William Forsythe (dancer)

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William Forsythe (born December 30, 1949 in New York City) is an American dancer and choreographer who became known internationally for his work with the Frankfurt Ballet.

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 theatre 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 (award) (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. The company was 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 including The Kirov, The New York City Ballet, The San Francisco Ballet, The National Ballet of Canada, The Royal Ballet Covent Garden, and The Paris Opera Ballet among many others. The Forsythe Company, based in Dresden and Frankfurt am Main, enjoys a yearly residency at the Schiffbauhalle of the Schauspielhaus Zürich and also maintains an extensive international touring schedule.

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. He has created architecture and performance installations commissioned by Daniel Libeskind in Germany, Artangel in London, Creative Time in New York, and the City of Paris. His short film, «Solo», was presented at the 1997 Whitney Biennial. In 2006, a major exhibition of his performance, film and installation work was presented at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. In 1994, Forsythe virtually reinvented the teaching of dance with his pioneering and award-winning computer application «Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye» which is used by professional companies, dance conservatories, universities, postgraduate architecture programs and secondary schools. As an educator, Forsythe is regularly invited to lecture and give workshops at major universities and cultural institutions internationally. He served as the first Mentor in Dance in the inaugural cycle of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative and currently codirects and teaches in the Dance Apprentice Network Across Europe (D.A.N.C.E.) program. Forsythe has been awarded an honorary fellowship from the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance in London and an honorary doctorate from the Juilliard School in New York.