A First Look at Ballet’s Great Hope

Both Christopher Wheeldon and his new company wore the Messiah mantle with grace Wednesday night at the City Center, when Mr. Wheeldon’s Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company made its New York debut.Ever since Balanchine’s death in 1983, the ballet world seems to have been looking for an apostolic avatar who could supply all the answers and lead ballet into its next epochal development. Mr. Wheeldon has seemed in recent years to be the next anointed candidate, but dealing with the anxious pressure and inflated expectations that go with this kind of investment doesn’t make for the easiest or most propitious circumstances in which to build a career. (Certainly Balanchine himself never faced a similar set of expectations until the final years of an eight-decade life.) For me, Mr. Wheeldon is not a great white hope but rather a talented young choreographer still in the process of finding himself, and there were strengths and weaknesses to the material he presented on Wednesday.The program began with Mr. Wheeldon’s “There Where She Loved,” which he made in 2000 for London’s Royal Ballet. It’s performed to alternating songs by Chopin and Kurt Weill, meant to illustrate respectively the smooth and the rough sides of life and love. There’s a toggling feeling to the piece, as lights go on and off, dancers go onstage and off, and our attention shifts between the two composers and soprano Kate Vetter Cain and mezzo Shelley Waite, who are perched on opposite sides of the stage. The opening dancers — New York City Ballet’s Craig Hall, Adrian Danchig-Waring, Tyler Angle, and Gonzalo Garcia with the Bolshoi’s Anastasia Yatsenko — get to sample both phases: they begin smooth and return for some rough stuff later on. (Most, if not all, of the dancers Mr. Wheeldon featured on Wednesday were guests from other companies.)“There Where She Loved” built to a smashing conclusion with the appearance of NYCB’s Maria Kowroski and Ballet Boyz’ Michael Nunn dancing to Weill’s “Je ne t’aime pas.” Ms. Kowroski blended a mobile and expressive torso with an infinitely extended balletic silhouette. The sheen she and Mr. Wheeldon applied in no way diminished the authenticity of emotion supplied: her tense, sullen, volatile exchanges with Mr. Nunn seemed irrefutably real.After the intermission, a series of short pieces began with Mr. Wheeldon’s “Tryst Pas de Deux” performed by the Royal Ballet’s Darcey Bussell and Jonathan Cope, as they had at the work’s 2002 premiere, where it was but one movement in a larger ballet. Both dancers have officially retired, but, on the basis of this performance, there’s no reason why both of them should not continue post-retirement careers as fruitful as the ones that have just officially ended. From the moment they appeared — Ms. Bussell dancing, Mr. Cope just walking — it was clear we were in the presence of two consummately skilled performers. Over the course of this duet, the dancers continue to field exchanges between near-entropy and positive assertion, between ungainliness and airy suspension. Ms. Bussell and Mr. Cope knew how to let the movement thread spool down almost into torpor without becoming empty or slack for a second.Together with Ms. Kowroski and Mr. Nunn’s duet, “Tryst Pas de Deux” established a bandwith of magnificence that sustained the whole evening. Mr. Wheeldon seemed to have given the performers something precious and they had risen to the occasion.Wisely, Mr. Wheeldon is not seeking to single-handedly sustain the repertory burden, and we next saw William Forsythe’s “Slingerland Pas de Deux,” handled with beatific aplomb by Wendy Whelan and Edward Liang. Then there was Mr. Wheeldon’s “Prokofiev Pas de Deux,” first seen in London last month, danced here by Tina Pereira and Nehemiah Kish. It is winsome and contained. Finally, there was Mr. Wheeldon’s “Dance of the Hours,” which he created for the Met Opera’s revival of “La Gioconda” a year ago.Mr. Wheeldon’s treatment of this warhorse reveals his indebtedness to British ballet style as much as the influence of the Balanchine neoclassical pas de deux informs his own style.His fondness for whimsical flicks, swishes, and insistent accents fit the highly indicative music. NYCB’s Ashley Bouder found a great vehicle in the work. Her sometimes manic energy was here channeled and focused in exactly the right way, and she had moments of virtuoso prowess it would be hard to imagine any other dancer could surpass. Her partner, Mr. Garcia, was not as sure or dynamic, but he was pleasant. The two leads were alternately screened and framed by an eight-member female ensemble.Wednesday night’s closing piece, Mr. Wheeldon’s “Fools’ Paradise,” received its world premiere in London last month; it had all the earmarks of the expediency that is the downside of Mr. Wheeldon’s facility; there are times when Mr. Wheeldon seems like a bright boy who likes to doodle. “Fools’ Paradise” used the talents of many of the superior dancers we’d seen earlier in the evening, but failed to extend them. The dancers tried to supply the passion and urgency that was missing in the ingeniously arranged but ultimately only decorative duets, trios, and tableaus. The music by Joby Talbot — prowling strings and pounding piano — is derivative and the theatrical atmospherics — confetti falling like snow — trite. This was not the strongest finish to Mr. Wheeldon’s opening, but there’s no doubt that over the course of the evening Mr. Wheeldon and his company had scaled several peaks.Until October 21 (West 55th Street, between Sixth and Seventh avenues, 212-581-1212).

A First Look at Ballet’s Great Hope

More from the New York Sun

Florida Freeze Prompts Roundup of Cold-Stunned Iguanas as Thousands Fall From Trees

The 50,000 Dow

The Dow 50,000 Prosperity Rocket Ship

Luigi Mangione’s Jeopardy

Will the Navy End Iran’s Ability To Export Oil?

Algebra, English, and Activism: Teachers at Middle and High School Instruct Students How To Protest ICE

Ex-CNN Star Ashleigh Banfield, Savannah Guthrie’s Former Coworker, Doubles Down on Her Reporting About Brother-in-Law

Economical Horror Indie ‘The Arborist’ Outshines Ryan Coogler’s ‘Sinners,’ in Many Respects