Dance review: the wonder of Christopher Wheeldon

Ballet to Broadway: Wheeldon Works
Royal Opera House, London WC2; until 27 May

Oona Doherty: Specky Clark
Sadler’s Wells, London EC1

It’s a wonderful quirk of fate that turned Somerset-born, Royal Ballet School-trained Christopher Wheeldon into the choreographer he is today. At the age of 20, two years into his career with the Royal Ballet as a dancer, he won a flight to New York in a promotion by Hoover that nearly broke the vacuum cleaner brand – but changed his life.

Wheeldon joined New York City Ballet, worked with Jerome Robbins and became the company’s resident choreographer. His uniqueness and his glory lie in exactly the melding of styles celebrated in this programme at the Royal Ballet, where he is now artistic associate. At 52, Wheeldon is showman and conjurer of sophisticated classical steps, an upholder of the reserved, detailed English manner and a celebrator of American balletic speed and razzle-dazzle.

All his qualities are fully on display in a rich evening of hugely enjoyable dance. It opens with Fool’s Paradise (2007), a sumptuous piece to music by Wheeldon’s regular collaborator Joby Talbot, bathed in golden light by Penny Jacobus. Petals drop delicately on the heads of the dancers in nude leotards and shorts as they form trios and duets, their movement sculpted and sharp yet full of longing.

The choreography is pure but flecked with little chorus-line touches. The dancers – Akane Takada, William Bracewell and Marianela Nuñez notable among them – bend forward with their hands, poised in triangular shapes, their legs raising in synchronised sequence. A little chorus line bobs along the back of the stage like a delicate tribute to Busby Berkeley. It’s exhilarating, full of fleet jumps and quick turns.

Two duets follow. The Two of Us, made for NYCB during the pandemic and getting its UK premiere here, puts the orchestra on stage to accompany singer Julia Fordham in some Joni Mitchell songs, while Lauren Cuthbertson, dancing with precisely honed grace and abandon, and Calvin Richardson chart the course of a relationship. The second duet, Us (2017), commissioned by BalletBoyz and also new to the Royal, sees Matthew Ball and Joseph Sissens turn its intricate foldings, shifts of balance and control into an engrossing study of friendship and love.

Finally there’s the first Royal Ballet performance of the ballet within Wheeldon’s production of An American in Paris (2005), which marked his debut as director as well as choreographer of Broadway shows. (He followed it up with MJ: The Musical, still running in New York and London). The ballet, plucked from the show’s second act, puts the heroine Lise (Anna Rose O’Sullivan) on stage in a jazzy romantic fantasy, with dashing Cesar Corrales sweeping her off her feet amid a corps de ballet of athletic poses and bright, geometric costumes (designed by Bob Crowley).

With deep, saturated lighting from Natasha Katz, it’s astonishingly witty and sophisticated – at once a tribute to the ballet and musicals of the 1940s and to Wheeldon’s glorious command of complex movement for large groups of dancers. A joy.

Oona Doherty is undoubtedly a choreographer to watch, trying out various styles as she forges her way. After the abstractions of her 2022 work Navy Blue, Specky Clark is a narrative based on the story of her great-great-grandfather, sent as a 10-year-old orphan from Glasgow to Belfast and set to work in the city’s abattoir. With dramaturgy by playwright Enda Walsh and music by Lankum, it unfolds like a fairy story, full of fantastical images, such as towering aunts in headscarves and a pig who comes to life to hug the boy who will shoot it.

When Faith Prendergast’s tiny Specky shudders with cold or breaks out into a wild dance that is both invocation to the spirits and a liberation from his fears, the piece bounds into extraordinary, vivid life. But the story at its heart – a lost boy searching for his mother; a child afloat in a terrifying adult world – seems curiously under-developed. It feels like the first draft of something rather than the completed picture.

Photograph by Johan Persson