New to the Glossary: A Pas de Multimedia

<First published online in the New York Times on March 21, 2008>

LONDON . The choreographer Christopher Wheeldon is always extending himself. So what if you had a problem with his last piece? In his next one he’s doing something completely different. And in this refusal to be pinned down we see much of what is admirable and promising about him.

His final work this season as New York City Ballet’s resident choreographer (“Rococo Variations,” new last month) was mainly an essay in the strictest traditions of ballet classicism: Tchaikovsky’s music, theme-and-variations format, an invocation of the shades of George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton.

His work for the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, “Electric Counterpoint” (also new last month - the man is certainly fecund), is entirely an essay in ballet postmodernism. It has music by both Bach and Steve Reich; it involves elaborate use of video and recorded speech (spoken by its four dancers); its accentuation of the ballet vocabulary puts more emphasis on transition, process and mechanics than on finish or illusion; it plays Pirandellian games with ideas of rehearsal and preperformance; and it ends as if about to begin.

More than any previous Wheeldon ballet I’ve encountered, “Electric Counterpoint,” which I saw on Wednesday night, shows a concern to develop a novel kind of dance theater. Not completely successful, it is so patently an experimental work that you applaud it just for what it’s trying to be. Not completely original, it earns admiration for the way it no sooner recalls some other innovative work than it shakes that memory off.

The piece opens the evening. The audience entering the Royal Opera House sees Jean-Marc Puissant’s bare décor onstage: a wall of different heights, fragmented into three separate angles, including four doors side by side. Only when the work begins do the famous Royal Opera House red curtains descend. They promptly part. An extended prologue follows.

One after another, four dancers (on Wednesday, Ricardo Cervera, Laura Morera, Deirdre Chapman, Martin Harvey; earlier, Sarah Lamb, Zenaida Yanowsky, Edward Watson and Eric Underwood) do “practice” movement, while behind them a film (the video artists are the well-known dance team Michael Nunn and William Trevitt, a k a the Ballet Boyz or George Piper Dances) shows a slightly blurred image that looks at first like each dancer’s mirror. Then the filmed dancer moves into divergent choreography, even other costuming. (I saw the second cast; the video showed the first. This only heightened the work’s interesting complexity.)

Meanwhile, as a pianist (Robert Clark) plays Bach keyboard music, a tape plays the dancers’ voices, speaking about rehearsal and performance, contemporary and classical (the contrasted issues that run through the piece).

The title “Electric Counterpoint” comes from a Steve Reich composition for solo guitar: this, played by James Woodrow, accompanies the main section of the choreography. The guitarist plays live against a collage of 11 recordings of himself. And the dancers move center-stage - now in solo, duets, trios or double duets - while video along the walls shows us multiple images of individual dancers also in movement.

The drama becomes an intricate interplay between present and past, live and recorded action. And it demonstrates a central truth of ballet, in which today’s dancers are forever set against their predecessors and the art’s ideals.

The video abounds in trompe l’oeil conceits. At one point it shows us four dancers moving to the four doors: these then open so that the live dancers - “our” dancers - walk through them. At another point we’re given a frieze of male and female dancers brilliantly accumulating from left to right: the combination of freeze-frame and motion is mesmerizingly poetic.

The dancing onstage shows both weight and lightness, strain as well as fluency. When Mr. Wheeldon quotes Balanchine, it is those lifts in which the ballerina has her hands placed, effortfully, on her partner’s, which in turn are on her hips; there are echoes of choreography by William Forsythe and others. These precedents must be deliberate: history-consciousness seems just part of the postmodernism of “Electric Counterpoint.”

But there are images that seem strikingly new, as when, in one pas de deux, Mr. Cervera “walks” Ms. Morera on point, his hands propelling her knees. At the end they appear in full costume, for the first time, as if the ballet were about to begin; or - as the costumes suggest - four different ballets.

Also on this quadruple bill was Balanchine’s “Tzigane,” staged by Suzanne Farrell (who created its lead role in 1975 and danced it at Covent Garden in New York City Ballet’s 1979 season), the first time the Royal Ballet has danced this work or has employed Ms. Farrell. The short ensemble with which “Tzigane” ends is Balanchine at his tritest. Not so, however, the long, dramatic solo and duet with which it opens.

Marianela Nuñez, dancing her second Farrell-Balanchine role in three months (the other was the radically different “Diamonds”), again proved herself a dancer of compelling musicality and acquired a new degree of stage authority. Though temperamentally a far sunnier dancer than Ms. Farrell, she seems to have learned from that Balanchine prima how to make space and time simultaneously dramatic. The intense Gypsy experimentalism of Ravel’s writing for solo violin (played by Sergey Levitin) becomes a thrillingly expansive mixture of flamboyant dance and gesture. Images of fate and mystery are woven through the solo and the succeeding duet. (Thiago Soares brings a strongly sexual charge to the male role.)

This program, well conducted by Barry Wordsworth, shows only a limited section of today’s Royal Ballet but reveals how good it can be in developing soloist and principal dancers. Ms. Lamb and Carlos Acosta were beautifully contrasted in Jerome Robbins’s “Afternoon of a Faun” duet, and not only in skin tones and hair coloring. She embodies academic ballet at its most refined; he has an animal quality both blunt and lithe.

Ms. Yanowsky brings a welcome dramatic weight to the role of Natalia Petrovna in Ashton’s “Month in the Country.” She is, however, the tallest dancer ever to have played this role, and some of the fine needlework of its choreography goes so against the grain of her dancing that it makes her look affected. Some roles in this 1976 ballet are now given as twee clichés. But Rupert Pennefather (playing Beliaev), by far the most gifted British male ballet dancer to have emerged in many years, and the appealing soloist Vanessa Palmer as the maid Katia bring music, action and acting right back into focus.

@New York Times, 2008