Auditory Turn: William Forsythe's Vocal Choreography

William Forsythe’s recent investigations of the sonic potentials of dance movement have led him to generate improvisational modalities that extend dancing

into the body’s interior by means of translations between movement and vocalization. Analyzing visuo-sonic choreographic processes in Forsythe’s works Decreation (2003), You made me a monster (2005), Heterotopia (2006), and Yes we can’t (2008) from a perspective informed by cognitive research,

and focusing particularly on intermodal counterpoint, I argue that his turn to the auditory extends his earlier investigations of perceptual performativity while also complicating linguistically based dance analyses.