Word: wheeldon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Anything you see by Boston Ballet, one of America's top five dance companies, will be good. Their dancers are the creme of the crop, reason alone to see this show. But this show has even more going for it. Firebird's award-winning choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, a current soloist with New York City Ballet, is one of the most innovative and heralded of new choreographers, having inspired big articles in Time and Dance Magazine. Daring to re-choreograph an already well-loved ballet, in Firebird he creates a new masterpiece from an old one, his choreography departing from...
...Boston Ballet, however, Firebird becomes much more than a story-ballet. It is the combination of an award-winning, inventive choreographer and fantastic dancers, who, having mastered the athleticism of ballet, are accomplished artists capable of expressing the human emotion and sensitivity behind Wheeldon's choreography, able to relate to the audience and imbue the piece with relevance...
...Firebird, however, is not without comic relief. Giant storks, with five-foot long necks, as well as other odd castle creatures provide laughs, but never does Wheeldon lose the carefully cultivated menacing atmosphere of Kastchei's land...
...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...