The Focus on Forsythe season, curated by Sadler's Wells, is offering some
fascinatingly different views of the choreographer. Forsythe the postmodern ballet master has just been showcased by the Mariinsky;
Forsythe the installation artist is shortly to be seen in a series of gallery events, while Forsythe the showman is on stage this week in his violently theatrical, four-act production, Impressing the Czar. This is danced by the Royal Ballet of Flanders, who navigate an exceptionally clear path through its crazy paved complexities.
The second act of Czar is the stand-alone ballet In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated. When it was performed by the Mariinsky last month, it had acquired some very odd accents; the Russians' hypersupple limbs warping and curving the choreography's lines. By contrast, the Flemish company seem far more attuned to its style, especially Aki Saito, whose tiny body sheers the choreography to near impossible angles and speeds. More revealing still is seeing In the Middle in its proper context.
The four acts of Czar add up to a surreal meditation on the rise and fall of western culture. The stage starts out as a giant warehouse of art, dance and fashion in which works from the great masters are paraded, and the dancers, dressed in clothes from different epochs, race through a history of styles. In this context, the logic of In the Middle takes on a new resonance - its choreography showing the classical language of ballet razored into a febrile, very-late-20th-century intensity.
The third and fourth acts turn wilder and more comic, as the artworks are auctioned off and the stage is overtaken by a chorus of stampeding schoolgirls, their jubilant war dance trampling on the sensibilities of the past. Their massed formations are both brilliantly and horribly entertaining. Forsythe is the dark, political Busby Berkeley of our times.
