Christopher Wheeldon: making the best of both ballet worlds.

Christopher Wheeldon has two careers going simultaneously at the top of the ballet world. At the age of twenty-three, the young Englishman is a New York City Ballet corps member, increasingly singled out for solo parts. And he is already regarded as one of the most promising classical choreographers today. Royal Ballet (where Wheeldon danced from 1991 to 1993 before moving to Manhattan) and NYCB have invited him to create works for their schools and their main stages. Last June, when his Danses Bohe'miennes, choreographed to Debussy, was premiered at the School of American Ballet's 32nd Annual Workshop Performances, he received the $10,000 Mae L. Wien Award for Young Choreographer. Last month the Royal included a pas de deux by him on its all Ravel program, which included works by Ashton and MacMillan. Recently Colorado Ballet commissioned his first large-scale work, a full-evening Midsummer Night's Dream, to premiere in Denver on February 8, 1997. Luckily, Wheeldon is energy personified and thrives on a fast pace. At a London rehearsal for Diversions, his new piece for the advanced students of the Royal Ballet School, his most frequent corrections were along the lines of "Faster! More animated here! Like a panic!"

The youngest of five children, he developed a love of theater from his childhood in Somerset after his parents began taking him regularly to London for West End shows and ballet. His mother, Judy, is a physical therapist who studied dance when she was young; she has been known to dance to Tchaikovsky on the front lawn. ("There's definitely a suppressed dancer there," Wheeldon says.) His father, Peter, is an engineer who loves classical music. The first ballet Wheeldon saw was Frederick Ashton's La Fille Mal Gardee, first on television and then live, during a Royal Ballet tour to Bournemouth, with Lesley Collier in the title role. It was, in fact, that ballet--or, more precisely, the chicken dance--that inspired young Christopher to take a lively interest in ballet: he wanted to do that and was thrilled when, as a young student, it was taught to him.

Ballet studies began at the West Coker Ballet School in Somerset, a tiny studio where the children used the backs of chairs in lieu of a barre. By the age of eight he was already a promising student at the Royal Ballet School, despite what he thought at the time was a poor audition in London.

"I remember coming out of the initial class and being really distraught," he says. "I thought I'd done very badly. But the next thing we did was this kind of improvisation class where we did combinations, and then we were asked to improvise, and we were given little things to be. Well, one of the things was a leaf, being a leaf in the wind. So all the other dancers were sort of wafting around, and I, in front of this panel--I was so upset that I'd done badly in the first class, I thought, I've got to redeem myself!--threw myself in front of everyone. I was doing all of this what I thought of as complicated stuff, like manege, jetes en tournant, then I'd fall and roll over on the floor. I remember seeing my teacher at the time, from West Coker, sitting in the corner shaking her head frantically. I stood up and looked, and almost everyone else had stopped, and was just looking at me." Three years later he was performing bratty little Fritz in The Nutcracker with Royal Ballet at Covent Garden.

At age eleven, Wheeldon went to live for five years at White Lodge, the Royal Ballet School's palatial residence for younger students in Richmond Park, just outside London. On this extravagantly picturesque estate (originally built as a royal hunting lodge), herds of deer are commonly seen grazing within a few feet of relaxing students. In 1989 he moved to the higher school in London and then, two years later, joined Royal Ballet, having won three of the school's top awards for choreography along the way.

"At White Lodge," he says, "I choreographed my first ballet, The Syncopated Clock, to a piece of music by Leroy Anderson--really tacky music, like the Boston Pops Orchestra-type of thing. It was about this clock, and a little girl was the clock. There was a businessman, and the little girl would hit the time of day to wake him up, and he would go to have his breakfast and go to work. And there were a road builder with a spade and a bus driver, and the little girl would hit the time and they'd go to lunch. It was cute. I was eleven then. The school performed it for Princess Margaret at the end of the year.

"The next year I did a nursery-rhyme ballet. The wardrobe mistress at White Lodge was so nice. I mean, here was a twelve-year-old kid marching into her office saying, `I want one Humpty Dumpty costume, one giant cardboard book, and this and that and that.' And she made everything for me! The other people in the competition would do their number, and then here I'd come wheeling out my set. And they'd all sort of look at me like, `What is this little boy doing?' Then, when I did the senior choreography competition, I left the story ballets behind and moved on to something a little bit more classical. I did a little pas de deux to Elgar's Song of the Morning--a very English piece of music."

Though choreography continued to occupy him, he worked equally hard on perfecting his technique as a dancer. When he competed at the 1991 Prix de Lausanne, Wheeldon combined both interests: he won a gold medal dancing a variation he had choreographed for himself.

Wheeldon has returned to White Lodge to choreograph Diversions on Royal Ballet students. He is clearly pleased to be back after about five years-no longer as a student but as a professional choreographer who already has a considerable reputation. (Last year he created Le Voyage, a large-scale ballet to Poulenc's Concerto for Two Pianos, for SAB.) He points out to a visitor a handsome drawing he had made while a student at White Lodge that someone had since framed and hung, to his surprise and apparent delight. Before he can be interviewed, however, he has to assist a student dancer in Diversions who has sprained his foot to get up the steps to the lounge. The young man has been injured rehearsing double tours. Though genuinely concerned and helpful, Wheeldon says in all honesty, "Thank God he doesn't have a very important role in my ballet. That might sound crude, but nobody has an understudy up here."

