Dance: Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company at Guggenheim's Works and Process

This post is three weeks overdue, and for that I am very sorry; it has become a monkey on my back and I am now dropping it off at daycare.

I don't know what drove the procrastination; I wasn't so very busy, and I didn't absolutely loathe the performance—in fact, I found it rather interesting (the format of the program, that is). Christopher Wheeldon is a bit priggish, but what else can be expected for a male dancer of ballet who at such a young age is so sought after as a choreographer. The Boston Ballet's Jorma Elo is just as priggish, and so are the twelve year olds who take ballet at the studio where I do capoeira. It's just something about ballet, I think, and so I take it in stride.

What Wheeldon did so well, though, was give his audience some real-time insight into how he works. After introducing his company with the performance of a short bit of the piece Mesmerics, which I had already seen at the Fall For Dance Festival (blog entry coming soon, I promise! I'm so sorry!) and a video of his dancers working on a performance in Vail, he had dancers come to the stage and recreate a rehearsal session. Two dancers took the stage and ran the opening portion of a pas de duex (to the accompaniment of a live pianist and mezzo soprano) while he stood on stage and watched; after a bit he stopped them, and gave feedback and corrections. As a dancer myself, but one who has never seriously rehearsed choreography for a performance (high school foot- and basketball halftime shows don't count), I loved seeing how he calculated his intention and shifted his dancers—mere tools, it seemed—to better express his own art rather than their own. That is, he not only helped them through a few areas that seemed sticky or troublesome due to weight shift and partner work, but (and he did this again in running a piece of a solo from his Elsinore with dancer Anastasia Yatsenko) but he told them to withhold full extension here and there, to make certain gestures more abrupt and others lighter, as if he were holding a piece of charcoal, drawing a line, and smudging it with his fingertips to his own liking. I had always imagined that the dancer brings her own interpretation to a piece, and though that is of course to an extent true, it is now clear that, particularly in ballet, she expresses less herself as much as her choreographer or director.

The company closed with a pas de deux from William Forsythe's Slingerland, of which I have absolutely no recollection. I'm not, in general, a fan of the pas de deux, so I'm not surprised that three weeks later it has completely slipped my mind in a way that the rehearsal sessions did not. If anything, let it serve as a notice to readers to try, when crafting a performance, to work outside of the box, if you care to be remembered.