A pas de deux for ballet and technology

Christopher Wheeldon's new work measures up to the greats, but finds its own distinctive track

Christopher Wheeldon
Royal Opera House, London WC2

Christopher Wheeldon makes ballets like David Linley makes furniture. Bespoke, top-of-the-range classics with a twist, and every one impeccably cut, grooved and jointed. He has created significant bodies of work for the Royal Ballet, who trained him, and New York City Ballet, who made him resident choreographer. In all of his output, pitched at the precise mid-point between abstraction and narrative, you can read the influence of the titans: Ashton, Balanchine, and MacMillan. Last year he announced the creation of his own transatlantic company, Morphoses.

With Electric Counterpoint, a new work which opened at Covent Garden on Thursday, 33-year-old Wheeldon has moved forward significantly. The lingering sense of deference to the 20th-century masters and their heritage has vanished, to be replaced by a dazzling surface slickness and a sharp new curiosity about the nature of ballet itself. Taking four dancers - Edward Watson, Sarah Lamb, Zenaida Yanowsky, Eric Underwood - Wheeldon has interrogated them about their own self-image, intercut the spoken results with music by Bach and Steve Reich, and then choreographed an elaborate suite of dances in which the four take the stage with their own filmed images.

It sounds over-elaborate but it is beautiful to watch, and Wheeldon has crafted dance which is entirely at ease with the technology. As the title suggests there's a strong sense of counterpoint, with wholly classical phrases morphing into shimmying, finger-twisting versions of themselves that at times have an almost Indian, Bharata Natyam feel to them. Steps begin conventionally and then twist into probing hyperextension, or like Yanowsky's lavishly unfolding pas de chat as she's lifted by Underwood, suffer a sudden temperature drop to slow motion. As the dancers' back-projected images appear and fade, they seem to be dancing with their own ghosts.

This leap into high tech, I'm guessing, is inspired at least in part by the success of Wayne McGregor's Chroma. In 2005, thanks to the adroit orchestration of Royal Ballet director Monica Mason, the two were rehearsing in adjacent studios at Covent Garden (Wheeldon was preparing DGV). Both, it's safe to say, noted the activities of the other. The least successful element of Electric Counterpoint is the spoken word material, which shakes down to the predictable fact that dancers are not as sure of themselves as they look. Lamb is the most insightful, but Wheeldon could have pressed a lot harder here.

That said, he's labouring under a considerable weight of expectation. Although no one will actually admit it, the British ballet establishment suffers from a Messiah complex. It longs for a Great Choreographer to step forth and take command, as Ashton and MacMillan did. It wants Keanu Reeves as Neo in The Matrix. It wants The One, and the classically trained Wheeldon looks like the current best bet.

Wheeldon himself has always sidestepped this simplistic paradigm. He wants to travel light, and to go his own way. And this makes sense because, for all his accomplishments, he's a slow-burner. He's found his voice, but not yet his subject, and in consequence the art in his ballets is less apparent than the craft. For the time being, though, the craft is more than enough, especially when presented in a form as ravishing as this. Wheeldon's career lies ahead of him. We can wait.

Electric Counterpoint is followed by Jerome Robbins's Afternoon of a Faun. Successive Royal Ballet casts have polished this 11-minute work to a sapphire sharpness, and none more than Carlos Acosta and Sarah Lamb. When she first danced the role Lamb seemed over-brittle, her cocktail-hour sophistication at odds with the piece's sun-dazed languor. Now, though, I can't imagine the role more perfectly realised. Lamb is at once intensely, vibrantly present and a creature of dream, her sea-blue gaze fixed on some distant Aegean horizon, and her dancing drawn in incisive strokes of light. Acosta, meanwhile, expresses desire through the most restrained means imaginable. The angle of his neck, the tilt of his chin, the slide of his eyes. A masterpiece, masterfully performed.

What, though, inspired the reawakening of Balanchine's tiresome, cod-gypsy Tzigane? Given the thankless task of beating new life into it Thiago Soares and Marianela Nuñez do their energetic best, but some sleeping dogs should be allowed to lie. Happily, Frederick Ashton's A Month in the Country follows hard on its heels. It's a brave performance, but Alexandra Ansanelli can't yet animate the full, feminine sweep of the choreography. She may well get there in time, though. She's a great beauty, with eyes you could drown in and the requisite sense of entitlement. As I said, we can wait.

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