William Forsythe, the creator of the headline act at this year's Dublin Dance Festival talks to Michael Seaver.

WILLIAM FORSYTHE decided to make a work about the war in Iraq not because he wanted to dramatise what was happening, but because he didn't know what actually was happening. In his Three Atmospheric Studies- the headline act at this year's Dublin Dance Festival - he lets the audience create the truth from the collection of text, movement and sounds, just as the story of war in Iraq must be constructed from images filtered through the media.

Set as a triptych, Three Atmospheric Studiesrevolves around the attempt by an Iraqi woman to find out about her arrested son. Her efforts to find the truth are thwarted by officialdom - a translator who alters information, a politician who tries to placate and a narrator who insists on discussing and describing two images rather than engaging with her plight. In the end, the mother is still uncertain as to the fate of her son.

"With all this fragmentary information you have to create a narrative," says Forsythe. "That's exactly what we are all doing with this war, trying to construct some sense from images." It's this erosion of truth, particularly at official level, that is central to the work. "What is especially annoying as an American citizen is that there are countless articles about the falsification and manipulation of information and yet no-one gets prosecuted," he says. "Why do those people who represent us not realise how wrong this is?"

Forsythe's inspiration came from parallels between two images: one a 16th century painting of the crucifixion by the artist Lucas Cranach the Elder and the other a recent Reuters photograph of soldiers carrying a wounded body in Iraq.

With its depiction of different time periods, the Cranach painting had a universality that resonated with the photograph. Looked at objectively, the painting depicts a mother in the Middle East mourning her son who was killed by local authorities under the command of an occupying army.

Three Atmospheric Studiesis also centred on the mother's plight and told from her point of view. "I'm not usually overtly political," he says. "I felt this more on a personal level, so I rather talk about how this might feel to another parent. I'm a parent. In the case of Mary, how did she feel when she sees that some soldiers had nailed her son to a board? What happens to you as a person?"

A former dancer with Joffrey Ballet and Stuttgart Ballet, Forsythe rose to prominence as artistic director of Frankfurt Ballet, creating conceptual work that pushed ballet's vocabulary to its limits. His works are now in the repertory of almost every major ballet company, including Paris Opéra Ballet, The Royal Ballet and the Kirov.

But in 2004, the Frankfurt city authorities decided it wasn't prepared to subvent the company and, in spite of international protest, it closed. Soon after, Forsythe formed a smaller 18-member group, The Forsythe Company, which is supported by the same city authorities in Frankfurt am Main, as well its state of Hesse, and the city of Dresden and its state of Saxony.

The first work he created with this new company was Three Atmospheric Studies, a rare political piece in an artform that has generally steered clear of political issues. There are exceptions, like Kurt Jooss' anti-war The Green Table, created as Hitler was rising to power in 1932.

American choreographer Paul Taylor's 2006 work Banquet of Vampiresdepicted Death as President George W. Bush. But although choreographers might engage with the anti-war movement, this militancy seldom makes it into their works, in the same way that when the AIDS epidemic was devastating the dance community in the 1990s, artists clambered to be part of performance benefit nights but rarely addressed the issue in their own choreography.

With a surfeit of dances about Iraq, Forsythe has attracted more attention than ever and although he is keen not to be portrayed as a rabble-rousing creator of agitprop, some just can't resist the temptation. The New York Timesquoted Forsythe in saying that the work was an "act of citizenship," a phrase re-quoted in reviews and features on both sides of the Atlantic.

"Quotes in articles are always in response to certain questions, but the question is always left out," he says with some exasperation. "I was asked something like 'are you protesting some hyperbolic provocation?' which I tried to ameliorate by saying it was just an act of citizenship, which it is on one level."

NEVERTHELESS SOME commentators and critics believe that Forsythe should steer clear of politics and in its short life, Three Atmospheric Studieshas been criticised as much for its subject matter as its merits as a work of art. He was the poster child for the future of ballet for many years and during this time his neo-classical works were admired from a safe distance in opera houses, even though you could crack a tooth on his conceptualism. Three Atmospheric Studies, with its intimate horrors, makes different demands on the audience.

"The first time it was made for just 75 people, three rows of 25, and they were just a metre away from the stage," says Forsythe, adding that in some ways the small stage at the Abbey Theatre will make the work easier to perform. This move away from the semaphoric choreography of the opera house has taken him into creating gallery installations. Here, the usual performance paradigms are shifted and the audience members are freed from their fixed seats and become more active participants.

Forsythe's unrealised installation Memorial, part of a series called The Defenders, was a room where there was a violent snowstorm of little pieces of paper, like theatre snow. On every piece of paper was printed the name of a civilian casualty from Iraq and when the viewer left the room, they were covered in these small bits of paper. "They would have to make the decision to dust themselves off, discard the paper on the ground and then walk out in the street. Or would they wear it on the street and have people ask questions or laugh or whatever." In spite of the simple concept, it wasn't technically possible to put into practice. ("You've no idea how difficult it was!")

In addition, the number of casualties grew to a point where the website stopped listing names and started printing case numbers.

"It's great to go to a memorial, but how are we ever in a public discourse with our sentiments and feelings about these situations? How do you bring home the idea of loss in numbers? It is very hard to make numbers emotional, but linking them with identities is perhaps a way. That's why when it became case numbers it became less personal, which was another reason we decided not to do it."

Human Writes was created for the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, where dancers are choreographically constrained as they transcribe the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Every mark on the paper must come from a physical restraint or resistance and the resulting scrawl is metaphoric for what Forsythe sees as the current status of the declaration.

He also created a Library of Indecision, a 70-volume collection of excuses to which people sign their name. On the cover of each is an excuse for doing nothing and it is worded like the Declaration of Independence, for example: "We, the undersigned, who believe all things will work out in the end . . ."

In the era of the easy-click online petition, the human body remains a more powerful force for change. One thousand bodies at a protest make a louder statement than one thousand names on a few sheets of paper and it's the primacy of the body that allows Forsythe to maintain the audiences' human and physical empathies with the painting of the crucifixion or with the mother in Three Atmospheric Studies.

But in these mass media-driven times, the challenge is acting on empathy. In the programme note, Peter Michalzik has written: "All of the globe's catastrophes are accessible, yet remain remote: all conflicts are open to the public, but they are unapproachable."

Three Atmospheric Studies is at the Abbey Theatre on Apr 17, 18 and 19. There will be a post-show discussion on Apr 18.

www.dublindancefestival.ie