New York City Ballet | Town Topics

April 29, 2015

“Crystal Cut and Clean” — Former Ballet Star Teaches Master Class at University

ballet whelan Wendy Whelan’s retirement from the New York City Ballet last fall was marked with great fanfare and emotional tributes. In her 28 years with the company, she performed a broad range of repertory and won loyal fans for her individualistic style and distinctive approach to her roles.

Teaching a ballet class Monday at Princeton University, a day before she was to appear at McCarter Theatre in a program of contemporary choreography called “Restless Creature,” Ms. Whelan made it clear that though she still loves ballet, she isn’t exactly bereft about no longer being a principal dancer with one of the largest ballet companies in the nation.

When she was introduced to the students as “formerly a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet,” Ms. Whelan grinned and said, “Yes, formerly!” Retirement from the ballet company clearly agrees with this 47-year-old, who looks decades younger. But she has hardly been idle. In the current phase of her career, Ms. Whelan has been developing new collaborations with choreographers who take ballet to a new level.

Small and delicate but with long, sinewy limbs, she wore a gray leotard, black warmup pants and black socks — no ballet slippers. She demonstrated each step, and within a few minutes was sweating along with the students.

The 29 students in the class — 26 women, three men — had no trouble keeping up with Ms. Whelan’s movement combinations at the barre, then in the center of the room, and finally “across the floor.” Some were tall and willowy, and appeared to have years of ballet training behind them. But it was those who looked less like the standard ideal of ballet dancers that she singled out more frequently for praise.

“That’s beautiful — crystal cut and clean,” she said to a young woman after asking her to demonstrate a combination of jumps. When one of the male students leaped so high that he nearly crashed into the wall, she whooped with delight.

Growing up in Kentucky, Ms. Whelan started ballet classes at age three and performed in her first Nutcracker at age eight. She was awarded a scholarship to the School of American Ballet, the official school of the New York City Ballet, in 1981. Five years later, she was invited to join the company. By 1991, she had reached the rank of principal dancer.

Her years at New York City Ballet included performances of works by George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Peter Martins, and numerous other choreographers who worked with the company. Ms. Whelan came to be identified with the more contemporary, rather than classical pieces, and formed a particularly productive working relationship with choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, who has frequently credited her as an inspiration.

Ms. Whelan had already begun collaborating with several choreographers when she danced with New York City Ballet for the final time last October. Since then, she has focused on “Restless Creature,” which premiered at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in August 2013. The program at McCarter Theatre on Tuesday night featured her in works by Kyle Abraham, Joshua Beamish, Brian Brooks, and Alejandro Cerrudo.

Teaching is also one of Ms. Whelan’s strengths. Challenging the Princeton students with some tricky timings, she said, “This is the most complicated it will be today, I promise you. I know you’re dealing with finals.” Quoting the late ballerina and teacher Melissa Hayden when urging the students to tighten their posteriors, she made them laugh when she said, “You’ve got to use your cheeks — all four of them.”

There is no dance major program at Princeton, but students who pursue a certificate in dance are offered a wide variety of courses in a range of genres. “You guys are awesome,” Ms. Whelan told the students at the conclusion of the class on Monday before posing with them for a group picture. “Great job.”

AT THE BARRE: Wendy Whelan, center facing right, a former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet who has embarked on a new phase of her dance career, taught a master class Monday at Princeton University’s Hagan Dance Studio a day before a performance at McCarter Theatre. (Photo by Anne Levin)

October 17, 2012

Pennsylvania Ballet Returns to McCarter With Balanchine, Robbins, and Martins

BALLET AND BARBER: Artists of the Pennsylvania Ballet in Peter Martins’s “Barber Violin Concerto,” part of the program at McCarter Theatre on October 23. (Photo by Alexander Iziliaev)

In the unofficial hierarchy of American ballet companies, a group of troupes from around the country rank just under the two biggest organizations, American Ballet Theatre and the New York City Ballet. Right up there at the top of the regional list is the Pennsylvania Ballet. The Philadelphia-based company was started in 1963 by Barbara Weisberger, who was trained by choreographer George Balanchine and used several of his ballets to build the early repertory.

