Word: balletically
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...sugar fantasies. The witty Soiree Musicale, which the school premiered last year, for instance, contains a show-stopping tango in which a femme fatale picks up new partners one by one, eventually dancing with a dozen admirers simultaneously. And Corybantic Ecstasies, given its premiere in March by the Boston Ballet, is a tough-minded, tautly argued work that shows off Wheeldon's ability to infuse the disciplined language of classical ballet with high emotion...
Born in Somerset, England, Wheeldon entered the Royal Ballet School at nine and started making up his own dances shortly thereafter. Hired by the Royal Ballet in 1991, he spent two restless years in the corps. Fascinated by the ballets of Balanchine, N.Y.C.B.'s founder, he left for New York City and took class with the company. "If I hadn't done that," he says, "I might still be back in London, standing on the side of the stage holding a tray." Instead, ballet master in chief Peter Martins, always on the lookout for promising young male dancers, offered...
Robbins promptly cast Wheeldon in Dances at a Gathering, his signature piece. Martins, after looking at videotapes of dances Wheeldon had made as a student, invited him to do one for the School of American Ballet in 1994. Three years later, Wheeldon choreographed his first work for the main company. Slavonic Dances, a folk-flavored ballet with a fire-eating solo for Monique Meunier, the company's most exciting young ballerina, drew critical raves and kicked off a new phase of his career...
Wheeldon's speedy rise to the top is partly due to a nearly complete lack of competition. The top American choreographers, Robbins and Eliot Feld excepted, have mainly preferred modern dance to ballet. Hungry for premieres, classical companies are increasingly turning to modern crossovers like Mark Morris and Twyla Tharp, whose highly personal reworkings of ballet technique are often refreshing but rarely idiomatic. While a few regional ballet masters are doing interesting work, none to date have won much more than local celebrity...
Small wonder, then, that companies coast to coast are clamoring for Wheeldon's crowd-pleasing yet intelligently crafted ballets. This summer he'll be making his first dance for the San Francisco Ballet and his second, a new version of Stravinsky's Firebird, for the Boston Ballet, as well as working on a dance-themed film by Nicholas Hytner (The Object of My Affection). "If a company calls and I have the time," he says cheerily, "I'll do it." There's just one catch: if they want somebody trendy, they'll have to call somebody else. "Ballet...