Voice of Dance

A Company For Specialists
Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company
City Center, New York, NY
November 28, 2007

By
ANNA KISSELGOFF
anna@voiceofdance.com
VoiceofDance.com 2007

Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company in Christopher Wheeldon's FoolsParadise. Photo by Erin Baiano.

It is too soon to write off Christopher Wheeldon. After 11 years of presenting his choreography at New York City Ballet and elsewhere, he remains a brilliant talent whose imagination is never out of sight.

Still, Wheeldon was off form in the New York debut season of Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company at City Center in October. Essentially, he was dragged down by loyalty to friends and acquaintances who -except for William Forsythe - are second rate choreographers or worse. In this context, one would have expected the Wheeldon works and a duet by Forsythe to stand out in relief. They did. But the mediocrity of the lesser pieces was dispiriting and affected the tone of both programs.

The dancers, mainly from New York City Ballet, were magnificent and the older Wheeldon works for City Ballet, the Royal Ballet and the Metropolitan Opera had been hailed in the past. Why was there no spark?

Wheeldon basically needs a large company where he can move platoons of dancers around as he did with amazing ingenuity in early pieces for City Ballet. In his chamber pieces created for large companies, he benefited from production values that were missing in his new troupe of pickup dancers.

Yet a large company is exactly what Wheeldon is fleeing. He is not the first choreographer to fashion his own creative outlet. It is hard to cast him as a Roland Petit: he does not have a kitchen cabinet of former Diaghilev collaborators (It is interesting, however, that both Wheeldon and Petit created a ballet based on Oscar Wilde's Nightingale and the Rose).

Morphoses is, rather, the latest in a line of current small ballet companies, usually but not always headed by a choreographer. These include Alonzo King's Lines Ballet; Complexions, directed by Dwight Rhoden and Desmond Richardson; Benjamin Millepied's touring group; Ballet Aspen/Santa Fe; Cedar Lake; Ballet Tech or Mandance, Eliot Feld's on and off pickup group and the George Piper Dancers in England, led by the Ballet Boyz (William Trevitt and Michael Nunn) who are Wheeldon's fellow Royal Ballet alumni and part of Morphoses.

Unfortunately, the Ballet Boyz seem to be Wheeldon's model. In 2003 in New York, they introduced each work with a rehearsal film and Morphoses mostly followed this format. A film clip of Darcey Bussell and Jonathan Cope rehearsing a pas de deux from Wheeldon"s Tryst suggested the dancers were humans like us. They flubbed a tricky lift while virtually lying on the floor. Onstage, they flubbed nothing and certainly Bussell is not like everybody. We come to see her because her artistry elevates her above the ordinary. A lecture demonstration is one thing. But a performance (art) should invite the audience into a different world.

Wheeldon generally inhabits this world and it is a world of poetic imagination, visible even in a new company that did not show him at his best. There were two weaknesses. One is that he does less well with commissioned music (Joby Talbot, James MacMillan) than with existing scores. The second is that while innovative partnering is his forte, his experiments can look like studio work, an impression carried away from his new FoolsParadise to the Talbot score.

Wheeldon has not done this kind of choreography for City Ballet and in fact, he has said he wanted to do new things. This is choreography that winds and unwinds relentlessly like a piece of string. It is so intricate in its web for trios, couples and groups that it can tire the eye or look like a bag of tricks. But it is also mesmerizing and its subtext is emotional. Two viewers told me they were very moved by a work in which relationships are subsumed within what looks like a plotless ballet.

Wheeldon said in a New York Times interview in 2003 that he "longed" for the story ballets of Kenneth MacMillan. But prior to the London and New York debuts of Morphoses (the programs differed slightly), he said he favored abstract ballets, which allowed viewers to read into them what they wished.

