by Leigh Witchel
Is a ballet process or product? That may depend on if you’re in the studio or the seats. At 76, William Forsythe is still very much in the studio. He spent two weeks at Boston Ballet coaching, and of course, changing, his Herman Schmerman.
“Welcome to Bill Forsythe’s world.” Mikko Nissinen, Boston Ballet’s artistic director joked. Noah Gelber first staged the ballet. Then Forsythe came in, and of course, changed it. When Forsythe changes his ballets, they don’t get clearer or better. They get changed.
Herman already has a history of constant change. Forsythe first made a quintet for New York City Ballet’s The Diamond Project in 1992. Later on that year at his home company Ballet Frankfurt, he created a duet for Tracy-Kai Maier and Marc Spradling. When Forsythe set the ballet on New York City Ballet in 1992, he added the pas de deux to the end. Then from 1994, only the duet was performed until 2019.
In Boston, Forsythe moved the pas de deux before the quintet. This was the first time the ballet was done in that order, and it felt more like restive moving of furniture than anything else. It used to be that the quintet of dancers disappeared behind a low flat at the back, then the pas de deux began as the couple entered from there. Here, the couple entered from behind, and the quintet ended with the dancers vanishing there. What was a transition had become a bookend.
I didn’t recognize much of the duet, either as the version currently done at NYCB or any version I can dredge up in my memory. The general style remained, as well as the idea of torsion that is in every Forsythe duet. The costume change gag (where the woman puts on a lemon-yellow skirt, then the man does) is still there. I don’t know Herman well enough to know if he’s actually changed the steps, but taking Nissinen’s comment into account, it’s reasonable to guess he did.
At the start of the Saturday evening performance, the duet danced by Ji Young Chae and Patrick Yocum felt more like just a pas de deux, instead of a competition. But at a musical change, it became more of a dialogue. Still, in a moment I know from other versions, particularly at NYCB when Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia danced the duet, Chae put her hand on Yocum’s shoulder before leaving, as is usual. But there wasn’t any motivation.
The next day, Madoka Sugai and Tyson Ali Clark felt more conversational. She ducked under his arms; He shrugged at her in the moment, then yanked and flung her in response. Though Clark isn’t as fluid as most Forsythe dancers, his punchy, aggressive movement worked very well. Guest artist Kevin O’Day first did the part at NYCB and if Clark has a different movement quality, he has an analogous outsider feel.
When Clark hauled or yanked Sugai, he really hauled or yanked her. That didn’t faze her; she seemed to enjoy it. Her attitude and equanimity was unsettlingly mischievous, like a doll with some strings cut. It related to the raw way Clark was moving, deadpan but also seemingly outside his own volition, like Petrushka, but also without strings. Even though we could only see her back when she put her hand on Clark’s shoulder to leave, you could almost imagine her saying, “Sorry, dude.”
Yocum started and stopped in slow rippling motions, isolating his movement beautifully. Forsythe may have tweaked steps, so they felt dense – five movements in a count with small reverberations of the head and torso.
The end of the duet was more or less the same shape as always, but again, even a slight change in emphasis could make it uncertain if that difference was just this performance or if Forsythe had changed something. Chae jovially called Yocum over to continue the dance, and at the end, seemed to be surprised to see his hand offered. She chose to take it and go into a pirouette, bringing her arm overhead, then down. Sugai made a little joke of the end, with the same doll-like mischief. Instead of seeing Clark’s hand as an offering, she interpreted it as a sign, looking at where his finger was pointing before going into the turns.
Putting the pas de deux in front wasn’t an improvement. With the duet last, the diminuendo turn that ended the ballet with a hint of continued dialogue was more interesting than the sharp exclamation point of the quintet disappearing. To begin the quintet after the pas de deux here, Forsythe had the dancers walk to their spots. He frequently uses quotidian walks as a transition step. Often, particularly after something brilliant, that nonchalance can be Grade-A humblebrag. But here walking to place just looked sketched.
Who knows how much of the quintet was changed. It looked like a lot. With Forsythe, all you know is you’re going to see something with the same amount of people in the cast. More or less. Maybe. Again, through an imperfect prism of memory, what once seemed more fixed looked now like improvisation to a set of rules about placement and balance.
