“By combining two conservatisms—faithfulness to old steps and an attachment to old stories—Ratmansky has produced a renewed modernism,” says Joan Acocella in her New Yorker profile of the overworked, 42-year-old Russian choreographer Alexei Ratmansky. “If we are lucky, his work will affect the field. …younger choreographers, too, may hazard work that is deep and bold.”
Pacific Northwest Ballet audiences saw Ratmansky’s Concerto DSCH last season, and next season comes his Don Quixote, an American premiere. Yet Seattle is elsewhere known for its innovation, and so it’s worth taking a moment to contrast this conservatism with the work of one of Seattle’s newer choreographic talents, Olivier Wevers, and his young company, Whim W’Him.
Speaking to an audience after a show, Wevers made a point of emphasizing that he avoids using ballet terms with his dancers, because he’s not choreographing ballet. Puckishly, he provided samples of the new nomenclature: “flying squirrel” or “the dolphin.” But there’s still a depth and boldness in how Wevers tries to speak directly to an audience–not just dance fans–about concerns “extracurricular,” over-consumption, addiction, discrimination.
Wevers is just 40, and coming off a successful career dancing in ballet. Born in Brussels, Belgium, he became a principal dancer with Royal Winnipeg Ballet and then Pacific Northwest Ballet, frequently winning praise for his characterization as much as his technique. His characters appeared fully formed and thought-through; whether puckish or tragic or storybook, Wevers found something in the movement of each that expressed their wants and desires.
That is now a goal of his choreography: “I want the dancers to touch people with their personalities, as well as their talent,” he’s said.
In late June, Wevers and his company assembled again at Intiman Theatre for reSet, an evening of dance both tempered by reflection, and driven to new heights by a young choreographer’s desire to better translate his vision to the stage. “There was more to be done to 3Seasons,” explained Wevers in his program note, “and my mind wouldn’t rest until I could produce a more fully realized version.” His company had more experience together, he wanted to rework the score with Byron Au Yong, and he contacted Casey Curran about a set.
Monster was brought back, he said, because “it conveys many of my ideals as a choreographer, including the vocabulary, drama, collaboration with other artists, and subject material that connects directly to the public.” A new piece, It’s Not About the Money, shows he’s still acquiring vocabulary at a frenetic pace.
When he first saw 3Seasons, The SunBreak’s at-large arts editor Jeremy Barker admitted to being won over by “dance that was at once accessible and charming as well as subtle and thoughtful,” and this is as good a way at nailing the nexus of Whim W’Him I’ve read.
What 3Seasons shows, in particular, is that there’s a similarity between Wevers’ approach to dance and the way writers like Dave Eggers or Aleksandar Hemon approach a novel: in both cases, the themes are wrapped tightly inside works that propel themselves forward by dint of their virtuosic execution, and while they experiment and play, they never become an empty act of formalism, experimentation for its own sake. And like an Eggers or a Hemon, Wevers peppers his work with rich little details—an errant breast grope, a deadpan joke—that reward the audience’s engagement with the piece while adding to the overall effect.
3Seasons isn’t didactic, but it is earnest in its concern about the human tendency to despoil the environment. Wevers was slightly anguished at recalling that, due to an error, they had to shred the first run of their programs for reSet. Rather than simply trash the results, he added shredded-program snow to the winter scene, which works well with Casey Curran’s set made of corrugated cardboard.
The story opens in spring (naturally), and proceeds on a series of levels, from object collection to fraying social connections, to what in winter arrives as the “triumph of trash,” as Wevers has it.
You see a lot of the storytelling in the dancers’ hands; there’s a fluttery frisson, a more coarse, coaxing “gimme,” a synchronized hand duet, and Lucien Postlewaite repeats a gesture, reaching around his head so that his own hand seems faintly alien to him. (Postlewaite, who easily plays light and mischievous, gave a particularly forceful interpretation of the struggle to break free of solitude at June’s performance.)
Jim Kent has a sort of pantomime role, as a person slowly seduced by “things”–it starts out harmlessly enough, but the scene where he sits on a chair, playing with a revolver is chilling. Later, with a birdcage on his head, he gives a brief thought to drinking from a water bottle, his arm just flexing, before he rolls his eyes at the impossibility of getting past the cage bars. It’s a nuanced, opposite-of-mugging take, but the whole theater erupts.