In the enormous rehearsal studio Wheeldon, wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and socks but no shoes, is utterly in control. The dancers--thirty-five of them (well, thirty-four now)--are warmed up and ready to get started. There are two very good pianists to play Britten's Diversions for Piano Left Hand and Orchestra, and Lesley Collier, now mother of twin sons and ballet mistress of the Upper School, stands by to help and to videotape the final run-through. Wheeldon starts working immediately, asking for the full-cast opening pose, then making corrections before the pianists can begin to play.

He works fast, permitting nothing to get past him. Diversions is the largest ballet he has yet made; it looks quite complicated yet completely logical and always lovely. It sticks close to the music in its rhythmic outline but remains unpredictable. It looks new and very fresh but also is unmistakably ballet. Classicism is at the root of his art, both as dancer and choreographer. Wheeldon has said that some choreographers "are trying too hard to create new ways of changing ballet. I don't think it really needs to change because there's still so much to be done with what we've been given originally . . . What makes good choreography interesting is little changes. Maybe that's what needs to be stressed: the little things here and there. The way you do a port de bras, or the way the girl may turn into a promenade with the boy, or the way the girl is lifted . . . I don't think it's necessarily important to be strikingly original all the time." Wheeldon loves ballet classicism, but he is so inventive a choreographer-and so energetic a dancer-that he avoids the dullness of a high-minded but superficially pure classicism.

At one point, after three girls move into position, Wheeldon stops the rehearsal to say, "It's got to be moving the whole time. It's very boring to look at all three of you just standing there; we might as well be looking at a sculpture."

At its final run-through with Wheeldon present, two months before the ballet is to be performed at Covent Garden, the entire piece is videotaped, then left in the supremely capable hands of Collier, who will continue to rehearse it after Wheeldon returns to New York City. One is struck by how everyone seems to take his creativity for granted at this point. As for Wheeldon, he seems to consider making ballets simply his job, and he makes very little to-do about it. What concerns him are details and the ability of the dancers to perform them. "They worked really well, didn't they?" he says.

During the drive back to London, the car radio picks up the BBC broadcast of an interview Wheeldon gave about Souvenir, the work he had made for the Royal Ballet's 1996 "Dance Bites" tour. (Premiered just three days before, it had garnered several rave reviews in the London press and clinched management's decision to commission a ballet for Covent Garden.) Wheeldon hears himself saying, "Tchaikovsky wrote the sextet, Souvenir de Florence, after having been in Florence, where he composed the opera The Queen of Spades. I thought it made sense for me to use that music in the first ballet I've made in England since moving to New York. It's really a blend of elements I've learned in both London and New York."

His reaction in the car is, "My voice sounds awful." But it doesn't sound awful; just confident.

To City Ballet principal Damian Woetzel, it was typical of Wheeldon that he would have moved from Royal Ballet to City Ballet. (Peter Martins had invited him to join in 1993 after he saw Wheeldon, who was in town on a holiday, taking a company class as a guest.) "Chris has this appetite for knowledge," Woetzel says. "He really tries to understand what is different, what works--about dances and about companies; I think that's why he came here. And he has already absorbed so much of what he has seen into his dancing, as well as his choreography, all the while retaining his own personal style."

This season he is to dance in a variety of ballets by Martins, Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, and others while working on A Midsummer Night's Dream for Colorado Ballet. He describes a typical day as: "Class at ten A.M., rehearsals starting at eleven, maybe an hour break, through to six o'clock. Run out, eat quickly, get bad indigestion, put your makeup on, and that's it--you do the show. Then you get home, eat something, to bed no earlier than one A.M., then the same thing the next day and the next day and the next day . . . If I have an unexpected break during the day, I try to get to the gym. During rehearsal periods it's a little easier; you have some time to be a human being. I can ride my bike, listen to music, watch TV."

There have been some active ballet dancers who were also successful choreographers, but the list is not a long one. Nijinsky is the most striking example: when he made Le Sacre du Printemps in 1913 he was already the most famous male dancer in the world. Leonide Massine both danced and choreographed, and Robbins built his career as a ballet and Broadway choreographer while still dancing with Ballet Theatre and later with City Ballet. (Such versatility has long been common in modern dance; one thinks immediately of Ted Shawn, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, and Trisha Brown.)

Wheeldon appears determined to pursue two careers simultaneously, however difficult it may be to do so. "I think I'm passionate about both pretty much equally," he says. "When I'm choreographing I always think I love choreographing more than dancing; but then when I'm dancing, I can't imagine being without dancing. Luckily, no one's put me on the spot about it. Yet.

"At the moment I'm doing both, and I don't see why I shouldn't be able to continue as long as I'm sensible about how much work I take on my break, because I obviously need to relax once in a while."

He may not get to do so very often. His career at the moment is very much like a spaceship a few minutes after a roaringly successful launch, heading for a long, high flight through space and time.

Rick Whitaker, whose feature article, "The Dancer: A Film by Donya Feuer," appeared in our December 1995 issue, also writes about dance for Ballet Review, New York Observer, and Dance Theatre Journal.