© Dave Morgan Wheeldon 'Continuum' reviews 'Continuum' reviews Wheeldon 'Softly as I Leave You' reviews 'Softly as I Leave You' reviews Wheeldon 'Rhapsody Fantaisie' reviews recent Wheeldon reviews more Eric Taub reviews Discuss this review (Open for at least 6 months)

Wheeldon's pre-performance introductions have gotten old, despite, or perhaps because of, his wit and charm. His little talks do put a face on the company, and his descriptions of the evening's works can provide little flashes of insight not always provided in the program. However useful these intros may be factually, they also let the undeniably charming Wheeldon seduce the audience, like an overly familiar waiter introducing himself by name ("Hello, I'm Christopher, and I'll be your choreographer for the evening"). However much he turns viewers into fans, he leaves the uncomfortable impression that he's his own number one.

A chat before the curtain I can tolerate, but Wheeldon then inflicted upon the captive audience interstitial videos which showed his dancers all having a wonderful time in Martha's Vinyard: laughing, stretching, sharing potluck, clowning around on a sailboat and, lest we miss it, telling us that they are, indeed, having a wonderful time. On their own, these "what-I-did-last-summer" videos are cheerfully banal; introducing the ballets they shown us being rehearsed, they're emotional blackmail. Who could be so stone-hearted as to dislike a ballet after seeing one of its dancers playing with his baby, gurgling and cooing in apple-cheeked closeup? (Besides me.) We go to a restaurant to eat dinner, we go to the the ballet to see dancing; not, in either case, home movies. Would we tolerate an on-screen waiter intoning such commonplaces "You can never pour smoothly enough" as we must a Morphoses dancer's "You can never be turned out enough"? Even when using use split screens to be twice as tedious in half the time, these videos can never be over quickly enough.

Why am I railing so against a practice most of the audience appeared to enjoy tremendously? Audiences, especially newcomers, come to the ballet freighted with enough received knowledge to sink a battleship beneath the feathers. Rather than lighten this cognitive burden, Wheeldon's shameless interlocutions add more layers, and cheat the audience of the God-given right to make up its own damned mind. If Wheeldon must produce cutesy-poo videos, he should let the audience choose whether to watch; instead, he's doing "A Clockwork Orange" with toeshoes.

So, I was at the movies and a ballet broke out. Three, in fact. Continuum, from 2002, again takes Balanchine's Agon and Episodes through Wheeldon's looking glass to Ligeti-land. Set to eleven short pieces of Gyorgy Ligeti to piano and harpsichord (how could you not love something called "L'escalier du Diable"?), Continuum is a trembling souffle that never quite collapses into a puddle of preciosity. Echoing Ligeti's charming near-randomness, Wheeldon creates a languid green-leotard world in which space curls and eddies with weighty deliberation, or fractures along invisible, shifting fault lines. Each bit of Ligeti's delicate, tremulous music is matched with a similar tracery of dance, most often a duet. It could be a treatise on Wheeldon's sensibility, if not his ever-shifting style. His choreographic building blocks are emblematic of his turn-of-the-century style, as in the Face-Plant (or Ostrich), where women stand in a straight-legged parallel fourth and bend sharply at the waist, optionally pawing the stage, or the Living Doll, in which a woman's lifted in the air and sharply flexes her feet and bends her knees.

Continuum takes place in Wheeldon's familiar murk, with Natasha Katz' original, dramatic lighting scheme recreated by Mary Louise Geiger; the ever-changing backdrops hide and reveal rows and columns of particolored light, against which the dancers are sometimes silhouetted. Wheeldon's not content to structure each dance with a conventional beginning, middle and end. He likes to finish with an unexpected pose, like the plucked-string terminii of Episodes, or a refined fade into blackness. One such finds a group of three kneeling women turning their heads to observe a fourth, who's being slowly lifted, chevron-legged, by her partner, as the music ends and the stage fades to black. It's an effective ending, as are most of Continuum's, but taken together they're wearying; all that baby's breath! It's War and Peace in haiku.

