Risky business

Ed note: This article has been expanded with bonus online content.

TURNING POINT Wendy Whelan and Craig Hall perform with Morphoses.

Photo: Lois Greenfield

One thing to remember is that playing it safe has never been a huge priority for Christopher Wheeldon. This is the person who, while recuperating on his sofa after sustaining an injury with the Royal Ballet, saw a TV commercial for a vacuum that included a free plane ticket to New York. Next thing he knew, he was taking a company class with New York City Ballet; shortly thereafter (in 1993), he joined its ranks and was promoted to soloist before being named resident choreographer. Long dissatisfied with the rigid constraints of a large ballet company (though he will make two more works for NYCB), he has decided to strike out on his own. Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company makes its New York debut at City Center—a copresenter of the group along with London’s Sadler’s Wells—on Wednesday 17, with two programs and a group of fantastic dancers. Wheeldon, 34, spoke about his new venture in a phone interview from Hamburg, Germany, where he wasn’t working—rare!—but visiting friends.

Is the reason you started this company the same as when you initially began thinking about it?
Yes. I don’t think I’ve really veered too dramatically from my original mission statement. There was more than one reason, really. I wanted to give myself a little bit more of a controlled creative environment to work in as a choreographer. To be in a situation where I can contribute more to the artistic experience of the dancers. To collaborate with other artists and to find other choreographers who are interested in working in the classical vocabulary. And, really, to put on programs that I think younger audiences or new audiences would like to see.

Does that focus on dancers stem from your own experiences?
It’s coming from me and also from my frustration in seeing so many talented, beautiful dancers going to waste. Special dancers are rare—too many of them get lost at a very early stage in their careers and become disenchanted and bitter or lazy; it comes from having spent a really good chunk of their early lives dedicated to something that’s so taxing, mentally and physically. I hate to see that. Dancers are fortunate to be in a position where they can make a living by doing something that they’re really passionate about and to suddenly have that backfire is very difficult for them emotionally. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not setting up a company for broken dreams. A hospital for broken dancers. [Cracks up] That’s not the idea at all, but that’s one of the reasons why I talk so much about the dancer experience. It’s a very short-lived career and it should absolutely be as fulfilling as it possibly can..

Is this just at New York City Ballet?
No, it’s everywhere, and it’s inevitable in a big company in many ways. It’s unfair of me to point fingers at anyone because it’s just part of the world. It is brutal and there are many wonderful dancers, but I think by having a small company I could possibly create an environment that can allow dancers to have a really fulfilling artistic experience. I’m certainly not saying that it’s not going to happen with me because I’m sure it will. It’s kind of par for the course. But I think if you’re sensitive to it from the get-go, then the potential for actually following it through.… I had a lunch with Jiri Kylián last month. I went to Amsterdam for the afternoon to sit down and talk to him about this, and he said, “We all start out with those wonderful dreams of making an environment where dancers are going to be happy, and once you’ve worked for a while together, it’s a very difficult dream to sustain.” So his advice for me was: You’re starting in the right place, but watch out because it’s not always going to be like it was in those first few years. Dancers inevitably get used to their environment, at times they get tired, someone else comes in and maybe takes over a role that they still think they should do—it’s just inevitable. It is part of that dog-eats-dog world of the ballet dancer. It’s a young profession. But I have a great appreciation for older dancers. I think I’ve learned over the years while I’ve been choreographing that I really do appreciate dancers who are mature. I want that to be a part of the company too. I want there to be dancers who the younger dancers can look up to, and maybe even some dancers who retire from a big company and want to extend their career by a few years—they could have work made for them or I could make work for them. I don’t know. There are all still ingredients waiting to be thrown into the mixing bowl, but so far we’ve had a blast. We had a very taxing couple of weeks in London. The schedule was tough, we had two programs to put on: complicated works, new ballets, really long, hard days. And I kept thinking, Any minute now these dancers are going to break. Somebody’s going to get upset, somebody’s going to be frustrated, and they seem to be thriving on it. The more exhausted they got, the more determined they were to give great performances. I think it all really came down to being incredibly fulfilled because of the amount of work they had.

What is your dream for the company? How many dancers would you want, in a perfect world?
I’d like 20 dancers. I pulled that out of a hat a little bit, because who knows whether that will be the right balance? It seemed to me that ten men and ten women would enable me to do relatively medium-size and small works. But it’s definitely going to have to be for a company where everyone kind of mucks in and gets on with it. It can’t really be a company with a hierarchy.

You’ve worked with all of the dancers before?
There is no one in the group that I haven’t worked with at some point. I never created for Aesha Ash, apart from Center Stage—she was also in the chorus of Slavonic Dances. But never a principal role, anyway. And it’s been so great to have her as a part of our group; she danced so unbelievably beautifully both in Vail, Colorado and in London. She’s a very focused young lady. And she has really matured since she left City Ballet, danced and Europe and then went on to perform with Alonzo King. She’s about to get married to a very handsome Italian man, and I’m worried that she’s just going to escape to Italy never to be heard of again. [Laughs] But I’ve really had the chance to work with my favorite group this summer, which brings up something else—I find that when I’m in an environment surrounded by a condensed group of really inspired performers, it makes that choreographer-dancer experience even richer.

