Christopher Wheeldon: making the best of both ballet worlds - choreographer and dancer with the New York City Ballet - Cover Story

Dance Magazine, Nov, 1996 by Rick Whitaker

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."