It’s no coincidence that so many of a new generation of choreographers have danced forWilliam Forsythe, the most influential dance-maker since George Balanchine. It’s not just that he encourages thought and creativity, enabling people such asCrystal Pite, Emily Molnar and Jill Johnson to emerge as significant forces in their own right. It’s also that he makes dancers look so powerful, majestic, in control of time and space and their own destinies.
English National Ballet’sThe Forsythe Programme,which has been filling Sadler’s Wells with adoring audiences this past week, is a case in point. In three contrasting works, the sense of dance prowess realised springs from the questing character of Forsythe himself. Never a man to rest on his laurels, in his mid-70s he’s still refining and rethinking dance. He seems constantly to ask himself what something is, turning it like a diamond to see how the facets will refract the light.
Rearray(London Edition 2025), originally made as a duet in2011 for Sylvie Guillem and Nicolas Le Riche, has been refashioned as a trio, with one central ballerina (now on pointe) and two male consorts. In a series of short scenes separated by sudden blackouts, sometimes to David Morrow’s dark-hued score, sometimes in silence, the dancers shape the air in fiercely defined symmetries.
In her central role, Sangeun Lee’s long legs flick into casual attitudes, her arms outstretched into impossible geometry. Halfway through a movement, she seems to hesitate, question where to go next. In the dark, positions shift, often surprisingly. The men (Henry Dowden, Rentaro Nakaaki) are watchful, in her thrall. They fling off sprightly jumps, super-fast turns; sit on stage, arms interlinked like medieval jesters.
The piece is full of quotations from works of the past, struck almost casually before the dancers move on. In the next cast, Emily Suzuki brings a gentler flow to the dynamics of the movement, less haughty than Lee but still very much a queen to the attendant men (Jose María Lorca Menchón and Miguel Angel Maidana).
The pensive mood is in marked contrast to the muscular vitality ofHerman Schmerman(Quintet), for two men and three women to music by Thom Willems, reconceived with a bright blue background (lighting design Tanja Rühl) and orange plush velvet leotards. Created for New York CityBalletin 1992, its title taken from Steve Martin’s noir parodyDead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, it’s an abstract piece of circus vitality that sets its participants off in cheekily insouciant showoff turns.
The energy is electric as, on opening night, Aitor Arrieta, Alice Bellini, Ivana Bueno, Francesco Gabriele Frola and Swanice Luong stroll on to fling themselves into off-kilter pirouettes and eye-popping entrechats, feet and limbs moving at pace. At the end, they all fall down – a tribute to the final moment ofBalanchine’sSerenade, perhaps, but also a reflection of just how exhausting the combinations they throw off are.
The delicious contrast between the formality of the patterns created and the relaxed bravura of the dancers is amped to the max in the final work,Playlist (EP)from 2022, in which dazzling feats of balletic virtuosity are set to a score by artists including Peven Everett, Lion Babe and Barry White.
It begins with ENB’s impressive cohort of men performing athletic (and often rarely used) ballet combinations like battling club dancers, raising the roof with the sheer elevation of their jumps and the sharpness of their turns. Then the women enter like a brilliant chorus line. The intricate shifts of their movements, alone and in constantly changing configurations, release a sense of infectious pleasure. Yet amid the delirium there’s subtlety too: a duet for Junor Souza and Precious Adams to Natalie Cole’s This Will Be (An Everlasting Love) is full of feeling as well as panache.
The entire evening feels like an assertion of ballet’s ability to wrap its past and future into one joyful package. Forsythe’s works are a jewel in ENB’s crown, and the company makes them gleam.
The Forsythe Programme is at Sadler’s Wells, London, until 19 April