I know you used to say when you were casting a ballet at NYCB that you took dancers who wouldn’t give you much attitude. Is Morphoses like having that plus talent?
Absolutely. I’ll take the attitude every now and then if it’s somebody with exceptional talent, but atmosphere in the creative environment counts for a lot with me. It’s so exhausting and a waste of energy to have to deal with really complicated personalities. I don’t mind crazy: I Good crazy is always inspiring to me, but bad crazy? Not so good. All my dancers are good crazy.

City Center will include your new ballet Fools’ Paradise. How did it develop?
We just premiered it last week in London, and I’m really pleased with it. One of the critics described it as a cut-priced jam or something. He said that clearly this was a ballet that was thrown together very quickly with few means and very little money and a lot of goodwill. And that actually kind of was the case. And as I found in the past, even working with big companies: The less dollar value there is to a piece, often the more successful it is, simply because you’re forced to be creative. This piece was born out of the excitement of having such a wonderful group of dancers together; of course we started in the most beautiful environment in Vail.

What is the music?
It’s a piece that I had orchestrated from a trio written for the soundtrack from a ’30s silent movie from Russia called The Dying Swan. It’s about an artist who is obsessed with death and falls in love with a ballerina who is famous for interpreting the dying swan. {He} actually ends up murdering her because she’s not close enough to death for him to paint. So he lures her to his studio, strangles her and paints her. That’s not the subject matter for the ballet. [Laughs] I’ve done enough strangled-to-death this season with The Nightingale and the Rose.

Do you feel people have expectations about Morphoses that you can’t yet deliver?
Yes, and they’re not going to get them for a while because we’re not going to be, this season, what we hope to be in five, six, seven years time. There were some complaints in London like, Oh, well, we’re not seeing what he’s saying he’ll deliver. And as far as the collaborating with other artists and designers, this season it’s only Narciso Rodriguez and Ed Liang and, up to a point, Bill Forsythe, even though we’re doing an existing work of his. He worked with the dancers, we talked, we interacted with him, and to me that counts as a collaboration. But Morphoses is really set up as a collaborative factory where we will bring people together from different media and throw them into a big mix—hoping that every now and then we’ll strike gold. And when we don’t, we’ll still have created a dialogue between artists and dancers. And that’s not going to happen this year because we’re not really Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company yet. We just aren’t. We’re a good, very high-level pickup group of dancers who are doing real rep—quite successfully. But we’re only a fraction of what we hope to be, and I think it’s important for people to understand that. I don’t think that message was perhaps made clear enough to the people in London. I think some people felt a little bit like, He’s promising us the world and all he’s giving us is two programs of contemporary ballet. [Laughs] But you’ve got to start somewhere.

What do you mean by real rep?
We’re not just doing gala programs, we’re doing real, complete works. It’s not a gig where there’ll be a Stars and Stripes pas de deux and then half of Apollo—it’s not an evening of divertissements, even though in both programs in New York, there is a section that we’re calling contemporary diverts. Both programs feature three short works, which I think is also sometimes a problem for people. We’re trying to figure out a way to successfully link pieces like that—to make it more of a journey and an experience in itself, rather than feeling like it’s the gala performance where the curtain comes down in between each one and you kind of sit and stare at the red velvet for two and a half minutes while the dancers quickly change. That’s an interesting lesson that I learned from London—we did do that on one of the programs and it felt, continuity-wise, clumsy.

What else have you learned form London?
I’ve learned that programming is of the essence. As a choreographer, I often think, What would I like to see? And as far as music is concerned, what would I like to listen to? And in some ways, I’m realizing that works up to a point, but you really do have to take your audience and the balance of an evening into consideration seriously. And it’s alchemy. What might look good on paper doesn’t necessarily end up working perfectly as a complete evening of dance. So I’m learning a lot about that, but it’s good to be learning by doing. I think it’s the only way that I can ultimately be really good at what I’m setting out to do. It’s difficult when you’re doing it on such a high level and you’ve got the entire world perched—and that’s how it feels to me a little bit at the moment. It’s a lot of pressure and I’ve made some bold statements. I think that’s necessary because unless we start as we mean to go on, then it’s not really worth doing; it’s already hard enough to get people engaged in a new ballet company, so we’ve been finding the balance between getting people excited and sounding kind of arrogant, like, “Look at what we can show you.” Deep down, my confidence level is high enough. I know that I can do all of this, but do I really know if I can achieve it? Not really. The important thing to me is to at least have a go.

