Consciousness As A Dance

This week, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival will present the innovative choreographer William Forsythe and his Frankfurt-based company in the US premiere of Forsythe’s Decreation. Inspired by an essay by poet Anne Carson, Forsythe used Carson’s writing as a starting point to explore, in choreographic terms, the poet’s thesis of the dissolution of the self in order to create space for something new. According to The Forsythe Company’s website, “Sound is transformed, weeps and soars through the throats, the bodies, which move in a constant, oblique tension.” In Decreation, the dancers interact with onstage cameras, their own projected images, and one another as they explore the progression of the soul.

In addition to seeing The Forsythe Company at BAM, the public has a chance to see William Forsythe in conversation at the New York Public Library on Friday, October 9th at 1 PM. Forsythe and the cognitive scientist Alva Noe will discuss consciousness as a kind of dance, as something that we engage in as opposed to something that occurs inside our brain.