State of the Art

The Wheeldon Firebird

by Jeffrey Gantz

It made Stravinsky (who composed it). It all but unmade Balanchine (who kept redoing it). It's The Firebird, a ballet with a long history but no definitive choreography. Now Boston Ballet is hoping that the Firebird (from Stravinsky's full-length score) it's commissioned from hot young choreographer Christopher Wheeldon -- now the company's Principal Guest Choreographer -- will heat up Boston when it opens at the Wang Theatre tonight.

For all that Wheeldon, a soloist at New York City Ballet, is just 26, he's already danced in two Firebirds. First of all, the original Mikhail Fokine version from 1910, with the Royal Ballet. "I was 16 years old, so it was 10 years ago. I believe it's a bit of a sleeping dog, it hasn't been done that much. Margot [Fonteyn] danced it when she was dancing." Wouldn't Margot have had a more contemporary costume? "Yes, she didn't have all those beads and feathers -- though the headpiece was very elaborate." And what does he recall about Fokine's Firebird? "I remember it being very stylized, a lot of groupings, poses, not an enormous amount of movement -- ravishing, ravishing to look at, but a little stilted and old-fashioned."

Indeed, don't the 1910 costumes seem almost too cumbersome to dance in? "Well, you'd be surprised, our costumes are almost more cumbersome-looking, but with the technology of this day and age, we have these fantastic fabrics and amazing mask makers that can create these fantastic masks that weigh virtually nothing."

Wheeldon has also danced in the Balanchine Firebird: "My first and second year in NYCB, which was four years ago. I was only a monster, and of course it was the Chagall designs, which are also ravishing, but again very limiting movement-wise, because although they were pliable and soft, they were so big that any movement that a dancer made was completely engulfed by those wonderful Chagall costumes. I wanted to create these monsters that could really move but were also grotesquely large. Much of the size comes in the masking as opposed to the bodywear -- the bodywear is very lightweight, so they can really move around.

"There's a certain amount of the music that calls for pageantry, and I think Fokine and Balanchine both got very much into the pageantry side of things, and I've enjoyed that also, but at the same time I want the audience to get a real good dose of dance. The very very end becomes very static, because you want to create this final image, but it's an important thing to keep moving, and most of our finale is a whirlwind of movement. We have this wonderful image of the Firebird appearing and reappearing, and her costume is very striking, it's part Navajo Indian, totem-pole-shaped mask, part Vegas showgirl, part contemporary unitard. I wanted to completely do away with the tutu ballerina, I didn't want my Firebird to be a ballerina with a feather in her hair. I wanted her to be a creature."

Then there's the Princess, whom Ivan marries in the end. In 1970 Mr. B put her, like the Firebird, on pointe. "I took her off. Going back to the whole Romantic period of ballet, they went up on pointe to create this ortherworldly creature. Not only did I take them [the Princesses] out of their pointe shoes, I took them out of their shoes -- they're barefooted, all the Princesses, because I felt they should be earthy."

So, even as he looked back at Fokine and Balanchine, did Wheeldon conceive this as a brand new Firebird -- his Firebird? "Absolutely. I envisioned a new look for it, a new structure for it, a new story for it." And how much starts with the music? "All of it, as far as I'm concerned. I learn my music intimately before I go into the studio so I can sing the phrasing through my body whilst I'm choreographing. You build a ballet on the dancers; you don't build a ballet on yourself and then teach it to the dancers."

Boston Ballet presents Christopher Wheeldon's The Firebird, along with Daniel Pelzig's The Princess and the Pea, beginning tonight, October 14, at the Wang Theatre.