The gamut of Wevers’ choreographic ideas here is notable not just for their originality but for the use he puts them to. There’s a dry humor in the prancing, preening steps you see, and something more Rabelaisian in the arched-back booty not precisely shaken, but close enough. (The rawer moments are backed by Michael Jinsoo Lim’s electric violin, which transform any Vivaldian equanimity into a more stressed outcry.)
When Kaori Nakamura’s nature spirit is dragged about the stage in splits, she shifts her weight from back to front, which somehow deepens the impact. With dancers prone, Wevers localizes movement in a lifted hip, eliciting a blindly mechanical, damaged look. As Kylie Lewallen is swung in a circle, off her feet, by Cheng, she has a series of leg foldings, shifts in attitude, and extensions that seem the fuel the spin. A contra-Morris entangled ensemble to Vivaldi ends in a collapse to the floor, the kinks never worked out. Nakamura ends up head-first, tutu-second, in a garbage can.
The triptych Monster showcased, in its first and third parts this June, outstanding work by young PNB dancer Andrew Bartee. In the first part, with prologue from RA Scion, Bartee and Vincent Michael Lopez are a gay couple who struggle with the internalization of homophobia.
As this work has evolved from its workshop setting, Wevers has walked back from the frequency of an accusatory, Invasion of the Body Snatchers-type gesture (mouth open, arm out), and elaborated on the relationship waltz–I think this is all to the good, because while it is difficult to imagine an audience for modern dance that overtly condones discrimination against homosexuals, it is painful to watch the subtler, insidious ways that self-censorship perturbs the couple. Here you read a lot in the body language, the compression and sudden awkwardness–Bartee lets you see a whiplike movement, the sheer speed of which is a little astonishing. Wevers has the two lift and reposition each other, leaving it up to you to evaluate the power dynamics.
If you needed proof that classical ballet is not where Wevers’ head is at just now, the second part of Monster, which has Cheng and Lewallen prone the majority of the time, is it. Also, classical ballet rarely takes up the subject of drug addiction. Cheng and Lewallen (from Spectrum Dance Theater) are not not twitchy but taut, making moves in unison. They’re given a harsh bed of light by designer Michael Mazzola. It’s difficult to connect emotionally with addicts (you may realize to your chagrin), and there’s nothing redemptive here. The two manipulate each other like meat; at one point Cheng draws on the floor with his finger, pushing down as if his bone is chalk. Wevers conjures set pieces out of apparently irritable spasms (at one point, Lewallen’s face is framed, trapped, by Cheng’s knee, and the aptness of this image makes you rethink how deftly Wevers created it).
In the third section, a relationship has gone bad. Postlewaite and Houston Ballet’s Melody Herrera play a couple who can’t throw in the towel. The mood is Hemingway-esque, in that there’s an economy of phrase but flatness is a willful imposition–the mode is romantic, heroic. Having seen this work before, I’m still always left choked up by a surprise, backwards jump from the wings, Herrera hurling herself with complete abandon into Postlewaite’s arms. Yet, you then watch as Postlewaite whirls her lower and lower then drops her down to the floor. Herrera, en pointe, leans her head against Postlewaite’s chest; Postlewaite, this last time, seemed disengaged earlier on, flaring into rage. That’s the perverse dramatic conflict here, the way the drama is robbed by repetition, so that what first looks aching and soulful becomes grueling.
It’s Not About the Money, a meditation on fame, mixed motivations, relationships, is really a quartet, if you add Michael Mazzola’s stark, angular lighting design to the trio of Nakamura, Postlewaite, and Bartee. Blistering spots of light pick out the dancers for solos, but light is also simply fractured. Bartee delivered an elastic, sinuous, high-speed solo that the audience roared about. Postlewaite was playing a “show me the money” character, literally rubbing his fingers like a Robbins’ Jet who wanted payday. A weightless Nakamura partners with both Bartee and Postlewaite, then Bartee and Postlewaite have their own sinuous duet. There’s something a little Fosse-like here, and it’s not just the one-shouldered, purple-blue costumes by Mark Zappone–it’s as if Wevers were conducting a clinic on pose and composure.
An evening of these three works demonstrates Wevers bubbling over with innovation and experiment, still very, very early in his career as a choreographer. I don’t mean to compare his work, in that sense, to Ratmansky’s, except to show how paths can diverge substantially. But I think we would be lucky if someday Wevers was overworked, too.
