All you ballet fans, listen up! I won't pretend I grasp the meaning of it.

For a newspaper audience, this is almost impossible to explain but not so for
ballet audiences, dancers, teachers and choreographers. Forsythe said of
epaulement "it is the crowning accomplishment of great ballet dancers. It entails a
tremendous number of counter
rotations determined by the
relationships among the foot,
hand, and head and even of
the eyes. As in Indian classical
dancing, it dictates rules of
gazing past the body. For me,
epaulement is the key to ballet
because it demands the most
complex torsion. The
mechanics of epaulement are
what give ballet its inner
transitions." As he told me in
the interview, "epaulement is
essential to a lot of my
thinking. At one point it's a
completely embodied
mechanic, you don't have to
think about it any more.... no
matter how you turn your hand
in relationship to the foot or
head you can induce
epaulement, so to speak."

In epaulement, as he says, the
eyes gaze out, yet Forsythe is
now concerned with turning the gaze inwards. "If you take the notion of putting
your eyes in the back of your head, for example, what happens to that
epaulement - you can literally invert the epaulement." He calls this "disfocus,
shorthand for inverted epaulement... dancers have to stare up, roll their eyes back
and try to accomplish the inversion." The only way one could really understand
this process would be to see him work in the studio with dancers, as you can in
Mike Figgis's documentary, Just Dancing Around (1995.) Just one section of this
documentary, showing him working with a dancer, leading phrases with the
elbow, stressing the emphasis on the beginning of the movement, says more than
all the words can. One easy way to understand his concepts of tracing
movements through space is his comment "people often ask me where is the
book of photographs of the Frankfurt Ballet. Ballet has been blessed and cursed
by the profusion of coffee table books with ever more more beautiful pictures of
graceful bodies frozen in the air. But our work is about moving between positions,
not maintaining positions. This is actually a fact of ballet in general, new and old:
one moves through a position with greater or lesser accuracy."