Forsythe's Box: On the Afterlife of Choreography

Abstract

“Open the box . . . yes you can’t, yes you can . . . the box is open.” These words, spoken into a microphone by a menacing male with a shaved head, wavered between command, threat, entreaty, invitation, and temptation. Of course, there was no box on the minimalist stage of William Forsythe’s Yes We Can’t, which premiered at the Festspielhaus Hellerau in Dresden in March 2008, but only three microphones and an ordinary white exercise mat. In the absence of a referential object, the audience was confronted by the overdetermined associations of “box,” which might refer to graves, secrets, storage, archives, theatres, or, ominously, a crudely depersonalized female sex. Although such an extreme implication may seem far-fetched, just such a salacious shadow of sexual violence haunted the work. The uneasy proximity of “box” and “sex” was made explicit when a female performer breathily baited the audience with the words, “put your stuff in the box . . . put your stuff in my box,” repeating phrases that alliteratively intermingled indefinite and definite articles. This linguistic technique became a central device that instigated slippages between can/n’t, would/n’t, could/n’t, and cunt.