Morphoses the Wheeldon Company - Off to Vail!
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CHRISTOPHER WHEELDON |
Photos ©Yaniv Schulman
Recounting Morphoses the Wheeldon Company’s first performance in Vail, CO in July/August…
Picked up at my apartment this morning at 7 am by Nev, camera in hand and tape rolling. Bleary eyed, I staggered into one of the two car services waiting. One had been called by mistake, by Ginger my assistant, and in an effort to be super organized we have truly pissed off a very grumpy Indian driver. We zip uptown on the early Sunday morning traffic-less streets of Manhattan’s Upper West Side to pick up Elizabeth our administrator, who is likewise bleary eyed and soapy smelling from the shower she has taken minutes before we pile back in the van and set off for La Guardia airport to take our flight to Vail. Today is Elizabeth’s 25th birthday, so July 29th is a shared birthday between Lib and Morphoses the Wheeldon Company.
Nev is shooting footage so we have film to make webisodes for our site and also to document the first steps of Morphoses. He clips a radio mike onto my belt as we wait for some of the dancers to gather by the United check-in desk. One by one, the dancers arrive, are they all really here for my company? Wendy Whelan, Craig Hall, Gonzalo Garcia who recently arrived in New York to take a position as principal dancer at City Ballet in the fall but dancing with us this summer. Following is Teresa Reichlen and Adrian Danchig-Waring. Immaculately organized and dressed in her own inimitable style. (She makes fabulous imaginative jewelry.) Victoria Epstein, our tour manager, instructs the dancers on the check-in procedure. All cruise through security except for me who is of course hauled aside for a scrutinizing extra check. I think it must have been my threatening English pinstriped trousers.
We sit in departures as a group happily chatting comparing technologies (mainly iphones and Blackberries). Lourdes and family arrive. Calista, her youngest daughter, chats excitedly with Wendy and I about a fish she had caught in the Hamptons. Adriel greets the group with a sleepy yet fresh and beautiful charm. George, Lourdes’s husband is dapper in a pressed shirt and grey slacks . His fatherly concern and devotion to Morphoses always touches me. He believes in us and it really translates into genuine caring support. A wonderful personal touch, he is surprising the dancers when we arrive in Vail with personalized backpacks and Morphoses sweatshirts. We continue to sip coffee and I eat my bran muffin suggesting that all the dancers take one. A suggested slogan :
“ Morphoses, we keep our dancers regular! “
Katy arrives with baby Jack . His blue eyes and white blonde hair enchant everyone. Katy will have her hands full in Vail between Jack and her ballet mistress-ing duties. Her family is in Colorado Springs so hopefully she will have her parents to help.
Looking around I am suddenly overcome with pride. This is my group of dancers. These people represent the beginning of a new part of my career, my life. They have come together to create dance, to emanate beauty, such important food for humanity. Can we really do this, change the way ballet is viewed by the dance world and the public? I believe that we have to try. Over the next ten days with a group from all over the world we will create new work, rehearse existing ballets and perform twice. Focusing on process and performance and developing a technique of presentation that allows the audience into our world just enough to feel welcome and involved and to fall in love with the people who are fascinating and often underestimated, the dancers.
Okay so I skipped a few days. Actually it’s August 29th today so I skipped quite a few days, and what amazing days they were.
We arrived in Vail to a warm reception from the festival. I think all of us were thrilled with our mountainside accommodations. We shared condos in a complex in Beaver Creek (unfortunate name but stunning location). The reps from the festival met us at the condos and filled us in on the various transportation and activities during our stay. It all felt a bit Dirty Dancing mixed with summer dance camp although I don’t think anyone was underestimating the amount of work that was ahead of us. That night I zipped over to Vail to watch the opening of the Festival. First act only, as Lourdes Lopez our Executive director and her husband George had arranged a welcome dinner for all the dancers to meet. So there we were, sun setting over mountain tops on a balcony-overlooking town. A group of dancers from several acclaimed international companies. A fantastic feeling of goodwill and excitement and a healthy dose of travel exhaustion. By dessert we were all close to passing out so the night swallowed us in.
The first few minutes into morning class I would pinch myself. Here we were finally, a small company with a real performance to deliver. An absolutely stellar group of dancers, a wonderful executive director and spectacular place to perform. We assembled each day at The Ford Amphitheater, an outdoor stage with a roof covering the seated audience and stage but with no walls, revealing the spectacular surrounding mountains. By the Stage Door a stream rushed by and the backdrop of the stage was a garden of wild flowers. Sounds idyllic and it was, especially taking morning class in the open air.
Olga Kostritsky taught us every day, pulling together our different schoolings into one unanimously popular class. The mood was light and jokey although the mix of styles created a very interesting sense of friendly competition. The dancers from Hamburg displaying a distinctly classical training in class and a controlled abandon in performance. The City Ballet dancers characteristically American, theirs a full and daring movement quality with the distinct Balanchinian style. Laeticia Giuliani unquestionably Italian, her movement sensual and generous. It was wonderful to be working alongside Carla Korbes and Miranda Weese again, two dancers who left City Ballet to explore careers at Pacific Northwest Ballet . We all went along to cheer for them in their performances with PNB later on in the week. I was honored and proud to have such a group working for me and they reciprocated with hard work, many hours in the car driving to the rehearsal venues, and two absolutely spectacular performances.
