A Program in Four Parts, With One a Farewell
<First published online in the New York Times on February 9, 2008>
In leaving the job of resident choreographer of New York City Ballet, Christopher Wheeldon seems to be taking up another as traveling choreographer to the world. “Rococo Variations,” his City Ballet farewell, had its premiere on Thursday; his next premiere, for the Royal Ballet in London, opens on Feb. 28; his first work for the Royal Danish Ballet opens in Copenhagen on May 8; and a second season of his own company, Morphoses, presumably with further premieres, is to occur on both sides of the Atlantic, from July to October.
Mr. Wheeldon, Anglo-American in most of his career to date (he has been choreographing regularly for the Royal Ballet since 1996), long ago suggested in his work that he was an heir to the traditions of both George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton, the greatest New York and London masters of ballet choreography. “Rococo Variations,” an extended all-dance quartet for two young ballerinas (Sterling Hyltin and Sara Mearns, dressed by Holly Hynes in charmingly old-fashioned near-knee-length tutus in brown with gold trim) and their male partners (Giovanni Villalobos and Adrian Danchig-Waring), recalls aspects of each of those dead masters.
In expansive moments of supported adagio, it employs flashes of Balanchine’s grandeur. Its brisk conclusion recalls facets of the brilliant pas de quatre that Ashton added to “Swan Lake,” and earlier, at least two passages of partnering quote figures from Ashton ballets like “A Month in the Country” (as when a ballerina is propelled through rapidly traveling pas de bourrées by her partner, whose hands are on her waist). That’s good; when another choreographer once told Ashton that his new work was full of quotations from Ashton ballets, the old master happily replied, “That’s what they’re there for.”
The score, Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme (1876), a concertante construction for cello and full orchestra, suggests many choreographic models, notably by Balanchine, who specialized in Tchaikovsky and theme-and-variations scores. Fred Zlotkin’s playing of the cello part on Thursday for the conductor Paul Mann was very much like, as the British would say, the curate’s egg: good in parts. (The other parts sounded distinctly ill tuned.) And the same goes for Mr. Wheeldon’s choreography.
The ballet has the important virtue of giving Ms. Hyltin and Ms. Mearns a new stylistic distinction: Ms. Hyltin’s rapid delicacy took on a new power, and Ms. Mearns’s lusciousness of tone acquired a new kind of measured precision. But the two women are not so physically alike that they gain from being given so many passages in parallel unison.
And Mr. Wheeldon doesn’t rise to the nature of the theme-and-variations format as well as choreographers like Jerome Robbins or Twyla Tharp (never mind Balanchine or Ashton). Variations on a theme are an essay in musical alchemy. The composer keeps saying: Did you think it could become this? Now that? The results are a celebration of protean diversity, and that’s how choreographers have often responded: Look how this dance can change and change again! But although Mr. Wheeldon gives alternating solo and duet passages for his ballerinas, he doesn’t turn all the music’s changes of tone into drama.
His men don’t have much life beyond their function as cavaliers; his women seem to find completion only when they rejoin their men; and the big moments, as usual with Mr. Wheeldon, are demonstrations of inventive partnering. Ms. Mearns has a gestural motif that suggests intimate need as she privately presses a hand to the side of her groin; yet in expressive terms this seems merely a digression, and soon Mr. Danchig-Waring is carrying her horizontally across his back, like a tabletop, into the wings. There are many such details that will reward a second viewing. At first viewing, however, they don’t add up to a compelling structure.
If choreography is just dance making, Mr. Wheeldon is skillful, if seldom remarkably individual. If choreography is a form of theater - and surely it is - then Mr. Wheeldon almost never displays any dramatic flair in showing how dance energy can keep revealing human beings in new ways. That gesture for Ms. Mearns and that flat-table exit look like mere effects.
This is a severe way to speak of Mr. Wheeldon’s gifts when you compare “Rococo Variations” with “The Chairman Dances,” which immediately precedes it on the “Inspirations” quadruple bill. This thin pseudo-Maoist pastiche made little impression when Peter Martins first choreographed it 20 years ago, and it is astonishing to find that so dull a piece is still being revived. Listen and at almost every point you find much more color, energy, propulsion and rhythmic complexity in John Adams’s score than in the tedious and imprecise minimalist repetitions of the all-female choreography.
The program begins and ends with Balanchine ballets, “Divertimento From ‘La Baiser de la Fée’ ” and “Stars and Stripes.” Neither is among Balanchine’s greatest. Yet either is an object lesson in both dance making and dance theater.
Full of corny fun though “Stars and Stripes” seems to be, it’s also full of surprises, as when the first regiment of 12 female Corcoran Cadets suddenly subdivides into subgroups of three, four and five, and then these uneven subgroups become rotating spokes of an irregular wheel. Or when the 12 Thunder and Gladiator men of the Third Campaign and their leader (Daniel Ulbricht on Thursday), in a triangular wedge formation and jumping in unison, suddenly turn to do their dance facing the back.
As for the “Baiser,” it is a pure-dance idyll that mysteriously turns tragic, and it is dotted with dance-drama masterstrokes, each of which unforgettably changes the stage world before us. The greatest is surely the moment when the heroine arrives out of nowhere in the hero’s arms, center stage though near the back, in a deep and ardent backbend. And then, as he holds her there, gazing down to her face, her legs start slowly and hugely to walk forward. This woman was an innocent, a bride, but who is she now? And what are her needs?
Watching this, as so often when watching the Balanchine repertory, I think it is reasonable to suggest that Balanchine and Beckett were the two supreme dramatists of the 20th century.
@New York Times, 2008