The dancing couldn’t be faulted. After Forsythe’s residency, Boston knows Forsythe’s work better than probably any other company on the continent. The dancers savored snapping in and out of distortion and the emphatic exclamation points in the phrases. In the evening cast, Chisako Oga threw herself around her leg, swinging, then catching itself. Lawrence Rines Munro sprang into his solos; Wesley Miller isolated his body and his phrasing so amazingly it was like elocution that went from slang to Shakespeare in a syllable.
Munro repeated in the matinee cast, showing off how he could distort academic positions. Daniel R. Durrett’s solo was in a similar sweet spot: classical placement that he could shelve for explosive crazy sissonnes. The coincidence of this cast being black men and white women (Kaitlyn Casey, Haley Schwan, and Sage Humphries), felt as if it gained a subtext – not a racial one but an unearthing of movement styles and training. From their up-and-down axes at their default, the women looked as if they were playing with a welcome stylistic departure from their training. Durrett and Munro looked as if they were getting to draw on a different movement history as well as their academic style. Everyone got to remove an overlay of training, but what lay underneath seemed different.
Thom Willems’ score went into hurdy-gurdy noises at the end, and the quintet ran to the back and dove behind a low flat – instead of that moment being the middle, as it was for a while, it was once again the end. Still, Herman felt more like a showpiece – the sophomore followup to Behind the China Dogs. And perhaps because Forsythe fiddled with it, Herman felt like steps without intent.
With five years of residency, some of Forsythe had to rub off on Boston’s dancers. Lia Cirio has been with the company two decades, and has been central in Forsythe’s casting. He created a new section of Artifact Suite on her. You could see bits of his influence in her work from 2024, After. The dance was for two main and three subsidiary couples, all unhappy. The title seemed to suggest a post-traumatic landscape, perhaps after a divorce.
Lera Auerbach’s music, selections from her set of 24 preludes, started almost like a nursery song. Scored for piano and violin, the piano portions often recalled one of Eva Crossman-Hecht’s piano pieces for Forsythe’s Artifact. John Farrell’s ghostly sculpture, glowing white at stage left, looked like paper but was actually aluminum. It was used evocatively to shelter or disgorge dancers.
As the cast moved slowly alone or with a partner, the music went from innocent to ominous, rumbling before chords. A woman flailed, then collapsed. Couples danced to a cascade of violins, people hugged and swayed, then one couple curled and wrapped through an ambivalent waltz. A second couple cut through dramatically, entering and exiting. The mix of contemporary and classical vocabulary, distortions and twitches snapping into clean positions, were also echoes of Forsythe.
The drama continued in couples and groups. The first woman waltzed on point from her partner, then draped back into him. He carried her as the violin slid precipitously. In the shadows, she was determined, he was regretful, and it ended with him putting her on his shoulder and bringing her out in the silence.
After a virtuoso section for the men, a woman ran on for a second, emotional duet. She reached, walking as her partner carried her. She took his hand off her thigh, and put it on her heart. This questioning duet was the most substantial and the dancers were feeling the drama, but it seemed short-winded because of the brevity of Auerbach’s preludes. Cirio tried to mitigate that by choreographing through where Auerbach’s preludes would trail off to connect the short selections. An allegro finale had the couples racing until awful crashing chords had everyone exit but one woman teetering on pointe and the others fled past her.
After was up against tough competition from Forsythe and what closed the show, Jerome Robbins’ Dances at a Gathering. Cirio’s work has a short performance and textual history: created two years ago and encored now. If there wasn’t much to say about how it has changed, the cathartic nature of it seemed to indicate preference for process over product. After was very in its feelings, and its downtempo melancholy didn’t make it a great curtain-raiser.
Dances has turned 55 but there’s life and a few surprises in the old girl. Though Robbins was nowhere near as elastic as Forsythe (no major choreographer may be – except Merce Cunningham), Dances has some variation built in. On Saturday evening, the woman in the first duet was Oga, who danced the Apricot role. On Sunday, it was Cirio, in Mauve. Per the company, Robbins had a casting history of having both roles do that duet. It’s not the same as changing steps, it’s modular, the way Balanchine could have any of the ensemble women in Raymonda Variations step out of the corps to do a variation. The text is much more fixed than in any Forsythe ballet, but there is still leeway for variations in casting and interpretation.
This was the first time Boston had taken on Dances, and both casts did well. Jeffrey Cirio (Lia’s brother) danced Brown both performances, and he was consistent: only slightly different at each outing. He started pensive and introspective, so that at first his opening felt like an epilogue to something that had already happened. A dancer with forceful attack, Cirio kept a light touch on the phrasing, not hammering a pose on a delicate high note, but then he tore through a circle of jetés.
