Dana Caspersen, William Forsythe & Joel Ryan: Tight Roaring Circle

26 March - 27 April 1997
The Roundhouse, London

“Imagine Kant writing the Critique of Judgment on a Space Hopper.”
(The Independent)

Within 15 years of its completion, rapid advancements in railway technology rendered Robert Stephenson's Roundhouse obsolete. For the past 150 years, it has variously been used as a gin distillery, an arts centre and a storage warehouse.

William Forsythe, Dana Caspersen and Joel Ryan were brought together by Artangel to re-animate The Roundhouse as a choreographic instrument, tracing movement through architectural space. Tight Roaring Circle is a return to the Greek roots of the term choreography ("the drawing of movements for a chorus; an inscription of circles") in which Forsythe and Caspersen set up an interaction between fields of light and movement through the installation of a massive white bouncy castle housed tightly within the iron ring of the Roundhouse. The audience became the dancers surrounded by a soundscape wrought from Ryan's tuning and playing of the building itself as a vast musical instrument. On the walls of the castle, printed white on white, a poem by Yukio Mishima on failure; if you’d stop to try and read it, you'd lost your balance.

William Forsythe and Dana Caspersen have collaborated on a range of major works integrating movement, language, architecture and technology with the Frankfurt Ballet and the Forsythe Company. Joel Ryan, who came to music via a background in physics and philosophy, is a pioneer in the design of musical instruments based on real time digital signal processing. He currently works at STEIM in Amsterdam.

This project was supported by Arts Council England, Special Angels and The Company of Angels.

Funders and Collaborators