If you’ve reached the top of your profession and then spent twenty years there, retiring is going to be hard. It will be many times harder if, like New York City Ballet principal Wendy Whelan, you were only twenty-four when you reached that rank, and only in your mid-forties when injuries came calling and roles started to fall away - unwelcome signs that the end of a classical ballet career is nigh.
With this tour of four new duets created especially for her, Whelan is experimenting with a new career as a freelance contemporary dancer. This is not a move made by many retiring ballerinas, since it involves all the same dangers and insecurities as any dance career, but without the reassuring cushion of salary, daily classes and physiotherapists that a major company provides. But Sylvie Guillem has shown that it can be done, and Whelan, as a dancer of similar domestic and international stature, must be hoping to follow Guillem’s lead in translating her prima ballerina credentials into contemporary dance gold.
I admire what she’s done in composing the programme for Restless Creature: by choosing four young contemporary dancer-choreographers to make duets and perform them with her, she’s signalling a willingness to challenge herself with new work and new collaborators, as well as sharing her box office drawing power with younger artists. You might also think there would be a decent chance that a programme created by so many choreographers would have some variety to it, a bit of “ooh, what can be next?” frisson (like the Royal Ballet’s delightfully mad Titian 2012).
But there was all too little variety in what we saw in the Linbury Studio Theatre at the Royal Opera House on Tuesday. There are several possible narratives suggested by having an older woman and a younger man on stage, but only one, the unhappy romantic relationship, is in evidence in these pieces, which form as a result a rather indistinguishable sequence of push-me-pull-you interactions. The continual, quiet desperation in Whelan's lean, rather sad face is moving, but becomes monotonous - without a story arc that would help carry the audience along, there's no sense of development or resolution. Only the last piece, Brian Brooks's First Fall (pictured above right), manages to wring real emotional resonance from Whelan’s melancholy, as in its final moments she repeatedly falls, limp and forlorn, onto Brooks’s back.
Whelan, with her NYCB thoroughbred figure, is known for being compelling on stage, but she looks under-realised here: contained, even tense throughout. Joshua Beamish’s Waltz Epoca is all crisp shape-making – the trapezium of legs in a lunge, the circles of arms - yes it looks good on a ballerina's body, but I’d have loved to see her allowed to cut loose, using the freedom of contemporary dance to be a little bigger, a little more. Slightly more of her famous fluidity is in evidence in Ego et Tu by Alejandro Cerrudo, whose own arms in the underwater-slow opening moments of Ego et Tu are liquid as seaweed fronds.
The music is most dull, and in some cases inane – samples of Va Pensiero in one of Borut Krzisnik’s Epoca waltzes had me shaking my head in disbelief. The patching together for Ego et Tu of works by Max Richter, Philip Glass, Olaeur Arnalds and Gavin Bryars set the tone for the evening, in which collections of contemporary pieces (by Hauschka and Hildur Gudnadottir, and Philip Glass, as well as Krzisnik) functioned more like set-painting than the intellectual or emotional engine of the dance. There was no other set-painting to speak of: all four pieces used the bare black box of the stage and “costumes” merely a step up from practice clothes; lighting effects, even, were only on limited display (mainly in Ego et Tu and Kyle Abraham'sThe Serpent and the Smoke).
Whelan has been critically acclaimed (nominated for Olivier and Critics’ Circle awards in 2007) for her contemporary work with Christopher Wheeldon’s Morphoses company, and her performances of Wheeldon’s work in the UK have stunned and impressed audiences here. Despite her immense gravitas and talent, the same is unlikely to be said of the works in Restless Creature. Let us hope for better in a year's time, when the Linbury will see her première a piece in collaboration with the Royal Ballet's own grave and talented Edward Watson.
- Restless Creature is at the Linbury Studio Theatre in the Royal Opera House until 26 July. Whelan's collaboration with Edward Watson comes to the Linbury in July 2015.