Do you really think that ballet is in danger?
Yeah, I do. I think there will always be the Swan Lakes and the Sleeping Beautys because there will always be an audience for that of some age group, but I think we’re in danger of losing exciting, new contemporary works created with a ballet vocabulary because there are fewer and fewer people doing it. Most ballet companies now are realizing that predicament and, rather than fighting for it, are almost settling with more contemporary works in a ballet company rep because it’s easier.

And they’re not even truly contemporary.
No! Not really. Particularly when you look at a lot of the so-called contemporary ballets that are being brought into the reps of American companies, versus what’s going on over here. I hate the word Eurotrash because I think it’s used way too liberally by Americans, and I think there’s a lot of quite dreadful, pretentious contemporary work going on over here, but there’s also some really fabulous cutting-edge work as well, but it’s all happening in contemporary dance. It’s not happening in ballet. I figure in the end, if it doesn’t work, I will have tried and I’ll just go back to choreographing as an independent choreographer, or maybe settle down again as a resident choreographer somewhere. At the moment, having worked with my group of dancers for the last two months, I’m really confident that if we do this right we could really be something. It’s just going to depend almost as much on whether people want us and whether, in some ways, if the press decides there’s a place for us or not.

And there’s money, too.
Oh, did I forget to say that? [Laughs] That’s a very big issue. But you know what? It does tie into what I’m saying and if people want it, it will happen. We’ve already been very well supported up to a point; as a group, we have theaters backing us, we have individuals backing us, we’re starting to assemble a board. But it’s one thing to be doing five venues over the course of two months in the summer, and another thing to be paying dancers full-time and giving them benefits and having a rehearsal space and administration, and all of that comes with a very high price tag. But we’re very realistic about it. [Executive director] Lourdes Lopez and I know that this is a bit of a crapshoot and we’re both prepared to throw ourselves in the deep end.

Why did you want to work with Lopez [a former principal with NYCB]?
We did a project together at the Miller Theatre a couple of years ago. I asked her if she would be in charge, and she took it on and was absolutely fantastic. Through the course of that project we talked on and off about the possibility of doing something a bit more permanent one day. Last September I called her and said, “I think I’m ready to do this now.” I wanted to work with her for all the right reasons—and a few wrong reasons, too. She’s got a great sense of humor—very important when you’re working with me. She’s incredibly poised. She really cares about the dancers, which is paramount as far as an executive director is concerned, because she’s going to be pushing for the money for their benefits, and she’s just as eager as I am to make sure they’re really well taken care of. One example of what’s amazing about Lourdes happened in London: She couldn’t come for the first few days and there had been a few grumbles about the rooming situation— Sadler’s Wells had given us a certain number of rooms and that meant some people had to share, and because we’re a small repertory group it meant that nobody should take priority over the others. But then you’ve got Wendy Whelan and Maria Kowroski. So there were a few people whose feathers got a little bit ruffled and the first thing she does after getting off the plane is walk into the studio, saying, “You know what, guys, I’m really sorry about the situation. Chris has been choreographing for many years, and you’ve been dancing for many years. I’m the one who’s really learning on the job here. I’m new to this and I’m a little bit old-school, so back in the day when I was touring, the principal dancers or the ballerinas were given priority, and I’ve made a mistake and I just wanted to say I’m sorry, and next time it won’t happen.” To have an executive director that does that is pretty rare.

Are you really trying to get Björk to do something?
This is the thing. I discussed a project at Covent Garden a while ago and Björk was on the cards to possibly come and do something with us, and it took us a long time for us to get in contact with her and finally—unfortunately too late—she was sent a video of Polyphonia and After the Rain. She got back to me and said she was thrilled and she loved them and was sorry that she’d been on tour and hadn’t been able to get it together in time to do that project, but that hopefully in the future we could do something together. So even though I haven’t yet really pursued it, it’s starting to be printed a lot and I’m worried it’s going to kind of tick her off—I would hate for her to keep reading that I’m working with her. But she’s a potential collaborator. She’s somebody that I would love to work with, let’s put it that way.

Who are other possible collaborators?
I want to find ways to cross over the boundaries between pop music and classical music and dance: I think there are a lot of recording artists out there who are classically trained musicians and whose music actually is full of it. I’m thinking of people like Damien Rice, Björk, Rufus Wainwright. There’s a lot of richness and texture in their music, and it’s not just pop music. I’m very open to trying to discover new amalgamations of our different worlds.

Are you trying to reframe classical ballet, or make something entirely new?
It’s still very much based on the tried-and-tested structure of a ballet company. I think the key is really finding fresh, inventive things to put on the stage in order to zero in on a wider audience, which is kind of what we’re all doing. It’s not particularly revolutionary, but I think there are quite a lot of closed minds and closed doors in the classical ballet world—that our tradition is already rich enough and why do we really need to go to those places anyway? I think, unfortunately, that in order to keep the audience alive we do have to go to those places.

But it’s not entirely unfortunate?
Not at all! Otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it.

Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company is at City Center Wed 17–Oct 21.