The full-length ballet has always been synonymous with storytelling. But for William Forsythe, who's spent his career grafting a postmodern sensibility on to classical forms, the three- or four-act format is simply an extended canvas on which he can play with extravagantly diverse elements of theatre and dance. As the title of Artifact suggests, his own full-length ballets are objects whose meanings are created purely on the stage.
Artifact was created for the Frankfurt Ballet when Forsythe became director in 1984 but has never been seen in Britain. This week, however, Dutch National Ballet perform it in Edinburgh, and watching it on the huge expanse of the Festival Theatre stage, the overwhelming impression is of scale. During parts one and four of the work (set to piano music by Eva Crossman-Hecht) 36 dancers track the stage in artfully scattered patterns or burnished lines. The breathtaking sweep of their formations is heightened by the fact that Forsythe doesn't parade his men and women like a conventional corps de ballet, but makes them appear like some crowd of flocking birds, unconscious elements of some grand natural design.
These large and beautiful stage pictures are contrasted in part two (set to Bach's Chaconne in D minor) with two pas de deux choreographed in Forsythe's now trademark style of violent stop-start moves overlaid with a sharply insinuating sensuality. However, in a work which is constantly pulling the perceptual rug from under our feet, we aren't allowed to relish the formal beauties of the dance.
For much of the work the dancers are invaded by two actors, a testy grey-haired gentleman with a megaphone, and flouncy diva who rants gobbets of interrogatory text about the nature of meaning, memory and action. In their wake moves the obscurely named Mudwoman, a dancer coated in clayey paint who glides around the stage performing hieratic gestures as if trying to recall the dancers to their interrupted steps. Forsythe also plays frequent games of now-you-see-it-now-you-don't, dimming the lighting suddenly, or letting the curtain thud down at arbitrary points in the dance. In part three total chaos seems to erupt as a babel of text, music and sound swirls around truncated squibs of movement and the cardboard scenery collapses.
It has to be said that there are several passages where Forsythe's puzzle making seems time-wasting, and where we simply don't trust the logic of his imagination. Yet as we strive to navigate an intellectual and visual course through the anarchy we find ourselves moving through an extraordinary range of theatrical effects, from magisterial beauty, to surreal comedy to thrilling climax. Despite the effort and the length, it's a journey we willingly, and often wonderingly, undergo and its pleasure is compounded by Dutch National Ballet who perform with an entranced intelligence that makes the work seem very much their own.
