Christopher Wheeldon must be one of the most steadily productive and widely popular figures in today’s dance world, but I’m yet to be persuaded that he has much gift for narrative. His adaptation of the novel Like Water for Chocolate was a hopeless muddle; his response to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is mere vaudeville; and I’m praying to St Jude that nobody is planning to import his dramatisation of Oscar Wilde’s downfall, premièred in Australia last year. But as the elegant craftsman, and sometimes the inspired artist, of more abstract dance, he is without doubt a great talent.
The Royal Ballet’s programme of four of his shorter pieces showcases his strengths. Let’s get the misfire out of the way first – The Two of Us is set to four Joni Mitchell standards, prissily sung live on stage by Julia Fordham (to do her justice, she was struggling against a faulty sound system). Lauren Cuthbertson and Calvin Richardson are wasted as they mooch around in shimmering pyjamas without ever establishing any compelling counterpoint to the implications of the lyrics or the mood of the music: they might as well be extemporising, and there’s just not enough in the movement they come up with to hold one’s interest.
But everything else on offer gives much pleasure. Fool’s Paradise, first seen at Covent Garden in 2012, is richly melancholy – perhaps subliminally a meditation on how relationships between three people inexorably gravitate into two, but more obviously a beautiful example of Wheeldon’s neoclassicism. His aesthetic has been influenced by his long sojourn in America and his choreographic style reflects that of New York City Ballet luminaries such as Jerome Robbins and Justin Peck as much as it does that of his Royal Ballet precursors Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan: sleekly athletic, clean in line, devoid of jerks and twerks, milk and honey for dancers with fluent classical technique. A restrained score by Joby Talbot, Wheeldon’s regular musical collaborator, provides the appropriate emotional accompaniment, and how serenely Akane Takada and William Bracewell seem to float through it. But shafts of light illuminating falling leaves or snowflakes is a threadbare cliché.
Us is a duet in which two half-naked men can scarcely let each other go. An encounter that seems neither homoerotically charged nor a gamey bout of wrestling, it nevertheless radiates a fierce intensity as though some inexorable magnetic force is holding their bodies together. Matthew Ball and Joseph Sissens admirably convey its ambiguities without hamming it up.
Finally, sending us all home happy, there’s An American in Paris, a 25-minute ‘dream ballet’ drawn from the musical comedy hit that Wheeldon presented in the West End a decade ago. The real star of the show here is the designer Bob Crowley who has conjured up a fabulous spectacle, all massive cut-outs and a riot of candy-coloured costumes. The courting couple – on opening night, Anna Rose O’Sullivan and Cesar Corrales, both delightful – stand out in existentialist black. But they don’t get much to do, and the energy that surges through the piece comes mostly from the corps, put through their paces with turbocharged panache. Koen Kessels conducts an exuberant account of Gershwin’s chirpy tone poem, and the sum of it is an irresistibly delicious dessert.
As a postscript, I was dismayed to see Wheeldon briefly participating ‘as himself’ in the perfectly awful Étoile, a ‘comedy drama’ series currently being aired on Amazon Prime. The latest, and by a long chalk silliest, in a long tradition of cinematic fantasies claiming to take the lid off ballet backstage, it focuses on the travails of two fictitious companies based in New York and Paris. I can only emphasise that the whole thing is unmitigated drivel and about as rooted in realities as Trump’s tweets.
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