After transforming the Frankfurt Ballet into one of the most beloved and innovative companies, characterized by a dance in which the harmony of classical ballet and the innovations of contemporary dance coexist, the geometric rigor and the emotional impact of a thought open to the anxieties of modernity, Forsythe still manages to amaze and be amazed by going in search of the choreography and art that lives in everyday life. He does so with City of Abstracts, a very technological installation where everything revolves around the gaze of a camera on the people who inhabit the contemporary city, in this case the city of Rovereto and in particular the square of the Polo Museale, on how they move, what rhythms, pauses and rules mark their relationship with the urban space. Everything is reworked through software and projected on a large screen and what comes out of it is pure movement, that of the body, and dance, the one that lives, sometimes unconsciously, in each of us. When William Forsythe and his newly formed company created Three Atmospheric Studies in 2006, the world of dance was enthusiastic but disoriented because it was faced with an unusual creation and above all because Forsythe's work ventured into the delicate terrain of political dissent, rarely explored by modern dance. In the midst of the Iraq war, Forsythe brought to the stage what he called an "act of citizenship". This new piece was inspired by the comparison between two very strong images: on the one hand, the depiction of a crucifixion by Cranach the Elder and on the other, a photograph by Reuter in which a body wounded by the explosion of a car bomb is carried away by hand by some soldiers.
Forsythe began to wonder if we can truly see suffering, if we understand it, given that even when looking at these images, we are usually not struck by them for long. This is enough to understand why this American is one of the greatest contemporary choreographers. His gaze always manages to see what surrounds him, manages to move in new directions and trace subtle and ever-significant relationships between what has been, what is and what will be. All around what is perhaps his object of greatest interest, that is, “the possibilities of the human body”. The relationship between body and space is in fact a central and recurring theme in Forsythe, so much so as to push him towards architecture and the idea of a choreography applied to every “animated thing that organically occupies a place”.
