English National Ballet: The Forsythe Programme review

If you’ve ever doubted that ballet dancing is as demanding as any athletic discipline, William Forsythe’s choreography leaves no room for debate. The master of radical modern ballet brings a merciless drive to his works, every line taken to its extreme even as the speed ratchets up alarmingly.

Rearray (London Edition 2025) is pure Forsythe in this regard. Reworked for English National Ballet from a duet into a trio, it’s a deconstruction of classical technique that’s delivered with a ferocious sense of challenge and attack from the off. Blackouts puncture the piece, and David Morrow’s atonal strings lurch in and out, leaving Emily Suzuki, Jose María Lorca Menchón and Miguel Angel Maidana often dancing in silence on a black-box stage. But the speed and thrust is mesmerising – Suzuki delivers a whirling torrent of hyper-extensions and sharp articulations, capped deliciously with a flick of hand or foot and a jut of the chin signalling supreme insouciance. The men mould around her and each other, a fine-tuned mechanism of intersecting limbs, their pure movement offering an almost forensic examination of stillness and speed.

Herman Schmerman (Quintet) was made for New York City Ballet in 1992 – a 12-minute piece for three women and two men that is just as demanding as Rearray, but carries more than a hint of playfulness in its merciless precision. There’s a tick-tock momentum to Thom Willems’ score and the movement, and a sense that Forsythe and his dancers – the archly amused Minju Kang in particular – are toying with each other and with us, like a cat with a mouse. 
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