The Forsythe Company Woolf Phrase / N.N.N.N. / 7 to 10 Passages

Woolf Phrase

Through the breath of two dancers, in the empty, scintillating air, Woolf Phrase begins as a world visible only through sound. The dancers glide and then swoop together, along the hypnotic cadences of Virginia Woolf. They pull the eye of the viewer closer, as the rhythms and patterns of passage intensify, flocking in sleek, glistening waves before veering away, leaving the air empty, avid.

N.N.N.N.

Appears as a mind in four parts, four men in a state of constant, tacit connection. Underscored by the sudden murmured flashes of Thom Willem’s music, the men enter into a complex, intense inscription. Their arms, heads, bodies and legs become singular voices, each tuned and in counterpoint to the other. The men write out a text of the voice of the body, slowly, then more and more rapidly, coalescing over and over into a linked entity of flinging arms, folding joints and a sharp, high sense of time.

7 to 10 Passages

7 to 10 Passages is the sixth in a series of seven productions on the theme of Robert Scott’s failed expedition to the South Pole. Each of the productions in this arc of choreographic inquiry, which begins in 1985 with the first version of LDC and extends through Die Befragung von Robert Scott (1986), One Flat Thing, reproduced (2000) and Wear (2004), represents a distinct engagement with the ideas that were incumbent in this disastrous undertaking. Focused on the nature of effort, 7 to 10 Passages offers a slow, hallucinatory archeology of the cycle’s glacial evolution.