At The Shed: Silence Speaks in "William Forsythe: A Quiet Evening of Dance"

The experience of watching "A Quiet Evening of Dance,” a new work by choreographer William Forsythe currently showing at The Shed in Hudson Yards, is not dissimilar to that of meditating. The lack of external sound in the performance (which is not entirely silent) directs the audience’s attention to the steady and straining breath of the dancers, who frequently mirror each other's movement. This repetition, in turn, induces its own trance-like state.

This can make the show hard to watch sometimes; seeing dancers – even those as expert as these – repeat motions over and over and over and over again does feel occasionally monotonous. But as with meditating or a particularly grueling yoga class, when you are able to break through your conscious state and surrender to the repetition, the very act of watching the performance becomes absorbing.

Of course, unlike during a meditation, the audience at “A Quiet Evening of Dance” is not looking inward, but outward at the extraordinary dancers, who move through a ballet-inspired, breakdancing-infused choreography. Forsythe’s background is in ballet – he was the director of the Ballet Frankfurt for 20 years – but he is not a classicist; his work tests the boundaries of what ballet can really be, incorporating moves from other genres like breakdancing and modern dance. Hence, the addition of the street dancing star and visual artist Rauf ‘RubberLegz’ Yasit, who frequently twists himself into increasingly complicated knots during the performance, as does Roderick George, whose breakdancing style frequently morphs into ballet in a delightful and surprising fashion. Still, the works in the show that do incorporate ballet are perhaps its strongest; particularly, the second work “Catalogue” performed by Jill Johnson and Brit Rodemund.

Jill Johnson and Brit Rodemund perform "Catalog" (credit: Mohamed Sadek. Courtesy The Shed)

As the show’s title implies, sound – especially the lack of it – is key in this show, where the first two works are done almost entirely silently. Music comes up gradually; the fourth piece “Dialogue” features “Nature Pieces from Piano No.1” repeating over and over, and the last one “Seventeen/Twenty One” is set to the baroque music “Hippolyte et Aricie: Ritournelle.”

The music is a nice surprise, to be sure, and “Seventeen/Twenty One” is a joyful and fun cap to the evening.

Rauf ‘RubberLegz’ Yasit (left), Parvaneh Scharafali (right) (credit: Mohamed Sadek. Courtesy The Shed)

Still, the most powerful and poignant moment in the show belongs to “Catalog,” when – in an extraordinary moment – dance veteran Jill Johnson rose up from a seated position and stretched her body into the air without making a single breath. It was a moment of seemingly effortless beauty that managed to mask just how much effort and skill and expertise it actually took to achieve. Sound – whether a note of music or a breath of air – would have only ruined it.

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