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?
Wheeldon: I was directly involved these last two weeks. Morphoses was away in Australia for the month of January and also the ballet was mounted very quickly because unfortunately time is always very precious at the New York City Ballet; there’s so much going on. But I was around for probably a little more than I usually would be, just because it’s a big piece, and I think there were no more than perhaps three or four dancers in the corps de ballet who had danced it before, but other than that it’s two entirely new casts, because tomorrow night another principal cast goes on. And I wanted to make sure that I was there, particularly for the principals. It’s a challenging pas de deux and I know the dancers appreciate having me there because, brilliant as the people who stage the work for me are, they can never put in those final touches, the last important flourishes that come only from the original creator.
DanceView: Did you tweak the choreography at all?
Wheeldon: A little bit, here and there. Not too much, but just sometimes certain steps don’t suit certain dancers. For the most part it’s all pretty much as it was.
DanceView: How did it look to you after probably close to ten years?
Wheeldon: I always find it difficult going back to old work; just because I’ve come a long way since then and gone down many roads; it’s been quite a long journey. But I enjoyed going back to it. It has an innocence and simplicity in its clarity of movement that were fun to revisit; and there’s definitely a naïve romantic quality in the piece as well, particularly in the pas de deux, which is refreshing in a way. It’s quite nice to go back to that and to an idealism too. I had a lovely time rehearsing with the dancers; they responded very well and had to respond very quickly. I think the corps de ballet, particularly the women’s corps, find it enjoyable to dance because it’s a big corps piece with plenty of dancing, and with a lot of focus needed on the regiments and the lines crossing, and the complexity of the patterns and that sort of thing. I sensed that they’re enjoying dancing it.
DanceView: The romantic element of the ballet certainly seemed more evident to me this time around and I thought that the casting of Tyler Angle in Jock Soto’s old role might have had something to do with it. He is such a Romeo.
Wheeldon: That was the way the new cast danced it. Jock [Soto] and Miranda [Weese] danced it so beautifully but there was a sort of coolness about both of them as performers. (Thinking). Neither Jock nor Miranda were ever overly emotive? What was interesting was the warmth that Abi [Stafford] and Tyler brought to it. And that’s the wonderful thing about remounting work with different dancers; dancers from a different generation, or a different country, or a different company; the ballets take on a whole new flavor and life, and sometimes it works wonderfully and sometimes it doesn’t. (Laughing). And also, looking back at Mercurial now, I enjoy the construction of the piece. I look at it and I think, for ten years ago and a twenty-six or twenty-five year old guy, I did pretty well with the construction. It’s certainly not the kind of work that I’d make necessarily today but it was a positive experience.
DanceView: I was struck by the moment early in the pas de deux when the principals seemed to stand nearly still on stage, about five feet away from each other, and just breathe for a couple of bars, and then perhaps bow slightly to each other. I didn’t remember seeing that before.
Wheeldon: Well that moment is the absolute heart of the ballet. It’s the moment that I talk about most with the dancers because it’s so important for it not to be sentimental, but it’s also very important for it to be the heart of the piece. You have to feel an energy between the two of them, they can’t just stop dead in their tracks as if they’ve forgotten their choreography or whatever. It’s actually the dramatic center, the dramatic heart and it’s also the most delicate, beautiful passage of music I think ever for me. It’s this quiet, shimmering . . . (Pauses, searching for words) . . . And we call it “Church.” Just because when we work from a musical score in rehearsal every section has a name; so there’s “Church,” and there’s “The Difficult Eight,” or “The Funny Twelve,” or “Jazz,” or whatever; we give the musical score little marks and we call that part “Church” because it has a reverential, spiritual feeling to it musically. And choreographically I did that – I stopped them there – because I had no idea what to do with the music because every time we got to it, I was so moved by it and found it so beautiful that it seemed impossible to put steps on that phrase. So that’s how that evolved.
DanceView: That was certainly the moment I came away from the performance remembering.
Wheeldon: It’s nice that you mention it because yesterday I turned to [Katherine] Tracey, who stages Mercurial for me, as we were rehearsing Tiler Peck and Adrien Danchig-Waring – they’re going into the principal roles tomorrow – and they were standing there and had done so well up until that point, and I said, “Katey, I think this is the best choreography I’ve ever done and they’re not moving.”
DanceView: But it’s amazing how sometimes when dance is at its best, a dancer can be standing still, but you in the audience can still feel them feeling the music. It’s very rare.
Wheeldon: It’s really rare in a dancer and it’s rare in choreography as well, and I quite often fall into that trap myself. I think choreographers forget that the air around their movement is just as important as the movement itself; and if you don’t give movement the chance to breathe it starts to cancel itself out after a while. Young choreographers who are focusing a lot on the overly physical aspects of contemporary ballet sometimes just don’t see that, and how important it is to allow the music to have life within the dance; because you can put a step on every note and what you’re not doing is, you’re not allowing the music to illustrate the movement, and visa versa, you’re just chomping away on the same bone. It’s something I have to remind myself often and coming back to Mercurial has reminded me very much how important that understanding is.
DanceView: What inspires you as an artist, that is in the wide sense of the word – art, music, other dance, books – what is the universe of your artistic inspiration?
Wheeldon: I think I’ve realized that pretty much everything finds its way into my ballets. And what’s fun and also mysterious for me is that I never usually set out with a very specific idea in mind, and then I realize that quite often my choreography is expressing things that have happened to me, or things that I’ve seen or done, or sculpture that I’ve been inspired by and so on. Certainly always music is a great inspiration to me; and the personalities of the dancers that I create the work on, getting to know them both in and out of the studio, and how different their personalities can be from one place to the other. So just as an example, the pas de deux in After the Rain was a quick piece of choreography for me; we made it I think in two or three days in one of the studios at City Ballet and as we were creating it I had no idea that actually in the end so much of my own personal experience would come out in it. It’s not until you sit back in the theater and the curtain goes up and you watch the piece that you realize, “o.k., this is what’s inspired me here.” It’s almost the wrong way around in a sense.
Read Part 3