Giovanni Villalobos, Sterling Hytlin, Sara Mearns, and Adrian Danchig-Waring of New York City Ballet in Christopher Wheeldon's Rococo Variations. Photo by Paul Kolnik.
Christopher Wheeldon left his post as New York City Ballet's resident choreographer this month the way he came in - as a highly gifted dance maker with a special grasp of ballet's classical vocabulary.
Happily, he chose to mark this official departure (he may return as a guest) with Rococo Variations, an inventive and beautiful ode to that idiom.
After Wheeldon moved in 1993 as a dancer from the Royal Ballet to City Ballet, where he began choreographing for the company, it was easy to say he was influenced by George Balanchine or Frederick Ashton. Yet Rococo Variations (given its premiere on Feb .7 at the New York State Theater) recalls neither in its originality.
A chamber ballet for two couples and exceptionally danced, the work mixes fleeting Romantic imagery with ballet's classical syntax, reflecting the Romantic and Classical currents of its score - Tchaikovsky's Variations on a Rococo Theme for Cello and Orchestra.
In recent years, Wheeldon has sought to evoke emotional situations or a dramatic subtext. But Rococo is a pure-dance neo-classical piece whose value is in its language and structures. The relationships among its dancers should not be over-interpreted.
Here, Wheeldon dazzles with playfulness and intricacy in partnering and his use of unison, symmetry and mirror dances. The undoing is as rich as the doing. The mesmerizing performers, seen more often as two pairs within a quartet, pour their dancing into double duets, single duets and a few solos, with an occasional and fleeting partner swap. There is one pause when the music allows it; the technical difficulties require continuous stamina beneath an elegant veneer.
Holly Hynes has costumed the dancers in stylized 18th-century dress, Sara Mearns and Sterling Hyltin wear knee-length bellshaped brown gowns with golden trim. Adrian Danchig-Waring and Giovanni Villalobos, their respective partners, are in tights with vest and blouses.
The score, for a reduced orchestra and cello soloist (City Ballet's Fred Zlotkin) is played in its standard version with a theme and seven variations. Wheeldon repeats certain movement motifs but like Balanchine in a grand Tchaikovsky ballet, Theme and Variations, he stresses the newness of each variation rather than the theme.
Above all, Rococo is a startling exploration of the unexpected. The two couples often dance the same steps but Mearns and Danchig-Waring are more equal among equals. They enter first from a downstage wing. Mearns brushes her skirt as she does later and he drops to the floor, leg extended forward. It an old ballet pose, familiar as Pavlova's deep curtsy in The Dying Swan, not to mention Swan Lake and it also the way the Bluebird ends his solo in Soviet productions of The Sleeping Beauty.
Here, when the men drop into the deep curtsy, they barely bend forward although curved backs appear elsewhere in the choreography. Hyltin is led in by Villalobos, younger dancers who soon do the same steps as the other pair, especially when the celllist makes himself heard. Yet no dancer is identified solely with the cellist.
Mearns and Danching-Waring get the first duet, more convoluted than the swifter lively one for the second couple. Wheeldon's use of technique is unconventional. Within a phrase, a woman unexpectedly changes from one supporting leg to another after she has accelerated her dancing and her partner catches up to fold her into an embrace.
There is a perfumed suggestion (but barely that) of 18th-century games of love. Danchig-Waring and Mearns, evoke a more experienced pair if only through the surprises of their choreography. When the cello zigzags, he bends over and exits in reverse as she lies flat across his back. It is tempting to compare this image to the way a man holds a woman upside down as a metaphor for a couple's relationship in Jerome Robbins's In the Night.
Sara Mearns and Adrian Danchig-Waring of New York City Ballet in Christopher Wheeldon's Rococo Variations. Photo by Paul Kolnik.
Yet again, relationships are not what Rococo is about. The unexpected is exactly what it is, especially when it recurs. Danchig-Waring exits with Mearns on his back not once but twice. It is not for the viewer to ask why or why Mearns smooths her dress just before as previously. The choreography, keyed to the music, has its own logic in alogic ( avant-garde Russian poets used to like that).
The fast and furious finale has the dancers darting from side to side in arabesque, deliberately and amazingly out of phase with each other. They are still at it as the curtain is lowered: a tour de force to be enjoyed for its own sake!
Another outstandingly danced work the same evening was Balanchine's wistful "Divertimento from Le Baiser de la fée." Balanchine spent 40 years educating a public not to read a story into his plotless works. Not everybody learned the lesson.
Baiser however is a distillation of one of his earlier ballets that actually had a story based on Hans Christian Andersen's Ice Maiden. The choreography in this abstract version has a subtext about a village lad separated from his sweetheart. Benjamin Millepied evoked tenderness in his strong partnering and then miraculously brought out the poetry of mysterious loss in the solo Balanchine created for Helgi Tomasson. Megan Fairchild, a promising dancer who had seemed to reach a plateau in her career, brought out all the precision of Balanchine's detailed footwork as few have. Art is technique as Balanchine used to say. This was a breathtaking performance because it was so expertly danced.
Like Wheeldon, Nikolaj Hübbe has left New York City Ballet, where he danced since 1992. Apparently, he will return this spring as a guest. The adoring public, however, was only told that he has become artistic director of the Royal Danish Ballet; City Ballet staged the mother of all farewells for this dancer, beloved of fellow dancers and audiences alike.
Hübbe adjusted easily to the company despite a few technical hitches in his early years. Occasionally, he danced Balanchine his way, with an extra forcefulness. But the integrity of his performance was never in doubt. This was manifest in this farewell on Feb.10, when he danced Balanchine's Apollo and Western Symphony, and also in Peter Martins's Zakouski, which was created for him. He sang ""Cool" from Robbins's West Side Story Suite." Most interesting was the way he staged Flower Festival in Genzano for two very young dancers. Hübbe was trained at the Royal Danish Ballet but not all Danish balletmasters have made such stylistic sense of this Bournonville pas de deux. Kathryn Morgan was sweet and shy, catching the quality of the head turns without the usually offensive irony; David Prottas was nothing but amazing in his leaps and precise leg beats and overall style. Hübbe will be missed but he left City Ballet a wonderful gift.
