A Conversation with Christopher Wheeldon
by Michael Popkin - Part 3
DanceView: Could you comment on how your own experience went into that pas?
DanceView: Wasn’t that pas de deux originally the second portion of a larger work called After the Rain? Does it change when it’s performed on its own?
Wheeldon : Actually It’s coming back in its entirety next season when the work will be in the City Ballet repertory; and I think it changes a lot when its performed on its own. It’s intended to be part of a longer ballet and even though stylistically and choreographically the two sections are quite different, the first movement creates an energy and a dynamic – a tempestuous, relentless and charged physical world. So that the serenity, simplicity and quiet of the pas de deux then comes as a balance to the first section, rather than the curtain going up on a couple of lovers who wend their way through this duet.
DanceView: How did it come to be performed as a pas?
Wheeldon: Well, it works as a pas de deux and I think that quite often, particularly at City Ballet, they’re looking for a short piece that will balance out a program; or there will be a fifteen minute work that’s not quite long enough to make up one third of an evening so that they will need something else; and that’s what happened. It was done first as a shorter piece at the San Francisco Ballet gala by Yuan Yuan Tan and Damien Smith a couple of years ago and since then companies have been taking just the pas de deux into their repertory, but the Australian Ballet did it a couple of seasons ago very well in its entirety and City Ballet will bring it back next season. I prefer it to be presented within the longer ballet to be honest with you; but if there are dancers that are right for it, and it’s a company that I’m interested in working with, I have agreed in the past to let it go on its own.
DanceView: When we spoke a moment ago about what inspired you, the range was very broad – basically an entire experience. What about your method of working, as distinct from artistic inspiration – do you see a pattern in the way you approach a work?
Wheeldon: There’s definitely a pattern. It’s not that I follow it, it’s just the way that it naturally works out and it stems from this place of being inspired by the moment. I’m very spontaneous in the sense that I don’t prepare a lot of movement before I get into the room. I get to know the music very well and I have a very clear idea of the shape of the music and how the ballet might be shaped as far as numbers and solos, versus pas de deux and corps de ballet and whatever. It doesn’t always work out just that way but I prefer to have something roughly down on paper that divides the music up; and then it’s just up to how I’m feeling that day, how the dancers are feeling that day. It’s very exciting to work that way. It’s also terrifying: because you’re never sure what’s going to happen.
DanceView: Starting a company must be very tough. Some of your early reviews seemed to expect a fully established company, even though you were very clear in your preseason interviews that you were building a company slowly. What was your reaction to that press?
Wheeldon: I was annoyed a little bit at everyone’s impatience at first. You go out on a limb and, as you said, I tried to be as honest as possible and prepare everyone. I was hoping that people would understand that we were young and starting out, but I guess with a certain amount of notoriety expectations are very high; and I’ve come to understand that in many ways having had that amount of criticism the first season made us stronger. But we are still growing, and even the New York City Ballet didn’t come together in a year, and Balanchine had Lincoln.
DanceView: Building a company in the current financial environment must be even tougher than you originally thought. How are you weathering the present crisis?
Wheeldon: We’re doing well and are in a good place simply because we’re so small. We’re a very lean organization; we don’t have huge numbers of people, or a development, or marketing department. We are three people in an office; we assemble and do everything together, so we don’t have an enormous amount of overhead as far as paying weekly salaries; and we’re flexible enough so that we bring the dancers in when we need them so that we’re also not paying dancers’ salaries full time. We’ve had a relatively small success at fundraising over the past two years, so we’re good for this year but it’s a bit of a terrifying time. Everyone’s having problems. The most reassuring thing to me is that, because we haven’t grown to be a big organization, we can handle this tricky financial period.
DanceView: With respect to the criticism you’ve received, I read something by Edwin Denby this morning that I’d like to get your reaction to. It’s from the 1950’s, and Denby wrote: “A choreographer or a dancer, as he reads his notices often forgets they are not addressed to him personally, but are a report to the general public. They are a sort of conversation between members of the audience on which the artist eavesdrops at his own emotional risk. What he overhears may make no sense to him, it may shock or intoxicate him, but it is astonishing how rarely, how very rarely it is of any use to him in his actual creative activity.” What do you think about that: are reviews of actual value to you in your creative capacity and have you reached a modus vivendi with them?
Wheeldon: (Laughs). That is quite a loaded question. (Pauses). It’s difficult because I’m interested – obviously even more interested now that I have Morphoses – in the effect that reviews have on the general public as far as ticket sales and things are concerned. Personally, I’ve always read reviews; I have often been intoxicated by them and have also often felt completely let down and destroyed by them; and to be perfectly honest it has effected me in the past; but I think I’m now at a point where I’ve had enough experience of them, and enough press over the past five or six years, to have a clearer understanding that they are always going to be there and that they aren’t going to change the way that I work.
DanceView: They are part of the artistic weather and either it’s either going to rain or the sun’s going to shine?
