In the Ear, Out the Foot

By Christopher Porterfield Sunday, May 02, 2004
    • Not many people in life," says Christopher Wheeldon, "have been lucky enough to fall into what they're meant to be or meant to do." Wheeldon is emphatically one of the lucky ones. He seemed to know where he was headed even at age 8, when he devised a rudimentary Swan Lake in which little girls hatched into cygnets from giant eggs in a school gym in the provincial town of Yeovil, England. If he could have dreamed up a future for himself then, it would have been exactly what has come true. Today he is the ballet world's most celebrated and sought-after choreographer — the figure who, more than any other in the past 20 or 30 years, seems likely to join the ranks of such greats as George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton and Jerome Robbins.

    What delights critics and audiences alike about Wheeldon's work is that while steeped in classical ballet, it has a fresh, contemporary spirit. He employs the traditional ballet steps and moves but adds blithely inventive twists, intricate turns and unusual lifts and balances, coaxing his dancers to use all surfaces of their bodies as points of connection. And he does so with no awkward straining for effect. "He isn't trying to shock or stun, like so many young choreographers, but simply to please," says critic Clive Barnes. "He has what every major choreographer has — innate musicality. It's a seamless process. The music goes in at the ear and comes out at the foot."


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    "He's just a major talent," says Helgi Tomasson, artistic director of the San Francisco Ballet, for which Wheeldon has created several works. "His range is already very broad. Considering what he has accomplished at this early age, it will be exciting to see what he can go on to do."

    Wheeldon's latest piece, Shambards, will be premiered this Saturday by the New York City Ballet (NYCB), the company for which he has been resident choreographer since 2001. Set to a craggy, dissonant score commissioned from Scottish composer James MacMillan, it evokes themes and dances from Scotland's romantic past — only to undercut and break them down, sometimes harshly. (Hint: think of the work's title as two words.) "The idea is to explore romantic loss, with its underlying discordancy and stress," says Wheeldon. But, he adds brightly, in its rugged climaxes, the ballet "has its Braveheart moments too."

    Having trained at London's Royal Ballet School and served two years in the Royal Ballet's corps, Wheeldon showed up as a 20-year-old visitor at daily classes at NYCB in 1993. Peter Martins, NYCB's ballet master in chief, thought he was acquiring a promising dancer, but when Wheeldon showed him videotapes of the ballets he had been making since he was a kid, Martins realized he had found something much rarer. For the next seven seasons, Wheeldon juggled dancing and choreography, until he finally chose choreography full-time and Martins shrewdly locked him up by creating the title resident choreographer.

    Wheeldon's true breakout began in 2001 with Polyphonia, a dazzlingly imaginative suite set to the jagged piano music of contemporary Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti. Other companies and other styles soon beckoned. There was a richly rendered A Midsummer Night's Dream for Denver's Colorado Ballet; another spiky, witty Ligeti work, Continuum, for the San Francisco Ballet; a fairy-tale treatment of Stravinsky's Firebird for the Boston Ballet. Like Balanchine before him, Wheeldon ventured onto Broadway, creating dances for the 2002 musical Sweet Smell of Success. It was a dud, but it led to a collaboration with Success's star, John Lithgow, who wrote and narrated Wheeldon's nimble, charming setting of Carnival of the Animals for NYCB last year.

    Whether the work is light or serious, abstract or narrative, Wheeldon unabashedly strives to make it entertaining. "I'm constantly thinking, Is this worth everyone's time? Is this worth everyone's penny?" he says. "But I try really hard to balance that by also challenging the audience, introducing them to new music and taking them to a new place."

    The nomadic schedule of a flourishing choreographer leaves Wheeldon little time in his apartment a block from Manhattan's Lincoln Center ("dangerously close to work") or in the house he recently bought overlooking the sea on Spain's Costa Brava. Next year alone, he has projects in Denver, Los Angeles, Melbourne, London and, of course, New York. But first he has another big premiere coming up on June 4, for Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Ballet, and it's a daunting one: a new version of Swan Lake. The production sounds like typical Wheeldon. The traditionalist in him is embracing the work's essence as a "grand, epic fantasy, the Lord of the Rings of its day." At the same time, the innovator has, he says, found ways to retell the story that make it "beautiful, sleek and contemporary." And this time, no little girls hatching from eggs.