The Forsythe Programme: Guaranteed to leave you with a great, giddy grin on your face

Telegraph

11-04-2025

It was a snuffly, sleep-deprived critic who took his seat on Thursday evening, sensing that even staying awake for the evening's 85 minutes of entertainment would be a triumph. By the time it ended – some 15 minutes late, but hey-ho – I felt ready to spring up and run a marathon.
A tribute to the great New York-born postmodern choreographer William Forsythe, English National Ballet's The Forsythe Programme comes in three zesty, entirely abstract, prop- and set-free parts. There's one borderline novelty – Rearray (London Edition 2025) – as well as Herman Schmerman (1992), a piece not seen in this country since the Royal Ballet last performed it almost 30 years ago. But it is the returning work, Playlist (EP) – beefed up for ENB in 2022 from two slightly earlier iterations – that will pull the crowds during this 10-day season. And it was this that proved so genuinely, ridiculously revivifying on the first night.
If you were to imagine a Venn diagram with the structures and strictures of a Balanchine work in one circle and an exultant club night in the other, Playlist (EP) would sit perfectly in the middle. Forsythe reasons that pop music is pretty traditional in terms of its composition, and that its core rhythms have plenty in common with the music of the great Russian ballet composers (Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Prokofiev), but that 'pop is just more blatant in its desire to engender joyful physical expression'. And so, the piece plays out to six beat-driven tracks – from the neo-disco of Peven Everett's Surely Shorty, via the groovy soul of Sha La La Means I Love You by Barry 'Walrus of Love' White to Natalie Cole's exultant This Will Be an Everlasting Love. And my, does Forsythe whip up some joy.
You can marvel at his organic, apparently effortless fusion and alternation of retooled ballet vocabulary and shuffling dance-floor moves, at his marvellous marshalling of a stage-full of dancers, the subtle variations in his responses to each songs, and his ever-ingenious way of wrapping each section. (Forsythe has a positively McCartney-like mastery of codas and conclusions.) On which subject, feel free, too, to beam in pure delight at the climactic reveal, which implies that a couple (here, the fabulously musical duo of Precious Adams and Junor Souza) have been shimmying away together, backstage and unseen, all the while. Or, as I suspect most people do, you can simply let its 30-odd-minutes tumble blissfully over you, grateful for the mixture of effervescence and (in the main) rigour that ENB's luminously clad dancers bring to the whole thing.
As for the two hors d'oeuvres, Rearray – bulked up from a duo that Forsythe created in 2011 for the Sylvie Guilllem and Nicolas Le Riche, and here performed by the crack trio of Sangeun Lee, Henry Dowden and Rebtaro Nakaaki – is a spikier three-way 'conversation' that's at its best when the dancers are apparently trying (and barely managing) to cajole each other into various flavours of imitative, often line-fracturing movement. Created for New York City Ballet, the quintet from Herman Schmerman (its title taken from a line in the 1982 Steve Martin comedy Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid) is more playful, and was more groundbreaking back in the day in the apparent casualness with which the dancers stride around between sections.
Even if their scores feel a bit wilfully spartan now, both hold the attention. But, as Hamlet famously said, the Playlist's the thing. And this, above all, is the piece guaranteed to leave you with a great, giddy grin on your face.