Wheeldon: It’s usually either pouring with rain or blisteringly hot. But I have to say what concerns me now is that with dance – actually this applies to theater in general, but dance and ballet are what I’m passionate about – being in sort of a fragile place; and we’re seeing drops in ticket sales, and ballet companies going under; I just hope that the most influential critics would, along with their astute criticism that has to be there – I’m not suggesting that criticism isn’t important – remain supportive to the art form. And I think there are times when overly harsh criticism in the papers can be damaging, not just to audiences, but for instance to young choreographers who are emerging, who are starting out and are in some way relying on the word of the press to help their careers move forward; because we’re not really seeing an enormous amount of new work happening in New York, or choreographers basing themselves here to create. I don’t think New York has the same creative energy that it’s had in the past.
DanceView: I’ve always thought that New York is a place where people come to work and settle from somewhere else. It’s very rare to find someone in any of the arts who is actually New York born and bred. But the thing is, when people come to live here, everyone fits. The character of the city is that people move here from all over the world and quickly belong.
Wheeldon: I feel that I’ve grown up as an artist here in New York. Even though I’m not from New York, and I choreographed a little bit at school back home in England, my choreographic career started here, so I feel that I’m a born and bred New York artist.
People keep saying to me, “Why on earth would you try to start a ballet company in New York?” but that’s the very reason: I feel that New York has given me my career and that it’s where I want to be. It’s a vibrant, exciting city and why would I want to go and do it anywhere else? It’s taken me sixteen years but I really do call it home now.
DanceView: I’ve read that you just moved from Manhattan across the river to Brooklyn. Can you tell me about that?
Wheeldon: Well I’ve moved to Williamsburg and, funnily enough, I feel much more in touch with Manhattan now that I live in Brooklyn. There is something about being able to exhale when you get off the subway in a neighborhood. Manhattan has just become one big melting pot. Everyone always uses that analogy, but even the East Village now feels less like a real neighborhood and more gentrified, and a lot of people who crave that neighborhood living have moved to Brooklyn. When I get out at my subway stop at Graham Avenue, I feel like I’m in a small town; I walk down my block and there are people in the spring and summer who sit out on their stoops and have lived there for many years and they probably look at me and think, “Oh, here comes the yuppie,” but it’s reassuring to feel like you’re surrounded by a community. Coming from a small town in England I appreciate that feeling. And then I get this great sense of excitement coming back into downtown New York. Ever since I’ve lived here – and I’ve lived here for sixteen years – every time I make the drive from JFK [airport] to the Midtown tunnel, when I first see the skyline of Manhattan, I get this great sense of excitement coming into the city. And now I have that every morning. I get on the L train with all the hipsters and come into Union Square and suddenly I’m projected out into this buzz. If you live in Manhattan you expect it; you walk out of your front door and are in the middle of it already, but something about traveling in and the adrenaline rush of coming up out of the subway and walking over to the office: I love that feeling. It makes the day exciting and starts it on a high energy. It’s been a good move for me.
DanceView: Are there major issues that concern you for the future of ballet as companies either scale back in size, or we see more small companies that are basically all soloist ensembles?
Wheeldon: Other than New York City Ballet, ABT and the Joffrey, there haven’t been any major size companies in the New York ballet world in quite a while and I don’t know that I really see things changing at the moment. There are still going to be those big classical companies with the big corps de ballets. The thing I’ve been concerned with is how to get a new generation of ballet goers in the theater; because it’s just a hard fact that ballet audiences at the big companies are dwindling; you can’t ignore it. You go to the ballet and you see it, empty seats at the New York City Ballet, a lot of older people.
DanceView: But hasn’t the backbone of the audience always been older people? If you go back to the ballet boom, the Fonteyn and Nureyev days, was it really a younger audience?
Wheeldon: (Thinking). Maybe not. But I think the current generation in the theaters grew up with their parents taking them to the ballet; and I don’t think that this generation of parents – people my age and a little bit older – are doing that, so there’s a danger of a drop out of the audience. It’s a cultural phenomenon that’s much bigger than Morphoses, that’s for sure, but we’re trying in our small way to do our part to make younger people aware of the art. There are so many factors that play into this: young people being aware that we even exist for a start, that ballet even exists. It’s not advertised in the periodicals they read, or on the websites they’re looking at, so why would we expect them to buy a ticket to see something at Lincoln Center or City Center when it’s not publicized in their world? And beyond that there’s of course the ticket price, which is always going to be a problem; and the length of the programming, and what’s programmed, are also very important. There are just so many factors that add up to bringing a new generation into the theater and a lot of work that is being aimed at them is quite often sneered at by the more established audiences and critics because, for instance, maybe we’re using popular music, and that’s considered to be selling out; or for other reasons. So it’s a tough one, it’s a bit of a battle, but it’s a battle that has to be taken on, otherwise the audiences will just dwindle away to nothing.
Read Part 4