However, there's much to admire in Continuum. When Wheeldon's not obsessively flower-arranging, he's taking us along on a voyage of discovery into Balanchine's black-and-white worlds; when he takes himself past his comfort zone and gets down to business, it's thrilling. There are times, although not enough, when you can almost feel him bringing his not-inconsiderable faculties to bear on the complex intersection of time and space, the physical and ideal that defines ballet. How marvelous that he can take something we've all seen a million times before, a dancer slowly bending and straightening her leg, flexing and pointing her foot, and show us the wonder of it. Balanchine had the courage to always let us into his head and the genius to make the trip worthwhile; when Wheeldon's similarly brave, he's brilliant. Alas, for all his years of skillful self-apprenticeship to Balanchine, for all his ready grasp of Balanchine's fractured space, he never learned, or perhaps forgot, this most important lesson.

Wheeldon's always got supremely capable dancers. Of Continuum's eight, it's not surprising that my eyes were repeatedly drawn to the ethereal Wendy Whelan, although it was good to see City Ballet alumna Melissa Barak looking trim and fit, along with Gabrielle Lamb, Danielle Rowe, Andrew Crawford, Rory Hohenstein, Edwaard Liang and Matthew Prescott. Cameron Grant and Susan Walters played beautifully.

As I'd previously reviewed Drew Jacoby and Rubinald Pronk in Lightfoot Leon's Softly as I Leave You, it provided a great opportunity to sample the wheat beer in a bistro across 55th Street, and the Scotch served up in City Center's lounge.

I feel that I should have more to say about Wheeldon's new Rhapsody Fantasie than I actually do, or want to. Wheeldon's fond of self-referential programming; last year, he followed Ashton's Monotones II with his own Fool's Paradise, which borrows as much from Monotones as his Ligeti oeuvre does from Agon and Episodes. This program was book-ended with episodic works to short pieces for two pianos (Grant and Walter again); Rhapsodie Fantasie, the trailing bookend, was to Rachmaninoff, not Ligeti. While Wheeldon's Ligeti-land is faceted, angular and contemplative, he shapes the stormy Rachmaninoff with hyperbolic curves, whirlpools and arabesques. It's a big, all-hands-on-deck work, with twelve dancers clad in bright red by Francisco Costa: the women in short dresses; the bare-chested men in billowing, Scheherezade-style pants. Mary Louise Geiger clothed the stage in Wheeldon's wonted chiaroscuro, and the Cuban artist's collective, Los Carpinteros, provided a backdrop different from the ballet's recent premiere in London, looking like an assemblage of crumpled bumpers from automobiles of the Fifties. From time to time Geiger's lighting would highlight one amorphous shape, then another. It was interesting, although this illuminated junkyard massif seemed entirely unrelated to the dancing below, which I appreciated more than I liked.

I admired Wheeldon's deft hand at deploying his dancers, and his sure hand at sending movement motifs flying from dancer to dancer, although why he's so fond of having two couples perform the same adagios at the same time is beyond me. More isn't always better, but perhaps such doubling is merely an echo of his split-screen video. Again, Wheeldon's dancers are great, and again, the dancer who most stuck in my mind was Whelan. It's almost a no-brainer to put her in an extended adagio in which she's the ballet's unassuming linchpin; a role she's played countless times over her career. It's a high-energy work, with dancers flying on and offstage, grouping and regrouping with urgency and fervor. Great costumes and choreographic structure and brilliant dancing, Los Carpinteros' awesome wall of lozenges: Rhapsody Fantasie comprises lots clever bits and pieces, but Wheeldon's misplaced the magic wand he once used to assemble a work's disparate parts into an organic, breathing whole. Without his spell of synergy, Rhapsody Fantasie is neither more nor less than the sum of its parts, an assemblage of Wheeldonian cleverness that underwhelms by overwhelming.

Sometimes I feel like slapping Wheeldon and saying, "You can do better than this!" but then I think, can he?