Rehearsals over the ten days were divided between four venues some as far as 35 minutes away from each other. My particular favorite was the auditorium of The Valley Mountain School in Vail. It proved a quiet and removed space that allowed for focus in the creative process. It was also fun to create on the stage of The Ford Amphitheater. Nothing quite like mountains in the summer sun to provide inspiration for a new ballet. Both Edwaard Liang (an ex-City Ballet dancer, dancing and choreographing for me this year ) and I made some new work in Vail . Ed’s new pas de deux ‘Vicissitudes’ premiered at the end of our stay and we previewed a ten-minute excerpt from my new work, which will have its premiere in London next month at Sadlers Wells. I think we were both turned on by the majesty and beauty of the surroundings. One day during class it was difficult not to be distracted by the hummingbirds dancing around the flower garden at the back of the stage. Such is the inspired beauty of nature. It was at times easy to forget the struggles of the world whilst we were hiding out in Vail .
The first week was tough as we all found the travel between rehearsal spaces to be logistically challenging. Often the dancers had to spend their lunch break sitting in traffic on the highway between towns. Luckily tired as we all were, everyone seemed happy and we celebrated the end of our first week with a cookout in my condo . Of course it was meant to be by the pool but we were rained off so we gathered on Sunday evening and had an eat fest largely supplied by Lourdes and George.That was the day that confirmed my suspicions that I had gathered not only a supremely gifted group of artists, but also a fantastic bunch of people.
George and Lourdes
Aside from the dancers, Lourdes brought her family. Her husband George who was our biggest supporter and took it upon himself to be a very successful activities director. Their daughters Calista, ten going on thirty, and Adriel who is off to Yale this semester .They were a super family and included everyone in a feeling of love and support. Yaniv Schulman came along and made two insightful and moving short films that were shown at “ Up Close with Morphoses”, the first and most intimate of our two performances. These proved a hit with the audience as I knew they would . It really gave them a look into our personalities, our process, and above all our accessibility as people and as a company. It will always be the goal of Morphoses to be welcoming to the public and to shed some of the mysteries of our art form . That’s not to say that a certain amount of mysteriousness isn’t alluring, but I think that many people fear ballet because of a long enforced inaccessibility. Films and personal insight invites a wary and suspecting fence sitter into our world.
My assistant Ginger Tidwell came as well, and was soon nicknamed mother Ginger. She was awesome and made sure that everyone was well taken care of as well as seeing that I made it to my many rehearsals on time. I cant remember a happier professional time in my career.
Our administrator Lib was with us and she made sure that all was running smoothly behind the scenes. And then of course Victoria Epstein, the most spectacular company manager of all time, and likewise Loreen Domijani who spent sleepless nights lighting the stage and running the performances with a biting wit that kept us on our toes and laughing even in the pressured moments. Katey Tracey was also a force to be reckoned with. Her perfect schedule calculations, and as always, totally thorough rehearsing of my work was invaluable. Katey is totally unflappable even with baby in one arm and a rehearsal schedule in the other. I was truly a blessed artistic director and couldn’t have wished for a better team.
Cameron at the piano
I know for those of you that were with us you might be thinking “but you forgot Cameron and Helena”. Ahh but I didn’t, I was just saving the best till last. Cameron Grant made our group complete with his exceptional playing of the piano in both ‘Polyphonia’ and ‘After The Rain’. He and his wife Helena had a close brush with nature when a baby bear broke its way into their condo, stole a yoghurt (low fat) from the fridge, only to be seen peering out the window yoghurt in hand, to make sure no one was watching. The rest of the week we would find signs posted all over the complex warning of the hungry bears.
Of course it would be unrealistic of me to think that I could always provide this kind of blissful environment for my dancers, and I look on these two weeks as our innocent time, probably the only innocent time of Morphoses, before we are looked upon and are judged for better or worse by public and critics alike. I do however feel confident in my philosophy that happy confident dancers give magnificent and radiant performances. From the beginning of the inaugural performance on the last night of our stay I knew that the dancers felt like they were part of a company. I also know that they felt the intense pride, support and appreciation from myself, Lourdes and all the others who had brought us to that point and we were not afraid to show it. I was moved by the way the dancers swept the audience along with them and especially by how the audience surrendered to them. It gave me such hope in our beautiful art form and in its future. For those of you that doubt we can do it, just watch us try. You may be right, but you certainly will have a hard time stopping us from giving it our best shot.
Vail International Dance Festival program
MORPHOSES/ THE WHEELDON COMPANY.
Gerald R Ford Amphitheater Vail Colorado Friday August 10th 2007.
POLYPHONIA.
Choreography by Chrstopher Wheeldon
Music by Gyorgy LigetiCarla Korbes Bakthuel Bold PNB
Miranda Weese Gonzalo Garcia PNB SFB
Helene Bouchet Thiago Bordin Hamburg Ballet
Teresa Reichlen Tyler Angle NYCBIntermission
VICISSITUDES,
Choreography by Edwaard Liang
Music by Franz Schubert ( Death And The Maiden )Maria Kowroski Tyler Angle NYCB
EXCERPT FROM NEW WHEELDON BALLET.
Choreography by Christopher Wheeldon
Music by Joby TalbotWendy Whelan Aesha Ash NYCB LINES
Craig Hall Gonzalo Garcia NYCBPROKOFIEV PAS DE DEUX.
Choreography by Christopher Wheeldon
Music by Serge Prokofiev ( Andante Assai from the Second Violin Concerto )Helene Bouchet Thiago Bordin Hamburg Ballet
DANCE OF THE HOURS FROM LA GIACONDA.
Choreography by Christopher Wheeldon
Music by Amilcare PonchielliLaeticia Giuliani Gonzalo Garcia Maggio Danza Florence NYCB
Intermission
AFTER THE RAIN.
Choreography by Christopher Wheeldon
Music by Arvo PartWendy Whelan Craig Hall NYCB
Maria Kowroski Adrian Dancig-Waring
Teresa Reichlen Edwaard Liang.
Check out Morphoses on the Morphoses MySpace page.
All photos ©Yaniv Schulman
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