It seems foolhardy to read into them, as many did, that his choreography inherently mistreats women. Forsythe, the hero of the New York season, used to be attacked on the same grounds. Yet in the 21st century, the ballerina is not a Sleeping Beauty held up on a pedestal: in an era of post-Balanchine "leotard ballets," she has long been manipulated into shapes by her partner. For Wheeldon, she is part of the choreography's evolving shape.

In FoolsParadise, past and present members of New York City Ballet (Aesha Ash, Maria Kowroski, Teresa Reichlen, Wendy Whelan, Tyler Angle, Adrian Danchig-Waring, Gonzalo Garcia, Craig Hall and Edwaard Liang) embodied this continuum. For all its formal extremes of physical flexibility and constant shifts in phrasing, the ballet had a romantic edge. Caresses and embraces were absorbed into the tangled flow.

Wendy Whelan and Craig Hall of Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company. Photo by Erin Baiano.

This romantic side was was more explicit in There Where She Loved (Royal Ballet, 2000), an early piece where Wheeldon contrasts happy and unhappy love through alternating vocal music by Chopin (sung in Polish by Kate Vetter Cain) and by Kurt Weill (sung in German or French by Shelley Waite).

The images certainly depicted men (especially Hall) deserting or pushing women around. But one had only to listen to the Weill songs about men doing women wrong to find the springboard. The Chopin suggested young love (a classically-styled playful duet for City Ballet's Sterling Hyltin and Garcia) and also romantic angst as Anastasia Yatsenko of the Bolshoi and City Ballet's Ashley Bouder and Ashley Laracey were women abandoned. The piece was a bit simplistic until Kowroski gave as good as she got in a dramatically shaped encounter with Nunn, who looked like rough trade.

Kowroski, Whelan and Bouder, dancing in the same exceptional way they do in City Ballet, were the standouts of the season amid mostly top-rank dancers. One needs also to single out Bussell and Cope (Royal Ballet alumni) for their presence and sportsmanship in an acrobatic cameo from Wheeldon's larger Tryst (set to James MacMillan's music).

Atypically, there was too much position-to-position work here. Not so in Wheeldon's new Prokofiev Pas de Deux. Nehemiah Kish of the National Ballet of Canada, a solid dancer of masculine grace, and Alina Cojocaru (Royal Ballet) were the cast I saw. There was fluency, swiftness and sweetness here.

Out of context, Wheeldon's Dance of the Hours, a gloss on 19th-century style for the Metropolitan Opera's production of La Giaconda, bordered on parody (partly because of its grinning corps) but Bouder's powerfully expansive dancing saved the day.

There were two other familiar works. In Morphoses, one of Wheeldon's breakthrough leotard ballets to Ligeti's music at City Ballet, Whelan's astonishing energy and clarity embodied both form and content in a brave new world, where she was complemented by Hyltin, Hall (superb) and Liang. Mesmerics, performed by the Piper Dancers in New York in 2003, was a cut below. Its eight cellists on an occasionally darkened platform, playing Philip Glass, looked more charming than experimental. The Piper dancers Nunn, Trevitt and Oxana Panchenko as well as Yatsenko, Ash and Danchig-Waring streched like rubber bands. The choreography, if uneven, was food for the eye.

Wheeldon's choreography is different from Forythe's in its use of space and does not incorporate Forsythe's rebellion against ballet's centered body or partnering in which the man's palm knuckles up to his ballerina's knuckles above. Liang and Whelan, at her most flexible and elegant in a lampshade tutu, captured the always inventive movement in a pas de deux from Forsythe's Slingerland. It was a transformative experience.

Depth was missing from Liang's respectable Schubert duet, Vicissitude and the British choregraphers. In Satie Stud, the problematic Michael Clarke promised much with Trevitt as a soloist standing on one leg in a bath towel but delivered little. Liv Lorent, a newcomer here, offered a duet both acrobatic and tender but again one-dimensional.

Forsythe and Wheeldon work on a much higher level but these programs risked boring their audience. Although trying to reach a wider public, Wheeldon may be creating a company for specialists.