The Balanchine aesthetic remains a central focus of the 21st century Pennsylvania Ballet. His Square Dance is on the company’s Tuesday, October 23 program at McCarter Theatre, along with Jerome Robbins’s NY Export: Opus Jazz and Peter Martins’s Barber Violin Concerto. Pennsylvania Ballet is returning to McCarter for the first time in almost a decade.

To Roy Kaiser, the troupe’s artistic director, the program is as much about music as it is choreography. “Dance accompanying great music — it’s a kind of a theme on this program,” he said during a telephone interview. “Even though we’ll be dancing to taped music, which is unusual for us, each of these ballets has a great score.”

Balanchine set Square Dance to the music of Corelli and Vivaldi. The devilishly fast choreography is classical, yet it follows the forms of a traditional square dance. Originally, a square dance caller accompanied the performances, but Balanchine dispensed with the caller when he revived the work for his New York City Ballet in 1976. “Like so many Balanchine works where there is really no narrative, you just see the music so clearly,” Mr. Kaiser said. “You see every nuance in the music. The fact that it was inspired by traditional square dancing, and the patterns he employs, make it just brilliant.”

The principal ballerina role is “a tour de force,” he continued. “She has to have razor-sharp technique. There is no way you can do this ballet halfway. And for the lead male, the solo he created is extraordinary in its simplicity. It’s an unusual male variation, but it works beautifully. It’s a break. It takes the ballet in a whole different direction.”

Perhaps unwittingly, the Balanchine/Robbins/
Martins program pays tribute to New York City Ballet. It was Balanchine who co-founded the company with arts patron Lincoln Kirstein in 1948. Robbins, a dancer in the company, was soon hired as assistant artistic director, dividing his creative energies between ballet and Broadway. He died in 1998. Before Balanchine died in 1983, he named Martins as his successor in leading the company.

Robbins choreographed NY Export: Opus Jazz in 1958 for a touring company he founded, known as Ballets U.S.A., to music of the same title by Robert Prince. With Pennsylvania Ballet currently made up of very young dancers, this period piece focused on youth is especially appropriate, Mr. Kaiser says.

“I love this ballet. Robbins created it shortly after he did West Side Story, so it’s got that kind of urban tension of that time in the fifties,” he said. “It’s a ballet in sneakers. I like bringing works like this into our repertory, because it’s a great experience for the dancers. Doing a piece like this and working with that vocabulary really informs their classical work and makes them better dancers. You never know what you’re going to discover when you’re working in different types of dance, and it improves them. Plus, it’s fun. And the girls get to take off their pointe shoes.”

Peter Martins created Barber Violin Concerto for two couples – one classical, the other contemporary, in 1988. At the first performance, David Parsons and Kate Johnson of the Paul Taylor Dance Company took the roles of the modern dancers. Each pair first dances alone, and then the couples meet, ultimately exchanging partners and integrating styles. A 2010 New York Times review by Roslyn Sulcas said of the ballet, “The heart of the work is the pas de deux by the ballerina and the modern dance man, in which his faunlike primitivism is tamed by, but also incorporated into, her fluid expansiveness.”

Since its last visit to Princeton, the Pennsylvania Ballet has acquired a new home on Philadelphia’s North Broad Street, currently under construction and preparing for an opening early next year. The company comes to McCarter in the midst of its opening run, at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music, of the Romantic-era classic, Giselle.

“We love McCarter because it’s an easy trip, and there is a wonderful audience,” said Mr. Kaiser. “Last time we were there, we felt like we were dancing in front of an audience that sees a lot of dance and was very appreciative. What more can you ask for?”

The Pennsylvania Ballet Company’s performance is on Tuesday October, 23. Tickets to the McCarter Theatre program, which starts at 7:30 p.m. are $20-$62. For information visit www.mccarter.org or call (609) 258-2787.

April 18, 2012

New York City’s Ballet “Farm Team” Brings Their Program to McCarter

THE WORKS OF GEORGE BALANCHINE: Principal dancers, Tiler Peck and Andrew Veyette from the New York City Ballet, will return to McCarter Theatre on Tuesday, April 24. The dancers will perform a range of works by Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Christopher Wheeldon, and Peter Martins. For more information, visit www.nycballet.com. (Photo Credit: Paul Kolnik)

At McCarter Theatre last fall, a group of principal dancers from the New York City Ballet took part in a lecture demonstration about the works of choreographer George Balanchine. Presented in conjunction with a course being taught at Princeton University by former City Ballet member Heather Watts, the program was a revelation to audience members. The celebrated dancers — among the finest on stages today — wore practice clothes to perform excerpts from several ballets, giving audience members a rare, behind-the-scenes glimpse into their world.

