Forsythe has created a setting — not completely silent, but nice and hushed — that encourages listening with both the ears and the eyes. The last thing you would want to hear under such conditions? A beep, buzz or, God forbid, the marimba ringtone. Putting our cellphones in airplane mode was the easy part; more difficult was grasping the poetry of this two-act program. And that wasn’t because of the sound or lack of it.
Actually, it isn’t completely quiet. The second half features a lively dance set to to Jean-Philippe Rameau, and in the first half, there are bird sounds and a spare composition by Morton Feldman. For the most part, though, it’s up to the dancers to create the score with their steps and breathing, and for the audience to absorb it.
Certainly, there are moments to admire and respect. “A Quiet Evening” has the rigor that Forsythe always brings to the stage; there’s just not enough transcendence. In part, that could have been because of an injury to a leading dancer, Christopher Roman. (Four others were brought on to fill in; during the curtain call, Forsythe said that they had learned their parts in three days.) But there is also a sameness to the material, and that makes the less experienced dancers stand out in an unfortunate way among the Forsythe veterans.
“A Quiet Evening,” with new and reworked choreography by Forsythe, pays homage to ballet’s European roots while attempting to bring it into the present. Forsythe is more than qualified for such a choreographic endeavor. An American based for many years in Germany, where he directed Frankfurt Ballet, he did much to guide ballet into a new era with his extreme take on classicism, paired with stark lighting and, frequently, the bold synthesized sounds of the composer Thom Willems.
The next phase of Forsythe’s career landed him in a more experimental world of theater and dance; but recently, he’s fallen back in love with ballet. While the Shed program affords the pleasure of becoming lost in his swirling, finely executed steps — how did that hip end up there? — taken as a whole, it starts to feel arid. And at times, the attempt to look at the future of ballet seems more contrived than organic, like the appearances of the street dancer Rauf Yasit. Also known as RubberLegz, he demonstrated the elasticity of his limbs with floor work that knotted him up like a pretzel, but as the night wore on, it seemed like we were seeing the same sequences on repeat.
Chirping birds introduce Act 1, which begins with “Prologue.” Parvaneh Scharafali and Ander Zabala, wearing evening gloves and sneakers covered with socks, perform a crisp, stately duet — it’s a labyrinth of limbs — with joints as loose as soft spaghetti. (The socks over the sneakers remind me of the way figure skaters pull their tights over their boots — not my favorite look.)
More intriguing is “Catalogue,” featuring the velvety dancing of Jill Johnson — formerly a principal dancer with Ballet Frankfurt, she is still astonishing — alongside newcomer Brit Rodemund. Here, it’s as if they are illustrating the development of ballet starting with simple shapes, some awkward, others pedestrian. This dance is in silence, which begins the moment they each extend an arm and touch palms.
At the start, they draw invisible lines along the perimeter of their torsos with their hands. As they increase their force and expand spatially, the dancers’ elbows and shoulders tell a tale of Forsythe’s intense study of épaulement, or the carriage of the arms. Eventually their isolated movements morph into ballet steps and shapes. When their palms touch in the center once again, and the music — Feldman’s “Nature Pieces From Piano No. 1” — starts, so does “Epilogue,” in which the cast of seven continues the story of some of Forsythe’s most recognizable contributions to dance: his use of torque, speed, articulation and counterpoint.
It’s handsome in parts and confounding in others: Why include even a second of the ever-popular floss dance? Is it meant to be playful? It feels like a throwaway.
“Dialogue (DUO2015),” the final piece in Act 1, pairs Brigel Gjoka and Riley Watts — an extraordinary dancer with silky athleticism — in a frisky duet of physical reverberations. This and “Catalogue” reveal much about Forsythe’s lineage and achievements — both spoke of scale and intimacy — but as informative as the first half of “A Quiet Evening” is, it’s also rambling. Steel yourself.
If Act 1 is about revealing the raw ingredients that make up Forsythe’s classicism, Act 2 is the meal in the form of a stand-alone dance: “Seventeen/Twenty One,” to Rameau’s “Hippolyte et Aricie: Ritournelle” from “Une Symphonie Imaginaire.” It explores ballet’s evolution from the 17th century to the 21st, flooding the previously quiet space with full-bodied dancing and baroque music.
This is a dance, charming in moments, that is hungry for movement. By the end, it creates a sweet and simple sense of community — a group of people just dancing together — that comes to a joyful close as they suddenly clasp hands and run to the front of the stage for a bow. But the most consistent pleasure is from one dancer: Johnson brings an unassuming clarity and articulation to Forsythe’s movement that feels like it comes from the deepest of places. All night long, her quiet radiance was the loudest thing in the room.
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Additional Information:
‘A Quiet Evening of Dance’
Through Oct. 25 at the Shed, Manhattan; 646-455-3494, theshed.org. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.
This article originally appeared in
.