanz”, in William Forsythe -  Denken in Bewegung (Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 2004).

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------------http://www.ballet.co.uk/magazines/yr_03/feb03/interview_bbc_forsythe.htm

---. “Epaulement and other things - Interview with Valerie Lawson”, Ballet.magazine October 2000.

---. “William Forsythe in the Middle – Interview with Julie Copeland”, ABC Arts Online, http://www.abc.net.au/arts/default.htm

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