A First Turn for Wheeldon and Company

<First published online in the New York Times on August 13, 2007>

VAIL, Colo., Aug. 11 — Could any new ballet company have begun with more good will and eager applause than Christopher Wheeldon’s Morphoses? At Friday’s inaugural performance at the Vail International Dance Festival in Colorado, almost all of the six dances by the new troupe were greeted by instant standing ovations from large parts of the audience.

From this start Morphoses now goes on to seasons at Sadler’s Wells in London (Sept. 19-23) and New York City Center (Oct. 17-21), each featuring a live orchestra and a different selection of international ballet stars. In the past 12 months alone Mr. Wheeldon, 34, has choreographed for the Royal Ballet in London, the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow and the New York City Ballet. Morphoses is already listed as one of Sadler’s Wells guest resident companies, and it has plans to return to Vail in 2008 and later years.

The name (stress on the first syllable) means “changes,” and not just in the Ovid or I Ching senses. Morphoses, the publicity makes plain, hopes to change the future of ballet. Be it noted that its executive director is a woman, the former City Ballet principal Lourdes Lopez.

“Polyphonia,” the opening ballet in Vail, showed at once what the fuss is about. Mr. Wheeldon had shown signs of choreographic promise, talent and imagination in the 1990s (he made ballets for New York City Ballet, for which he danced, and the Royal Ballet, at whose school he was trained), but his “Polyphonia” (2001) displayed — and still displays — true, and rare, authority.

From the first, it combines acrobatic and technical excitement with intricate classical order; in Vail you could feel how immediately it commanded the audience’s attention and respect. Amazingly, it achieves this to a collage of intensely modernist piano pieces by Ligeti. The first of these is “Désordre,” and Mr. Wheeldon’s mastery is unmistakable in the way he sets four couples in elaborate choreographic order to its near-cacophonous organized disorder.

When “Polyphonia” was new, it was just what the doctor ordered for ballet worldwide. It handled the classical vocabulary of Balanchine (in particular), Ashton and others without being inhibited or retro; it has a constant supply of inventiveness. And it is unmistakably well built: here, as elsewhere in Mr. Wheeldon’s repertory, you see motifs returning when you least expect them, so that you feel the happy surprise of pattern falling into place.

Since its New York City Ballet premiere Mr. Wheeldon has staged it for eight other companies around the world, using 144 dancers in various casts. It is hard to think what other post-Balanchine ballet has been so immediately successful. The Morphoses casting reflects this, with members of City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet and Hamburg Ballet.

The other four items on the Vail program ranged musically from Ponchielli to Arvo Pärt. “The Dance of the Hours” ballet, made in October for New York’s Metropolitan Opera production of Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda,” shows Mr. Wheeldon in his most traditionally classical mode, but still individual and charming. As the audience starts to recognize the music it knows from such comic contexts as Disney’s “Fantasia” (the ostrich-hippo ballet) and Alan Sherman’s “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah,” it expects to giggle.

But Mr. Wheeldon’s trick is to lead viewers back into what’s genuinely delectable about this music (which was one of Toscanini’s concert favorites). The eight corps de ballet women are given the brightest, most fragrant choreography of all, and each has her individual part. The male dancer has several brilliant passages, and the ballerina has in particular one ebullient diagonal that is irresistible in the way it brings one piquant musical phrase to physical life. This ballet’s principal dancers are Letizia Giuliani (who was in the Met original) and Gonzalo Garcia (the San Francisco Ballet dancer who is joining New York City Ballet).

“Polyphonia” had introduced the Hamburg ballerina Hélène Bouchet and Thiago Bordin, for whom Mr. Wheeldon has made “Prokofiev Pas de Deux.” The Vail audience was given an official preview of this rapturous mood study, which will have its Morphoses world premiere at Sadler’s Wells.

It also saw an unfinished, unnamed work now called “New Wheeldon,” set to music by Jody Talbot, for two black-white couples (Aesha Ash and Mr. Garcia, Craig Hall and Wendy Whelan): this complex chamber-scale ensemble is also scheduled for a Sadler’s Wells premiere. “After the Rain,” an especially popular essay in sustained lyricism set to music by Pärt and first performed with New York City Ballet in 2005, closed this Vail program. All these works reflect Mr. Wheeldon’s keen musical sense, responding to both pulse and legato flow in each score and highlighting its architecture.

Showing that Morphoses is not exclusively a vehicle for Mr. Wheeldon’s work, the program included the world premiere of “Vicissitude,” a pas de deux for Maria Kowroski and Tyler Angle choreographed by Edwaard Liang to the andante con moto from Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” quartet, with the death-maiden ideas lyrically connected. (It has been announced that William Forsythe, Michael Clark and the Ballet Boyz will also contribute work to the company.)

Mr. Wheeldon’s talent can be large enough to rivet an audience for the whole of a program, as was demonstrated in 2003 when San Francisco Ballet presented a Wheeldon triple bill (“There Where She Loves,” “Continuum” and “Rush”) at the Edinburgh Festival. The Vail Morphoses program, however, shows his excessive fondness for intense male-female partnering in general and lifts in particular. The motto for most of his women seems to be “stand by your man.” These women are striking as long as men are holding onto them, but there are several “sensitively” bland passages in some pas de deux when men and women do the same steps without much initiative. Often the women are less purposeful when given the rare chance to dance alone.

And though Mr. Wheeldon is a genuinely gifted dance maker, it’s yet unclear just how substantial or imaginative Wheeldon dance theater will prove as a genre. Certainly Morphoses is welcome. It is also important. But it will be valuable most if it helps Mr. Wheeldon himself to build on what he has achieved.

@New York Times, 2007.