Frankfurt Ballet fights closure amid claims of dirty tricks and smears

William Forsythe, classical ballet's most innovative and sought-after choreographer, has sent out a worldwide appeal to save his acclaimed Frankfurt Ballet from closure.

Forsythe learnt from well-placed supporters that the demise of the company was to be announced at a press conference next week, which prompted his SOS. After the news conference was abruptly cancelled without explanation, he has been summoned to a meeting with the Frankfurt culture minister on Monday morning.

"But," says Forsythe, whose contract is due for renewal in November, "he refuses to tell me whether I'm to be fired or rehired."

The uncertainty hanging over the company's existence comes after almost two decades in which Forsythe, 52, has elevated the previously provincial Frankfurt Ballet to one of the most talked-about companies in the world.

He believes that over recent weeks he has been subject to a smear campaign orchestrated by the city's politicians. Comments in the press have claimed that he was burnt out and that audiences had lost interest. He has also had private warnings that he and his company, which has been receiving a subsidy of 13m marks (£4m) a year from Frankfurt, were to be removed in favour of more traditional classical ballet.

Forsythe pointed out yesterday that Frankfurt Ballet achieves an average attendance of 96 per cent and is the most cost-efficient of the city's subsidised cultural institutions. The company's 38 dancers appear in two city venues – the Frankfurt Opera House and the smaller, avant-garde TAT – and tour widely. Their explosive mix of deconstructed classicism and mixed-media theatre attracts a young and fashionable audience, and drew crowds to Sadler's Wells in November.

Forsythe himself has been compared to Balanchine, the 20th century's greatest chore-ographer, updating the language of ballet with dangerous off-kilter extremes and expanded shapes.

He has more choreographic invitations internationally than he can accept, and the legendary Kirov Ballet sent a group of dancers to Frankfurt last year to learn the Forsythe technique.

According to the newspaper Die Welt, Frankfurt is clamping down on innovative artistic companies in general because the city is in dire financial straits. But Forsythe also sees his company's projected closure against a background of creeping conservatism in German politics, the result of commercial, monied influence.

He contends that the people wielding this influence believe there are two categories of art, eigentlich or uneigentlich – "correct art" or "incorrect art" – and Forsythe's work belongs to the second.

Forsythe sees the campaign as stemming from a political agenda designed to eject "incorrect art" and please the conservative tastes of influential sponsors and patrons. "They want ballet as part of the fine-dining experience, something like Swan Lake that won't disturb their dinner conversation or give them indigestion."