A Conversation with Christopher Wheeldon
by Michael Popkin - part 4
DanceView: Some questions about you. What music did you listen to growing up?
DanceView: Do you look at visual art, go to museums and galleries?
Wheeldon: I love to. In fact Lourdes and I are planning a trip next week to wander around the galleries downtown in Chelsea just to see what’s going on; because it’s easy to get stuck in the office when you’re planning a season and finding money and so on. Also I go to a lot of theater; I try to see as much as I can and I’ve been seeing a lot of theater recently just because I’m scared that it’s all going to go away! (Laughs). I do listen to a lot of different types of music and have really broad taste; meaning I can go from full on pop trash to contemporary classical music, parting through a bit of Broadway and some Indy folk rock. It’s all over the place.
DanceView: Do you like to read? Are books a major part of your life?
Wheeldon: They are. I’m always reading a book but I’m not a very fast reader so I don’t tear through them like some people do; and I don’t have the time because usually at the end of the day as soon as my head hits the pillow I’m out. But I love to read on the plane and I’m in the position at the moment where I’m on a lot of airplanes.
DanceView: What do you read – the classics, contemporary literature, nonfiction?
Wheeldon: I love biographies and read a lot of them. As far as the classics, I’ve read a lot of the English classics – the few that we were required to read at school and then every now and then I’ll pick one up and read through it; and I like to read the American classics too, because that wasn’t really a part of our education; so I’m always more interested in Steinbeck and those type of novels. Ayn Rand; I read The Fountainhead for the first time recently, which was kind of mind blowing. I’m also half way through reading a biography – actually it’s more like an autobiography because it’s in his own words – of Fidel Castro because there’s been talk of a project in Cuba in the future and I wanted to brush up on my Cuban history. That book [My Life – Fidel Castro] is beautifully put together; it’s assembled from eighty hours of interviews and I’m enjoying it very much; it’s fascinating but very dense and not a particularly easy read.
DanceView: Tell me about the full length Royal Ballet production for 2011 you mentioned that you were meeting with the playwright and composer about.
Wheeldon: It’s Alice in Wonderland, coming up early in 2011, and it’s a co-commission by the Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of a Canada. It’s going to be evening length but with two acts and only one intermission and I’m working with the English playwright Nicholas Wright on the book. He’s written a lot of adaptations of plays, and also an original play called Vincent in Brixton that was a big success at the National Theater in London a few years ago and that came to Broadway too. We’re in the early stages but it’s underway; Nick and the composer Jody Talbot are both coming out this weekend to meet with me, we have a rough draft of the book and Jody has started writing some of the score. I worked with Jody before on my ballet Fools Paradise. The designs are going to be by Bob Crowley.
DanceView: The idea of Alice in Wonderland reminds me a little of your Carnival of the Animals where the boy was trapped in the museum and saw one room after another, but without a lot of character development or the kind of plot development you’d see in a ballet like Manon or Swan Lake. Does dramatizing Alice imply a similar structure?
Wheeldon: Well, it is what it is and though I’m working with Nick to tie the whole thing together so it doesn’t feel completely episodic, it’s the nature of the story. Lewis Carroll wrote an episodic story where Alice has adventures and wanders from one crazy character to the next and comes out of it at the end relatively unchanged, so we’re working on giving it a little more sense of a story line. But no, it’s not Manon, it’s not about the development or demise of a single character; it’s much more about the opportunity to create a lively and bright evening of dances.
DanceView: How do you feel about making ballets that tell stories?
Wheeldon: It’s something that I’ve always found a challenge and I’m very interested in. I haven’t done an enormous amount of it, but it’s definitely territory that I’m excited to explore. And that’s why I’m embarking on several narrative projects coming up over the next few years.
DanceView: Your ballet The Nightingale and the Rose – made towards the end of your time at City Ballet – had a very strong narrative. Was it a satisfying experience making it and what was your reaction to the response it received?
Wheeldon: Yes, I was happy with it. I set out to tell the tale in as pure a dance and narrative style as possible without getting too bogged down in the story, but fleshing out the characters with choreography to describe them, and I was very happy with it. And I guess it was misunderstood by some, but not by all of the critics. Jennifer Dunning was really very effusive about it in The Times in her review of the premiere and then it was more or less dismissed by Alastair Macaulay; but I think that probably like any kind of work you’re always going to get differing opinions. I thought Wendy [Whelan] was very touching and, considering the limitations of budget, score and things, I was really quite pleased with the way that it came out.
DanceView: With respect to the dance and narrative style you mention, there was a passage midway through where Wendy seemed nearly “to negotiate” with a couple of the boys; she came out and struck an angular pose with a leg in tendu, and the boys were at the back of the stage and also very angular; I interpreted it as meaning “you give me the blood and I’ll give you the rose,” but what specifically was happening there and how did you do envisage it?
Wheeldon: Well first she flies back and forth between the white and the yellow rose bush asking them to help her produce the flower; and they both dismiss her, telling her, “We can’t, it’s not the right season for us, we’re a white rose bush so we can’t produce a red rose; and we’re a yellow rose busy so we can’t produce a red one.” But then finally she comes upon a red rose bush, and that’s the part that begins with those two boys; and they have this broken twisted dialogue with her, that represents the gnarly-ness of the red rose bush, and how it’s been tired and beaten up by the winter; how it’s cranky but yet interested in her plight; and it’s from there that they finally strike a deal for her to impale herself on the thorn. Then the plot turns and the bush becomes healthier with the blood of the nightingale flowing through its veins; it grows and I decided to show that by adding more and more men, making it a very masculine and even quite a brutal story; because it is a very sad story and it is kind of brutal when you think about it. People were upset that she was tossed around between all of these guys and kind of brutalized, but that’s what happens: she pierces her heart on the bush and gives her life to create a beautiful flower.
DanceView: The “twisted dialogue” you referred to was not in mime, for sure, but in something that was nearly an equivalent in its function. What were you doing there?
Wheeldon: It was very necessary for me to find as much of a movement vocabulary as possible to tell the story and it was through the rather broken and angular movements of the boys that I was describing the gnarly rosebush.
DanceView: Was there Christian or at least religious imagery in the ballet? Were you conscious of trying to create images like that?
Wheeldon: No but I was sort of conscious of it. Many of those wild stories have religious undertones. I wasn’t trying to create any obvious religious imagery with the choreography; it’s just hard not to, in a sense, because of the nature of the story.