© Paul Kolnik 'Klavier' reviews Whelan in reviews Marcovici in reviews recent NYCB reviews more Eric Taub reviews Discuss this review (Open for at least 6 months)

The curtain rises on his ensemble of ten dancers with their back to us, pacing slowly upstage in unison; one by one they turn to face us, and raise their arms slowly over their heads, as if in an invocation. Wheeldon has an eye for interesting dancers, with personality and presence, and has picked several here. Two lead couples, Wendy Whelan and Sebastien Marcovici, and Miranda Weese and Albert Evans, are set off against two triads of veteran corps women and up-and-coming men: Melissa Barak with Sean Suozzi and Andrew Veyette, and Pauline Golbin with Tyler Angle and Craig Hall. Set to that long and difficult piano adagio, the dancers' movements are for the most part measured and and sober, and the overall mood seems to be one of inward directed contemplation, and pained, Romantic remembrance.
 

Wheeldon uses his now-familiar style of classic ballet mixed with odd dislocations and adventurous trips away from the comfort of the vertical. Form's always important in his ballets, and even when he tosses in embellishments, like the odd flexed foot, and quirkier poses, they're presented with the same care, the same sense of striving for an ideal shape, which informs classicism. So when he has two of his women supported in a pose where they'd tipped almost horizontally, looking for all the world like statues which have fallen forward off their pedestals, for instance, it's a formal design element infused with a suggestion of literal meaning echoed in exact detail by the two lead couples. Wheeldon does this a lot in Klavier as he's done elsewhere: abstracting the drama out of striking images, and leaving it to us to put back together the formal puzzle he's created.

As with much of Wheeldon's work, that formality shows his gift for composition. His duos and trios coalesce and break apart with graceful fluidity; movement motifs bounce back and forth in clever counterpoint; and he's quite attuned to Beethoven's moods and phrases. There's some clever and striking bits indeed, particularly for Whelan and Marcovici, where he pulls her about the stage as she manages to glide on her points like a skater I imagine the rosin box was out-of-bounds backstage! While Weese and Evans seem to exist mostly as an afterthought, the duets for Whelan and Marcovici hint at a stormy relationship between the two: there are moments in their last duet where I realized with a shock that Marcovici's actually slapping Whelan around (she returns the favor, I believe). So prettily was this act presented that I didn't recognize the import of what I was seeing, and I cried to myself, "Please, don't let him kill her!" remembering the deadly duet in his recent departed and unmourned Shambards. Fortunately for us all, Whelan survived, to be knocked around another day. The ballet ends with an echo of its opening, ensemble movements.
 

So what do we have when all's said and done? A ballet that's no more, and perhaps less, than the sum of its parts. Much of the effect it does have owes as much to the brilliant decor, costumes and lighting as it does to Wheeldon's actual choreography, which faintly echoes the music's sad and retrospective tone. More and more Wheeldon's inventiveness seems merely clever, and his undeniable fluency seems wasted in the service of a conception which doesn't rise above trite, pretty navel-gazing. The emotional content is unrelievedly bland and nostalgic; the composition sophisticated, but stifling. And when he is perhaps trying to break the mold with the "domestic-disturbance" duet for Whelan and Marcovici (both of whom danced magnificently, by the way), it's strangely affectless. He'd given me no reason to care about this couple, other than to wish profoundly that he wasn't going to echo his gaffe of Shambards. And what is it with all this violence against women in Wheeldon's works?

I often find a ballet's success or failure correlates pretty well to how it answers the two-part question "Who are these people, and why should I care about them?" As he's done with depressing regularity lately, Wheeldon begs the question, and sometimes I think his penchant for dim lighting (however brilliantly realized) is to hide from us that lately there's less to his work than meets the eye.