Schooling an ensemble: The Forsythe Company’s Whole in the Head

Abstract

This embedded ethnographic study focuses on The Forsythe Company’s 2010 creation of Whole in the Head, the cast of which brought already-expert new dancers into collaboration with experienced ensemble veterans. The devising practice during the making of this “Schulwerk” yielded teaching and learning opportunities to all of the participants, whilst the emergent and distributed opportunities afforded by the devising context scaffolded the ensemble’s development as a complicit, choreographically productive community informed by specific somatic approaches to movement generation. Moving across unexpected etymological linkages of the term skill across languages, the analysis shows how the devising process of this work enhanced crucial expert-specific skills across the full ensemble, inviting consideration of the nature of skill and its expansion within communities of experts.