Many of those same dancers will return to McCarter on Tuesday, April 24, when New York City Ballet MOVES, a kind of farm team for the company, brings a program of works by Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Christopher Wheeldon, and Peter Martins to the Matthews Theatre stage. Tiler Peck, Daniel Ulbricht, Wendy Whelan, and brother-and-sister Megan and Robert Fairchild, all of whom performed in the lecture demonstration, are among this stellar group. They are joined by Tyler Angle, Andrew Veyette, Sara Mearns, Amar Ramasar, Jonathan Stafford, and other well-known members of the company.

Peter Martins, who has led City Ballet since Balanchine died in 1983, came up with the idea for MOVES a few years ago. “It was a vision of Peter’s,” says Jean-Pierre Frohlich, MOVES’ Artistic Administrator/Director and a former principal dancer with City Ballet. “He always wanted to have a small group to be able to tour to venues that normally the company as a whole does not visit. I think it was also a way to get our name out there, giving people a professional company with wonderful ballets. Basically, it’s to get people to get to know New York City Ballet.”

MOVES’ first tour was to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. “It was a very big success,” recounts Mr. Frohlich. “The following year we went to the Vail Dance Festival in Colorado, and then back to Jackson Hole, where quite a few people from other institutions came to see us, liked us, and asked us to come to them.”

What followed were engagements in Detroit, Minneapolis, St. Louis, California, and elsewhere, in addition to Princeton. The company will return to Vail this summer, and some European theaters are interested in presenting them.

City Ballet MOVES dances mostly small-scale ballets that require little scenery, but almost always to live music. “Due to our orchestra union contract, we have to perform to live music and cannot use tapes unless the ballet being presented was premiered without live music,” Mr. Frohlich says. “So some of the ballets will have a piano accompanist, or a pianist and violinist, or more. Most of the dancers are principals with the main company, though this time we’re bringing some members of the corps de ballet as well.”

On Tuesday’s program are Balanchine’s Duo Concertant, which debuted at the 1972 Stravinsky Festival; Robbins’ In the Night, danced to piano music by Chopin; Wheeldon’s Polyphonia,” to Ligeti; and Martins’ A Fool for You, to songs by Ray Charles and others (taped). Mr. Frohlich says a new piece is being created for the company by City Ballet dancer Justin Peck. It will premier in Vail this summer.

City Ballet’s regular schedule includes long engagements at Lincoln Center each winter and spring, followed by summer seasons in Saratoga Springs and touring to various parts of the globe. Adding extra work with MOVES might be considered a burden, but Mr. Frohlich says it is quite the opposite.

“The dancers love it,” he says. “A lot of the dancers who haven’t gotten to participate yet are envious of those who have. We try to rotate the group, because this is extra work for them, beyond the guaranteed work week. But they are happy to participate, because it’s more relaxed. They get to experience each other more, and become very good friends. And for the younger dancers in the corps, its especially exciting, because they might get an opportunity to do a role they wouldn’t get the chance to do otherwise.”

December 16, 2011

Princeton Students Study Balanchine With One of His Former Star Dancers

Last week, local ballet fans were treated to a behind-the-scenes look at the work of 20th century master choreographer George Balanchine. Seven dancers from The New York City Ballet came to the Berlind Theatre on December 5 to perform excerpts, in practice clothes, from some of Balanchine’s most iconic ballets, from the 1928 Apollo to works from the 1960s and 70s. The free, late afternoon, program was a revelation to many in the audience, who gave the performers a standing ovation.

Some of the loudest applause went to the narrators of the program, former City Ballet principal dancers Heather Watts and Damian Woetzel. Ms. Watts, who this semester taught a course on Balanchine at Princeton University, put the lecture/demonstration together with Rebecca Lazier, a senior lecturer in the University’s dance department. Mr. Woetzel, Ms. Watts’s husband, is today the artistic director of the Vail International Dance Festival and a frequent lecturer on many aspects of the arts.