Dances is very much a mix of when it’s a performance and when it’s an interior dialogue. As much as Robbins famously insisted that Dances had no meaning beyond that specific performance, there’s always some situation, and a balance that needs to be struck. In the women’s trio, when Han lingered, her two friends looked as if they pitied her. The next day, Chae’s friends just observed. With Dances, “just do it” is a good approach. Watch, don’t WATCH.
When Lasha Khozashvili in Purple carried Seo Hye Han in Pink in the air in a split, it was done for our benefit. His dancing was idiomatic; Khozashvili, who retired this season, is Georgian and was trained at the country’s state school, so learned folk dancing young. With Victorina Kapitonova in Mauve later, he gave their duet a sense of happening somewhere specific. Khozashvili was also a human crane, pressing her overhead into a bird lift with little effort. In his duet with Han, he looked at her, suddenly looked at us, and you could see a lot happening inside, including playful irony. He acted out his story, earlier stealing Schwan from Seokjoo Kim. His balance between acting and doing stuck out in his cast, but worked for him. In the other cast, Paul Craig was more low-key, aw-shucks American. His duet with Jeffrey Cirio had a teasing, age-old rivalry – Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton in circling triplets.
Durrett did Brick in both casts, marrying his attack with clean lines. Oga’s timing when he slung her to his shoulder and she put her arm en haut earned a laugh. Sugai brought her charming mischief from Herman to the role the next day, beeping Durrett’s hand right on a note, and leaping into his arms to exit.
As the woman in Green, Alexandria Heath was a drama queen, but that role, originally Violette Verdy’s, requires stage presence. Green was a courtesan in another life. And the three men who encountered her simply exited without EXITING. Even she didn’t make a big deal of it. The next day, Wanting Zhao made elegance her priority. When Craig left (again, simply) after walking with her, she didn’t react, but by the time she met Yocum, also in Green, she realized she had best try something else.
This program had been done by then for two weekends, so all the dancing felt as if it had benefited from experience. Both casts had no trouble with the acrobatic sextet. In his duet with Chae, Jeffrey Cirio tossed her up into a sharply etched position and his timing made sure it was a moment. But that timing also made it into a deeper conversation. In his solo he did double assemblées so precise they were things of beauty. Sugai made rising to pointe next to Kim a sudden decision.
The final quiet tableau felt literary, almost Utopian. When the cast looked out above us at something mysterious, they all saw something. When Cirio touched his hand to the ground, it felt like a query without an answer.
In Robbins’ casting shuffles, in Forsythe’s outright reboots, the essence of ballet – of dancing – is that there isn’t a fixed text. Like all performances, a dance isn’t created once and then read or viewed. It’s recreated every time it’s done, by the dancers, by the orchestra, by the audience – by every factor that changes.
Looking at Forsythe’s process, or that of Robbins or Balanchine, you can see an even more complicated argument for change: Robbins gave a part sometimes to one woman, sometimes to another, to see how it looked on different bodies and how a role changed when allocated differently. Balanchine once refused to use the notated score of a ballet when restaging it, because the dancer moved differently.
If both Balanchine and Robbins made revisions, Forsythe has been making this the center of his process for a decade now – the prerogative of an artist to change their work. Coming back to restaging ballets in his mid-sixties, his constant fussing feels as if it is not just about creative vitality, but physical. Heading past his mid-seventies, not all of his changes are improvements. Most are changes. And often, changes that are inconsistent with the earlier work – as I said in an earlier essay like an addition to a building with paint not quite the same shade.
Instead of a painting hidden away, slowly aging, it’s as if Forsythe alters ballets representing his younger self in plain view. Not just because he can, but because it’s his connection to being alive. The product isn’t as important as the process, and the process is his life. If you’re in the audience viewing it once, what does it matter? What you see is what you see.
But for those of us following his product over decades, and looking at not just what it is, but what it might mean, The Ballet of Dorian Gray becomes more like a painter choosing to over-paint a work from decades prior. They have every right to, but what gets lost is the clarity of intention hidden below each new layer.
copyright © 2026 by Leigh Witchel
After, Herman Schmerman, Dances at a Gathering – Boston Ballet
Citizens Bank Opera House, Boston, Massachusetts
May 16-17, 2026
Cover: Tyson Ali Clark and Madoka Sugai in Herman Schmerman. Photo © Rosalie O’Connor.
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