Dr Lucia Ruprecht
(University of Cambridge)
William Forsythe’s Three Atmospheric Studies
Three Atmospheric Studies, premiered in February 2006, has been described as William Forsythe’s most political work to date. Responding to the catastrophic events of the Iraq War, it engages with pain and its representation in performance. Through this double concern with pain and the challenges posed by its performative representation, Three Atmospheric Studies can be called a theoretical choreographic object, both displaying danced pain, and thinking about its implications. Focusing on the (in)translatability of pain, its central (choreographic) trauma – the execution of a son during a war accident – is always presented at one remove, most prominently exemplified by the retrospective perspective of his mother, and by the distorting mise-en-abyme of movement and image, organised around three choreographic compositions and two pictures, one a Reuters press photograph of the detonation of a car bomb in the Middle east, and the other one Lukas Cranach the Elder’s Crucifixion of 1503. Far from guiding the choreography towards an ideal form, beauty, here, is not aim but strategy: of precision and energy, demanding what Elaine Scarry has termed ‘constant perceptual acuity’.
Lucia Ruprecht is a Teaching Officer at Emmanuel College and affiliated Lecturer in the Department of German and Dutch at the University of Cambridge. Her book, Dances of the Self in Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Heinrich Heine (2006), received a special citation for the de la Torre Bueno Prize. She co-edited Performance and Performativity in German Cultural Studies (2003) as well as a special issue of German Life and Letters on cultural pleasure (2009), and is currently working on a study of charisma and virtuosity.
