I barely got a grip on Wheeldon’s 23 fine dancers, and only a few performances stood out for me as extraordinary. New York City Ballet’s Wendy Whelan and Edwaard Liang performed William Forsythe’s 2000 Slingerland pas de deux, one of that choreographer’s less violent exercises in partnering. Whelan got to wear a stiff white tutu-like affair designed by Forsythe and likened by many critics to a potato chip. Ignoring this preposterous get-up, she invested her slinky circumnavigations and scramblings around Liang’s torso with a sensual weightedness and a constantly surprising phrasing.
In so many other items in this vein, on Morphoses’s program and elsewhere, dancers do these moves with a flat, dispassionate attitude. Whelan made me feel she was doing more than waving her arms and legs decoratively. She made it okay, for once, that the women in these numbers don’t really get to dance even if they’re virtuosos.
City Ballet’s expressive principal Maria Kowroski circled tentatively around Tyler Angle in Liang’s Vicissitudes. This duet seemed to refer to its music, from Franz Schubert’s Death and the Maiden string quartet, rather than its naughty title, with both dancers in black and Angle enveloping her in his arms, lightly controlling her gestures, and she working up to submission as if she were a smaller, shyer girl.
City Ballet principal Ashley Bouder did dance, in the funniest, fullest choreographic piece Wheeldon contributed to the season, Dance of the Hours, which was choreographed for the Metropolitan Opera’s 2006 production of Ponchielli’s La Gioconda. Wheeldon begins with a double corps de ballet dressed (by Holly Hynes) in elaborate but abbreviated 18th-century gowns: four skinny, spacy ballerinas in gold and four tall, slightly klutzy ones in blue. The audience laughs on cue at the first campy notes of the theme (the “Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda” chorus).
The piece then goes on to scratch away at the conventions of the big-blast classical-ballet finale, with the corps deployed asymmetrically behind the stars, Bouder and Gonzalo Garcia. There’s a trickier-than-thou adagio duet backed up by the corps ladies, who recline on the floor and wave their arms. Bouder and Garcia do spectacular solo bits, the corps launches into a cancan, and at one thrilling point Bouder streaks in from nowhere and rips off a bubbly diagonal of turns and smiles. Finally she assumes a classic Mercury pose and Garcia slings her upside down over his shoulder. The corps is staunchly revolving around them as the curtain falls.
Dance of the Hours reminded me of the sly but well-bred way Balanchine used to poke fun at the clichés of the ballet trade while at the same time giving dancers the opportunity to show their mastery of its demands — Stars and Stripes, Donizetti Variations, for instance. I thought Wheeldon’s dancers underplayed the humor of the situation, but probably that was better than outright farce.
Wheeldon channeled Balanchine’s modern ballets in Morphoses, to the String Quartet No. 1 (Metamorphoses Nocturnes) of György Ligeti, which was played by the FLUX Quartet. Wendy Whelan with Craig Hall and Sterling Hyltin with Edwaard Liang were the two couples in this 2002 ballet. To the knotty, atonal music, they extrapolated on the Themes that begin The Four Temperaments, the inversions and distortions that pull up short into classical poses throughout Agon.
