Difficult Fun

Abstract Richardson decided to leave Ailey and form Complexions in 1994. The same year, Richardson left the US to dance in Germany with William Forsythe’s Ballett Frankfurt. This chapter explores how Richardson and choreographer William Forsythe’s combined modes of improvisation create a notable shift in their practices to a “black radical tradition.” It cites George Balanchine and improvisational traditions as influences on Forsythe. Richardson and Forsythe’s collaboration collapses racial and choreographic signifiers, lingering in the difficult space of illegibility. Through concerted practice, such illegibility functions as a refiguring of the relationship between subjectivity and blackness. The chapter traces the way Frankfurt dancers describe an otherwise modernist aesthetic of difficulty as “fun,” ultimately positioning the body as the locale of choreographic and ontological agency. In doing so, it traverses the interval between what Forsythe calls a “[staging] of disappearance” and what Fred Moten refers to as the inevitably “improvisatory exteriority” of blackness. While much of the book works to make legible otherwise illegible queer black masculinities, this chapter understands a certain kind of formal, choreographic illegibility as a site of radical, performative potential for black subjectivity. Despite Richardson’s hypervisibility, his work in improvisation renders him illegible as he collapses racial signifiers in pursuit of an aesthetics of difficulty with Forsythe.