“Genius Up Close: George Balanchine” was an open rehearsal, during which Ms. Watts and Mr. Woetzel dispensed advice on roles they danced themselves during their stage careers. After dancers Tiler Peck and Robert Fairchild performed a section of the duet from Apollo, Ms. Watts urged Ms. Peck to be a bit coy as she skittered across the stage, away from him. “Play with him!,” she said. “Go on, catch her,” she added to Mr. Fairchild as he tried to grip her hand. Later, when Ms. Peck danced a segment of the Dewdrop variation from The Nutcracker, Ms. Watts’ advice to “just hang there,” balancing on one leg a moment longer, turned what already looked like a perfect response to Tchaikovsky’s music into something even better.

“I’m doing what Balanchine did with us. He got us to do things we didn’t know we could do,” Ms. Watts commented a few days later during an interview in Ms. Lazier’s office. “He used to say, ‘Tell your children. Tell your grandchildren.’ So I’m passing it along. And I love doing it.”

Ms. Watts was younger than the University students she has been teaching this semester when she first encountered the great choregrapher at City Ballet’s training ground, the School of American Ballet. A self-acknowledged “bad girl,” she didn’t always play by the rules.

“Balanchine, to me, was a savior,” she said. “I was always involved in some sort of teenage drama. I was a hippie from California! But he kept finding ways to amuse me and keep me enthralled.”

Balanchine obviously saw something special in Ms. Watts, who joined the ballet company at 16 and was promoted to principal dancer rank 10 years later. “I guess he did have an interest in me,” she acknowledges. “But I just didn’t know it at the time. For me, he was more of a hero when it was happening. I liken it to being born rich. You don’t know what it was like not to be.”

Ms. Watts was among the last generations of dancers to work directly with Balanchine, who died at age 78 in 1983. He co-founded City Ballet several decades before with Lincoln Kirstein, a wealthy arts patron who brought the Russian-born Balanchine to this country in 1933 to establish an American ballet tradition.

If the company was a big family, Mr. Balanchine was Daddy — or to Ms. Watts’ generation, Grandpa. “We loved him. He was the center of our universe,” she said. “Everyone was traumatized when he died.”

Ms. Watts retired from City Ballet in 1995, but Balanchine continues to fascinate her. What she has been trying to pass along to her Princeton students is not just the works of genius Balanchine created, but his unique personality as well. During the lecture/demonstration, she told the audience how he loved anything American, and would sing little ditties he heard in television commercials (“More Park Sausages Mom”).

“He was always interested in who we were and where we came from,” she said during the interview. “My father was an aerospace engineer. He would tease me in class. He’d say, ‘Your Dad can land men on the moon and you can’t land from a grand jete.’ He would personalize things.”

Teaching about Balanchine first occurred to Ms. Watts when her husband was taking time from the ballet company to study at Harvard University a few years ago. After her retirement from dancing, she had co-written a cookbook, and worked as a contributing editor to the magazine Vanity Fair, which she continues to do.

“Damian was going to Harvard. I taught at the Boston Ballet a bit, but what I really wanted to do was teach an academic course about Balanchine. I sort of talked my way into it at Harvard. Then they asked me to do a studio course the second semester, also on Balanchine.”

Ms. Lazier read an article about Ms. Watts’ teaching at Harvard, and got in touch with her. “We had a lunch that lasted four hours,” she said. “I knew this was somebody I wanted to bring to Princeton.”

The Princeton students taking “Repertory and Choreography: George Balanchine” have done rigorous reading and analysis as well as dancing. Some have extensive dance training; others are novices. “We didn’t audition anyone, we interviewed them,” said Ms. Watts. “It’s a broad range of experiences in one class, which presents interesting but not impossible challenges. I’m a firm believer that water seeks its own level. Each person’s goal is their own. We’ve worked hard to even the field emotionally, and the less experienced dancers who are working on their own goals with Mr. Balanchine have been able to improve by leaps and bounds.”

The dancers performed a section of “Agon,” one of Balanchine’s most complex works, during the Berlind lecture/demonstration, counting out loud to keep up with the score by Igor Stravinsky. They will dance more Balanchine excerpts at the University’s Spring Dance Festival February 24 and 25.

“I’m teaching the generous part of Balanchine, the part that they can take with them,” Ms. Watts said. “The dances he made speak of such universal, big issues in their abstraction. And their connection to music is so deep. It’s like reading a great novel or looking at a great painting. They take our sensibilities to a higher plane.”