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A Conversation with Christopher Wheeldon - Part 1

“IT’S ABOUT CREATING A WORLD FOR THE DANCE TO LIVE IN:”
A CONVERSATION WITH CHRISTOPHER WHEELDON

by Michael Popkin
copyright 2009 by Michael Popkin

[Editor's note: This is a longer version of an interview that ran in the Spring 2009 issue of DanceView. It is posted in four parts.]

Two years after forming his own company, the New York based choreographer talks about his plans and recent work, his methods of working and the experience of living and creating dance in New York City.

Christopher Wheeldon needs little introduction to today’s ballet public. Trained at Britain’s Royal Ballet, but formed as an artist during more than a decade at New York City Ballet first as a dancer and then as the company’s first official resident choreographer, the 36-year-old British born choreographer left City Ballet to form his own company, Morphoses, nearly two years ago, performing first at the Vail Festival in Colorado, and subsequently among other venues at yearly seasons at both New York City Center and the Sadlers Wells Theater in London. Danceview caught up with him on February 25, 2009, when he was back in New York after Morphoses’ January tour in Australia, to oversee the revival of Mercurial Maneuvers, one of his early works, at City Ballet before making a quick trip to Seattle for the premiere of his Carousel, A Dance at Pacific Northwest Ballet.

A Conversation with Christopher Wheeldon - Part 2

A Conversation with Christopher Wheeldon
by Michael Popkin - Part 2

DanceView: In connection with what you’re saying, the revival of Mercurial Maneuvers last week at City Ballet strikes me as interesting, because certainly the theatrical aspect was present in that early work of yours, with deep red drops and theatrical lighting, and the beginning with the drops down to the floor when the curtain goes up, creating an architectural space, and then withdrawing after the opening section. Were you directly involved with reviving Mercurial?

A Conversation with Christopher Wheeldon - Part 3

A Conversation with Christopher Wheeldon
by Michael Popkin - Part 3

DanceView: Could you comment on how your own experience went into that pas?

A Conversation with Christopher Wheeldon - Part 4

A Conversation with Christopher Wheeldon
by Michael Popkin - part 4

DanceView: Some questions about you. What music did you listen to growing up? 

Diminishing Returns

"4 x 4"
Compahnia de Dança Deborah Colker
City Center
New York, NY
October 22, 2009

By Carol Pardo
Copyright ©2009 Carol Pardo

Take one choreographer, seventeen dancers, four Brazilian artists, a goodly helping of ambient music (much of it by Berna Ceppas), "Some Day My Prince Will Come" sung in a high treble, and a dash of Mozart. Add costumes and light. The result is "4 x 4" a collage of dances choreographed by Deborah Colker.

Dancers' Night: "The Evolution of Ballet" in Belgium

The Evolution of ballet – Royal Ballet of Flanders
Theater ‘t Eilandje, Antwerp, Belgium
October 2009

by Marc Haegeman
copyright 2009 by Marc Haegeman

What a brilliant idea of the Royal Ballet of Flanders to include a special programme focusing on the history of ballet. It’s no secret that in Belgium classical ballet remains largely uncharted territory for the general public and although the company is celebrating its fortieth anniversary this season, a ballet-minded or informed audience is about as rare in this country as intercommunal agreement. 

The formula for “The Evolution of ballet” is as simple as it is efficient. Guided by a speaker, ballet master Gideon Louw, the audience was introduced to a series of dance fragments performed by members of the company, starting with "La Sylphide" and going by way of the greats Petipa, Balanchine, and Forsythe to the present day. A film projection spotlighted on the Ballets Russes, celebrating their 100th anniversary this year – and, as we learned, visitors to Antwerp in 1922.

Vibrant Music Vibrant Dance

“Refraction” “The Moroccan Project”
Alonzo King LINES Ballet
Yerba Buena Center for the ArtsSan Francisco, CA
October 23, 2009

by Rita Felciano
Copyright © Rita Felciano, 2009

Being time-based arts, it seems fair to expect some kind of trajectory when music and dance cooperate on stage. It doesn’t have to be linear with a beginning, middle and end though the piece should move somewhere. But I have given up to look for that in the works of Alonzo King. What he creates, I think, is a sense of suspended time, perhaps something akin to the eternal presence. In his own and for his dancers imagination, he uses a pointillist painter’s palette who puts his canvasses together from hundreds of individual dots. Together they create the shimmering work of art.

Fingers with a Coloratura Trill, Dancing a Da Vinci Smile

Fall Festival of Indian Arts
      Dakshina / Daniel Phoenix Singh Dance Company
      Madhavi Mudgal and Arushi Mudgal
      Leela Samson
The Lincoln Theater
Washington, DC
October 24, 2009 at 2 PM & 7:30 PM

by George Jackson
copyright 2009 by George Jackson

Disregard history! Ballet and India's classical dance are cousins! They share core traits! Perhaps they are just kissing cousins, because the evidence for a joint ancestor does not exist. Perhaps their similarities are the result of convergent evolution or their single origin lies in the inscrutable future. Whatever the explanation, allow me to state the case. Both forms are based on the body's side-to-side (bilateral) symmetry, and on its ability to stretch vertically and fold horizontally. Limbs articulate finely and hips turn out strategically. There are differences, of course. Being stretched is ballet's norm, its starting stance, whereas Indiadance proceeds from a folded form - a plie that in profile looks like a zigzag lightning flash. Classical ballet emphasizes the pointed toe, banishing the thrust heel to the category of character ballet, but in Indiadance the toe-to-the-fore and the-heel-to-the-rear alternate rhythmically. There's more - quite a few steps that are shared, and that both recognize the interplay for eye and ear of rhythmic beat (tala) with melodic line (raga). On, though, to the three remarkable women from India who gave substance to all my orisons.

Orbo Novo

“Orbo Novo”
Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet
The Joyce Theater
New York, NY
October 21, 2009

by Kathleen O’Connell
copyright © 2009 by Kathleen O’Connell

What’s up with the rage to dance about non-fiction? First there was William Forsythe’s take on Anne Carson’s essay “Decreation” at BAM. A week later at the Joyce, in came Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet in the New York premiere of “Orbo Novo,” Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s take on neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor’s book My Stroke of Insight. Despite flashes of invention and beauty, neither project really worked. It’s one thing for a choreographer to be intrigued by an author’s ideas and to use them as a springboard for creation. It’s another to try to put those ideas into dance. The urge to make pointed reference to the source material is more problematic: it suggests that the dance can’t stand on its own; that it needs the crutch of someone else’s work to be intelligible. In the case of “Orbo Novo” the crutch got in the way.

Snacks

Keigwin + Company
Terrace Theater
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Washington, DC
October 23, 2009

by George Jackson
copyright 2009 by George Jackson

What more would you want when the curtain goes up than heavenly music, titillation and movement that's dancy? Larry Keigwin's "Elements" kicks off with Mozart (the so-called "Elvira Madigan" Andante), a half dozen bodies seemingly nude behind toweling, and bouncy, funny action. The theme of the first four, fairly short  numbers in this tongue-in-cheek catalog of antique chemistry and human antics is the element "Water". No question that we were being entertained. Yet, I found myself waiting for a change, I wanted a surprise - at least by the time "Fire", the second theme, arrived. In "Fire", like in its wet counterpart, I counted four, brief, catchily humorous dances. All the musical offerings were tasty and choice. Again so in "Earth", for which Keigwin himself performed the opening solo looking like the young Mark Morris. The resemblance triggered a memory.