We’ve been hearing critics singing the praises of dancer Wendy Whelan for the past 30 years. Alastair Macaulay, chief dance critic at the New York Times wrote, “Everything about her is riveting, interesting, unusual, intelligent” and “Few dancers in any genre show better that a work should be a process of self-discovery.”
Although she joined New York City Ballet shortly after Balanchine’s death, she went on to perform virtually all the major roles in his ballets. Jerome Robbins, the other choreographic mainstay at NYCB, worked with her a great deal. But her signal achievement was in creating many, many new roles for NYCB. Choreographers wanted to work with her and she with them. She became identified with contemporary ballet.
For Restless Creature, her touring program that stopped at Playhouse Square last Saturday, Whelan commissioned four choreographers to choreograph and dance with her in four duets. After a premiere at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in August of 2013 and a delay in 2014 while Whelan recovered from hip surgery, the in-demand program has continued its tour. By our count, Cleveland is the 15th of 19 planned performances, 18 in the US and one in London, England.
Restless Creature began with Ego et Tu choreographed by Alejandro Cerrudo, resident choreographer of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. After a short solo by Cerrudo in which he planted both feet on the ground and undulated his long torso, Whelan entered from an inconspicuous gap in the upstage center curtain, a device of his that Cleveland dance audiences may remember from a Hubbard Street concert years ago. The duet began with the two touching foreheads and Cerrudo comically undulating in recoil. As the dance progressed the touching of foreheads together became thematic, less of a joke, less of a metaphor for putting-our-heads-together, and more of a visible manifestation of the two working and feeling together. We were both reminded of our cats, pushing their foreheads against us and each other in search of some communion.
Less visible but permeating the Cerrudo/Whelan collaboration were the many low lifts. How is he taking her weight? How do they manage to get her off the ground each time — sometimes at arms length — with no apparent effort or change in momentum? In his dancing and in his words at the post concert Q&A Cerrudo presents himself as an amiable joker, but that’s just a cover for his core of Spanish steel. It’s the same for Whelan, all effortless and ethereal on the outside, but not quite concealing her extraordinary strength.
Conditional Sentences is Joshua Beamish’s duet set to a Bach Partita. Working with Whelan, Beamish showed that he hasn’t forgotten the hip-hop fundamentals that he started out with in his youth, with the baroque ornaments of the Bach providing opportunity for syncopated rhythmic accents using arms, legs, and hips. As in earlier choreography by Beamish, Conditional Sentences makes nuanced use of the head in slow, partial turns. But underneath the often humorous use of hip-hop, Beamish’s choreography is clearly based on ballet technique and his very nice, controlled multiple turns indicate that he’s kept up with his class work.
Kyle Abraham’s piece, The Serpent and the Smoke, began with him dancing under a harsh light set high over the stage. As Whelan joined him — rolling shoulders and flailing arms in fast bursts of movement that ended suddenly in low, static positions — the light gradually softened so that we could see the dancers better…until a pair of harsh lights aimed downstage came on casting the performers’ shadows into the auditorium. Lighting Design by Joe Levasseur dominated this dance.
First Fall choreographed by Brian Brooks is built around contact partnering in which she leans part of her weight on him as the two execute slow, repetitive locomotor movements through the stage space to the music of Philip Glass. As in, she arches her back and falls backward onto his crouching back; he slowly sinks to the ground, supporting her, and then levers her slowly back up, repeated in a path that takes them from one side of the stage to another, the movement mutating slightly as they progress, the requirement being for her to be both rigid and supple in her control. It was strangely satisfying.
Hip-hop dance and contact partnering are far afield from the repertory of NYCB but that’s why we call Wendy Whelan a ballet maverick, reinventing herself and her art after 30 years of toeing the line.
Wendy Whelan Restless Creature was co-presented by DanceCleveland and Playhouse Square with support from Arts Midwest Touring Fund, New England Foundation for the Arts, Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, and the National Endowment for the Arts on Sat 4/25.
The next project for the Wendy Whelan New Works Initiative will be a full program of new works choreographed for her and Edward Watson, principal dancer for the Royal Ballet of London. The U.S. premiere is tentatively scheduled for the spring of 2016. We’re hoping Whelan remembers the way back to Cleveland.
The next DanceCleveland performance is coming right up Sat 5/1 @ 7:30. Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host at the Connor Palace Theatre. Go to DanceCleveland’s website or call the PlayhouseSquare box office at 216-241-6000.
Photos by Christopher Duggan
From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas. Elsa and Vic are both longtime Clevelanders. Elsa is a landscape designer. She studied ballet as an avocation for 2 decades. Vic has been a dancer and dance teacher for most of his working life, performing in a number of dance companies in NYC and Cleveland. They write about dance as a way to learn more and keep in touch with the dance community. E-mail them at vicnelsaATearthlink.net.