MORPHOSES - THE WHEELDON COMPANY
New York City Center
New York, NY
October 19 and 20, 2007
by Michael Popkin
copyright 2007 by Michael Popkin
When Christopher Wheeldon appeared in front of the curtain before his new company's Friday evening and Saturday afternoon shows and thanked the artistic directors who had lent him his dancers, most prominent among the tributes he provided was that for Peter Martins, whom he properly credited not only for allowing stars like Wendy Whelan, Teresa Reichlen, Sterling Hyltin and Maria Kowroski to appear, but also for "supporting and fostering his career" as a dancer and a choreographer at City Ballet. What then followed on the stage, though, showed that the debt owed to Martins was, if anything, even greater than the one acknowledged - because it was a stylistic debt in addition to everything else. To the viewer familiar with Peter Martins' choreography and with Wheeldon's work over the years at NYCB, the roots of his new company's style were unmistakable.
In the natural world, one way that organisms reproduce is by budding. This means that, instead of reproducing sexually, a creature simply forms a little copy of itself at its margin and allows it to swim away for an independent life of its own. The organism produced is not its parent but a kind of "second self" - it has at once the parent's identity but now an independent existence and the promise of a life of its own. Watching Wheeldon's new company, it was hard to resist the impression that such was the case with Morphoses - the new company's name - and City Ballet. The essential character of the two entities: their styles, choreographies and even the dancers had stayed the same; through Wheeldon's agency NYCB had simply formed another smaller self at its margin and set it swimming into the world. At the moment of birth the identity was nearly total. What it will become (and actually if it will become - the rhetoric about Wheeldon "standing the ballet world on its head" is extreme but the new creature is extraordinarily modest: apart from three people in Lourdes Lopez's living room the troupe doesn't actually appear to exist between performances and its next program is presumably a few nights in London several months from now) remains to be seen.
How to get underneath all the hype and assess Wheeldon's venture on the stage? One way is to articulate what things actually looked like, concentrating as much as possible on direct perceptions. The conclusion to be drawn from this? Most of the choreography was at adagio tempi; the music was ominous, modern chords below and discordant squeaky strings on top; the dancers did quiet, tensile, t'ai chi-like acrobatic movements to accompany this. There was a lot of push-and-pull; a fair amount of awkward looking partnering; a repeated signature movement was for one or more of the men to go to the floor and partner a woman while lying there, lifting her above himself horizontally, often using his feet as well as his hands to support the ballerina in the lift. There wasn't a lot of emotional content. The material was anti-lyrical. Wheeldon's early ballet "Morphoses" that led off the second program - the ballet the company is named for - appeared to be both a masterpiece and the template for everything else: a masterpiece because something actually seemed to happen in this ballet between the dancers, the work had an inner logic that held it together; it went somewhere. But, while "Morhposes" the ballet was the theme, the rest of Wheeldon's appeared to be lesser variations. The ballets that closed the two programs - "Fool's Paradise" on Friday night and "Mesmerics" on Saturday afternoon - showed that Wheeldon has a lot to learn in planning evening length programs (something he's never had to do before) as each seemed montonous, repetitive and dull. An experienced impresario or director would never have structured a program like this.
Watching this, I couldn't help thinking Diamond Project and Peter Martins. If in a vacuum I were to give you the following clues: "City Ballet"; "modern score"; "sexy adagios by couples in leotards"; "lighting extremely dim but with bright spotlights"; "couples switching partners as a structural device"; "inventive sometimes awkward partnering"; "musicians on the stage on a raised dais" . . . etc. . . . wouldn't you think of a slew of Peter Martins' ballets, in particular such recent ones as "Tala Gaisma" and "Eros Piano"?
The odd thing is that, while Wheeldon has worked successfully in a number of styles at City Ballet - some more or less identifiable as company styles and some more unique and personal to himself - the ballets presented at City Center were the ones most in the company style and with the least of his own touch. Ballets like "Morphoses" and "Polyphonia" have their visual roots in a cross between the style Balanchine employed in "Episodes" and Peter Martins more recent work as a whole and represent an identifiable NYCB brand: impersonal, hypnotic, and autonomic. But besides this kind of thing, Wheeldon has created a whole series of longer works at City Ballet that are programmatic, if not narrative in content, and that are in the context of the company's total opus more individually his own stylistically. "Scenes de Ballet" (his first completely successful large scale work), "Carousel," "Variations Serieuses," "Carnival of the Animals," "An American in Paris," "VIII" (made for Britain's Royal Ballet and also performed at ABT), and most recently "The Nightingale and the Rose" are all programmatic or narrative ballets and are on the whole his most successful works. In them, the use of narrative provides Wheeldon with a structure that avoids the aimlessness and monotony present in both "Fool's Paradise" and "Mesmerics" at City Center; and also because of the content, he allows himself to be lyrical and charming. The musical choices are, similarly, more varied, rhythmic and danceable. There's an old world British whimsy at times that also seems to be part of his make-up.
It was this strand of his work that was completely missing at City Center but I hope he won't abandon it. One can well understand how an enterprise that stresses that it's going to be "young," "sexy" and "avante garde" will have a hard time accomodating more traditional structures and themes; and also that a company that says it aims at employing at most twenty dancers in several years time will have a hard time staging larger ensemble workds. But but that's just where Wheeldon has to be careful not to let his marketing blurb limit what he does. Ballet without traditionally danceable rhythms, lyricism, and warmth; without charm and personality is ultimately a dead end. Dance is as impulsive and natural to the body as song is to the voice. It's out there and doesn't have to be invented. All of the arts have recently been mired in the trap of having to stage an artistic "revolution" on a continuous institutional basis. The view of the artist as a revolutionary that came in with Romanticism hasn't really left us since and has only been reinforced by the more recent marriage of art and fashion (which also has to change every season). It's only by avoiding this trap that Wheeldon is going to go places worth our following.
copyright 2007 by Michael Popkin
Photos:
Top: "Mesmerics" Photo: Erin Baino
Bottom: "Morposes" Photo: Erin Baino
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