Signals of Future Success
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Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon has been positioned as successor to a particular lineage at New York City Ballet — namely, Balanchine’s ballets of the 1950s in which Balanchine responded to droning hive scores by contemporary choreographers with a kinetic incarnation that starred a breed of streamlined ballerinas with small heads and attenuated limbs. Dancing “Morphoses,” Mr. Wheeldon’s 2002 ballet, on Saturday night in the second program of Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company at City Center, Sterling Hyltin and Wendy Whelan were ideal embodiments of this particular species. They effortlessly rotated their joints into worm-turning wriggles that proclaimed Mr. Wheeldon’s musical attentiveness and his recognition of new modes of behavior for the esoteric creatures that Balanchine had first imagined. Craig Hall and Edwaard Liang threaded their bodies between the two women. The quatrefoil or cruciform configurations assumed by all four seemed like an iconographic signaling across the galaxies.
As in the opening performance of the company’s season in New York, the evening’s middle section was devoted to pas de deux. There were three, beginning with Mr. Liang’s “Vicissitude,” in which he attempts to make its two protagonists, here danced by Maria Kowroski and Tyler Angle, link in almost eerie consanguinity. One makes a gesture and the other, far across the stage, as if reflexively, makes the identical gesture. They dance to one movement from a Schubert string quartet. Liv Lorent’s “Propeller,” the next pas de deux, weaves together music by Vivaldi and Ezio Bosso and continually crafts amorous embraces between Oxana Panchenko and Michael Nunn only to pull the rug out from under them via foreshortened and flexed extremities; as the duet progresses, the dancers make sojourns across each other’s supine bodies.
William Forsythe’s “Slingerland Pas de Deux,” came next, and convinced us that it is the work of a master choreographer. Mr. Forsythe keeps subterranean currents visible even when they are being contradicted by what is right before our eyes: the dancers seem to writhe even when they are upright. Aesha Ash and Gonzalo Garcia performed it with impressive intensity. This time the string music was courtesy of Gavin Bryars.
Between the Lorent and the Forsythe duets came “Satie Stud,” a 2003 solo by Michael Clarke. Wearing a towel, William Trevitt struck a lexicon of poses that were something in the nature of stop-action photography, as if he was relating a diagrammatic account of the way a human silhouette transitions from silhouette to full face to prone on the ground.
Mr. Wheeldon’s 2003 “Mesmerics,” was a much more effective program closer than his “Fools’ Paradise” had been earlier in the week. High expectations are established the moment the curtain goes up and we see eight cellists perched in an alcove raised above the stage, suggesting some kind of New Age heavenly choir. The Philip Glass score they play cues a six-member cast to slink in and out of dim pockets of the stage. The piece has a real momentum, adroitly stirring up modern dance and balletic vocabulary. It begins with isolated shoulder scrunches, and goes the distance of modern dance vocabulary, but a lot of is almost militantly classical. The women were Ms. Ash, Ms. Panchenko, and Anastasia Yatsenko, and the men were Adrian Danchig-Waring, Mr. Nunn, and Mr. Trevitt. The men engaged in rough-and-tumble that preserved an impeccable politesse. Even in crash landings, elegant port de bras were preserved. With “Mesmerics,” Mr. Wheeldon shows he knows exactly how far to develop his ideas.