University of California, San Diego
by Lucas Perez
March 18, 2025
Not since George Balanchine, father of American ballet, has a single person generated so much influence on the world of dance. During his half-century long career, William Forsythe contemporized ballet by investigating the innovative potential of its academic fundamentals, while creating a new paradigm where improvisation, technology, experimental music, and ironic articulation pushed the form to its logical extremes.
For his innumerable contributions to dance, Forsythe was awarded the 2024 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, and as part of a powerful line-up of programming he was invited by the University of California, San Diego, and Point Loma Nazarene University along with the other two laureates to come to San Diego for the annual Kyoto Prize Symposium to give a lecture.
Characteristic of his jocular profundity, the talk was a blend of applied philosophical ruminations, audience engagement, and inspirational autobiography– mainly focused on Forsythe’s early life which he admitted had not yet entered the public record.
Entitled “Sometimes I Kiss Flowers” the lecture was a look into his formative years, recounting the interdisciplinary origins of his interest in aesthetics which led him down a path towards balletic excellence.
Whether it was decorating and sitting under the family Christmas tree, marveling at its twinkling patterns, or smelling and kissing flowers as he arranged them, ikebana style (something he admits he still does today) or testing his dance moves on a raised stage in 1960’s era New York City discos, it seems everything led him inevitably to ballet.
The talk was the blooming expression of a person at the apex of a long record of achievement. Interviewed by the UCSD Chair of Department of Theater and Dance, Lisa Portes, Forsythe treated the audience to an engaging retrospective of a lifetime of unlikely happenstances, decisions, and eclectic influences that formed his creative brain and lifestyle—recognizably branding his choreography, visual arts projects, and polemics as something ‘Forsythian.’
He admitted several times he was just an average kid from Long Island, comedically pronouncing the location with an exaggerated accent, stating great people “pop up from anywhere.”
At the conclusion of the talk, the audience comprised of young dance students from regional schools, faculty and administrators, professionals from organizations like Malashock Dance, representatives from the Kyoto Prize and the Inamori Foundation, and even a Japanese Honorary Consul engaged in a Q&A session with queries into his process and inspirations, wrapped up by a question from an Eastlake High School student who asked: “of all the different dance styles, what drew you to ballet?”
Forsythe answered, he loved the “mathiness of it (ballet), it’s like problem solving… when a dancer is given choreography, it’s like a problem to solve.”
At the conclusion of the lecture, the convening moved to the Molli and Arthur Wagner Dance Building to observe a one-hour workshop for select dance students who learned from and embodied the great choreographer’s sage wisdom and physical demonstrations. One such moment was when he instructed students to present themselves through their upraised arms as if bursting through a frame of their own making, Russian style. What he called ‘exaggerated attenuation.’
On the far wall sat some of San Diego’s most notable dance professionals who watched the workshop unfold, followed by another Q&A session.
I was lucky enough to pose a few questions to Forsythe directly after the workshop and when asked, what the Kyoto Prize meant to him he replied that it was an “award for values, and…identifies laureates as having shared values with the Kyoto Prize, and their mission statement” which is the “bettering of humanity.”
“We hold certain historical innovations, we are artifacts of an evolution in thinking about the body, which is this introduction of a scientific mentality in the 18th century…ballet was almost like an experiment.”
When asked what the future of ballet was, he replied: “good practitioners that decide to take it forward” and what keeps ballet contemporary is “the people, it’s the people that contemporize ballet …I did my part, and I believe it’s my time to step back.”
Lastly his advice to young up-and coming artists was “don’t beat yourself up… don’t insist on a path, don’t make the assumption that this [ballet] is the only way it can happen, or that maybe ballet is a path to something else in your life. It’s not the end.”
The Kyoto Prize is an annual international award founded by Japanese philanthropist, Kyocera founder, and Buddhist Priest Kazuo Inamori in 1984 to honor individuals who’ve made “extraordinary contributions to science, civilization, and the spirituality of humankind.” The prize is awarded to laureates within three categories including Advanced Technology, Basic Sciences, and Art and Philosophy. Winners of this vaulted prize are presented with a 20k gold medal, a diploma with a calligraphic inscription, and 100 million yen ($600,000) in prize money.
