Three years ago, when Christopher Wheeldon left the security of his position as Resident Choreographer at the New York City Ballet to form his own small company, Morphoses, his head was full of extravagant dreams about making classical ballet new for the 21st century. He even fulfilled some of them. But the economic downturn has thwarted his progress. Ballet companies, no matter how modest in scale, cost major money, and donors are feeling poor these days. Which brings us to the nagging question of whether or not Morphoses is really worth saving—at all costs, so to speak.
One can only look at the current evidence. Morphoses just played its third engagement at the City Center, offering a repertoire of dances old and new in two different programs. Wheeldon's own ballets dominated but did not overwhelm work by other choreographers, and Morphoses unveiled its first commission. That was the Australian choreographer Tim Harbour's Leaving Songs, to music composed for the dance by Ross Edwards. Unfortunately, it didn't amount to much. How could it, given its props: a colony of translucent, faintly iridescent balloons manipulated by the dancers to help indicate the fragility of life and loving relationships and a corresponding sense of hope, as the choreographer suggested, in one of those annoying videos with which Morphoses introduces each dance on its programs.
The choreography, largely in a regretful legato vein, was pallid even during a single allegro passage and meaninglessly studded with vehement moves—man slings woman across back—and angular gestures for the arms. Though Harbour stretches his dancers out on the floor a lot, signaling his modern-dance tendencies, his choreography retains a balletic look, even though it avoids entire departments of the classical ballet vocabulary such as petit allegro, with its sparkling beats, guaranteed to raise the happiness level.
Alexei Ratmansky's 2004 Boléro, to the mesmerizing Ravel score it's impossible to elude, was clever enough to make a veteran ballet-goer endure the music once again. A sextet for bright-spirited athletic youth, it showed off the choreographer's gift for making moves and patterns going on in the background as fascinating as what's going on in front. The piece is a relatively small number, but one must admire Wheeldon's wit in including the choreographer who is considered his only rival.
Morphoses, Softly as I Leave You. Photo by Bill Cooper.
Lightfoot León, a husband-and-wife team of dance-makers based at Nederlands Dans Theater, contributed the duet version of their melodramatic Softly as I Leave You. It depicts a woman imprisoned by her dark emotions in a vertical wooden box little larger than a coffin. She struggles violently to escape, battering her body against its confines. The guy who's the catalyst of her woes tries to intervene, and the two launch into an extended duet—in and out of the box—expressing the ever-fluctuating love-hate emotions so often confessed to a couples counselor. Ms. and Mr. Wrong don't have a happy ending; she, no doubt wisely, and, as promised, softly, opts out. The piece was played to the hilt, by Drew Jacoby and Rubinald Pronk, and I agreed with the audience that found its searing psychodrama welcome, at least as a change of pace.
Wheeldon's contribution to the engagement's repertory consisted of his 2002 Continuum, one of his most admired pieces, with its coolly objective moves—some of them spidery or otherwise eccentric—responding to Ligeti music; last year's Commedia (to Stravinsky's Pulchinella Suite), which makes the mistake of conjuring up commedia dell'arte features without rooting them in a story; and the new Rhapsody Fantaisie.
Morphoses, Rhapsody. Photo by Erin Baiano.
Publicity efforts made much of Rhapsody's scenery, by Los Carpinteros, which was touted as an "installation." As actually realized, it consisted of funereal wide black side curtains and, unfathomably, a backdrop studded with red and white windsocks.
To busily lush piano pieces by Rachmaninoff, a dozen dancers in Francisco Costa's blindingly red outfits—harem pants for the bare-chested men, flirty tunics for the women—twelve dancers perform vignettes that accent classical moves with pedestrian gestures, some vague references to "ethnic" dance genres, and the occasional gymnastic feat. Some of the gestures are as bewildering as the windsocks. Repeatedly, for instance, one person in a duo puts his hand atop his partner's head and bends it downward, without so much as a hint about mood. Should the action be understood as affectionate or aggressive?
For the most part, the ballet's movement streams freely—in contrast to Wheeldon's more typical laying out his moves with a chess player's deliberation—but the choreography never discloses the impulse for the flow. In truth, it never reveals the impulse for anything that's happening. This makes it hard to follow, to put it civilly, and yields no meaning for the viewer who has learned from, say, Balanchine's Concerto Barocco or Ashton's Monotones, that purely abstract ballet can be profoundly expressive.
Among the dancers—essentially a pick-up group with some loyal repeaters—Wendy Whelan, often referred to as Wheeldon's muse, made the material look as if there's much more subtlety and depth in Wheeldon's pieces than there really is. While there are many accomplished dancers in Morphoses, none of them can yet work Whelan's magic.
The speciousness of Rhapsody Fantaisie was enough to push one toward the verdict that Morphoses as an institution may not be worth rescuing in these difficult economic times. To judge by this latest piece, Wheeldon isn't moving in a direction that makes his work seem worth sustaining a troupe largely dedicated to showcasing it. Couldn't he compromise, at least for some years, one wonders, by setting his old repertoire and creating new ballets for the many prominent companies that have already welcomed him with open arms?
Rhapsody Fantaisie only underlined the fact that Wheeldon's ballets rarely seem to cohere because there is actually no connective material in them. They're just one bright idea after another. They're inventive, god knows—Wheeldon fattens his c.v. with genre-hopping, subject-hopping, and manipulating the classical vocabulary in peculiar (even perverse) ways in his effort to make it forward-looking—but more often than not, the various elements of a given work don't relate, organically, to one another. The same is true when you consider Wheeldon's repertoire as a whole; it doesn't add up to a unique vision.
The ballets also seem to lack sincerity. You admire the craft immensely, but you don't believe in what the dance claims to be telling you, not for a minute. Here, I guess, I shouldn't be saying you; I should be saying I. A deft artisan, Wheeldon is enormously popular. Audiences and critics, yearning for the next Balanchine, put their chips on him early on, as they've subsequently done with Alexei Ratmansky. I prefer Ratmansky's work. It's as inventive as Wheeldon's, but more naturally so; its concerns are very human. And, mercifully, it doesn't demonstrate a career agenda. Still, neither choreographer shows the genius of Balanchine. Sadly, choreographic genius is an extremely rare commodity.
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