danceview
a quarterly review of dance

Interviews

a conversation with Wendy Whelan
Principal Dancer of New York City Ballet
Winter 2003
by Marc Haegeman
® 2003

London, September 28, 2002

In Europe appearances of the New York City Ballet remain something of a rarity. The company’s repertory is as a result only partly familiar, its dancers even less so. Thanks to the efforts of Alexander Meinertz London audiences were able to catch some of them last fall during an all too short gig at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre (as reviewed by Jane Simpson in a previous issue of this magazine). One of the eye-catching ballerinas of that season was Wendy Whelan.

A leading ballerina of the Martins-era, Wendy Whelan received her initial training in her hometown Louisville, Kentucky before she was granted a scholarship to the summer course at the School of American Ballet in 1981, later becoming a full-time student there. In 1984 she began to dance as an apprentice with New York City Ballet and was invited to join the corps de ballet in 1986. In 1991 she was promoted to principal.

With the New York City Ballet Wendy Whelan has danced ballets by Balanchine, Robbins, Martins, and Forsythe. Moreover, she created roles in ballets by Robbins, Martins, d’Amboise, Tharp, Dove, and Wheeldon. Among her latest creations is one of the leading roles in Christopher Wheeldon’s critically acclaimed Polyphonia, which was shown at Sadler’s Wells.

MARC HAEGEMAN: Wendy Whelan, how did it all begin for you?

WENDY WHELAN: I started dancing when I was three years old. As a little child I had so much energy that when my sister was born, they feared I would have attacked the baby, because I wasn’t getting all the attention that she was. So, my mom decided to get me out of the house, to save the baby’s life [laughing]. Ironically, my sister is now working as a detective for child abuse [laughing]. No, I had a lot of energy and my mum studied ballet when she was little. It’s just a typical thing in the town I came from. It’s what all little girls did.

MH:  You are from Louisville, Kentucky. What is the situation of ballet there?

WENDY WHELAN:   The Louisville Ballet company is actually British-based. Some of the dancers had been working in London for years with the Festival Ballet. One of my teachers was born in Wales, another also danced a lot in London - Alun Jones and Helen Starr were my teachers from when I was nine until I left for New York. It’s something nobody would ever suspect, but I have a very British base. Actually, Alun Jones just retired as artistic director in Louisville and a Scotsman, Bruce Simpson, took over. They are definitely preserving the British stamp.

One of my teachers thought I had some talent and wanted me to audition for a big school, just to get out of this little town and do something more. She figured out where the audition for the School of American Ballet was. My mum drove me to Cincinnati, I auditioned for Suzanne Farrell when I was thirteen and I got accepted in the summer course. Once there, they asked me to stay for the winter and become a full-time student. My parents let me go, which was a great gift. I was in the School for about three years and I finished high school at the same time. There is a school in New York, called the Professional Children’s School where the schedule is adjusted to advanced dancers still in high school.

MH:  How was life in New York for you?

WENDY WHELAN:   Oh, it was extremely focused. I had no fear, I just did my thing, went to school, class, rehearsals, went back home, made my homework. You could compare it to a nunnery: it’s so devoted, it’s so focused, there’s nothing else in your life except that.

There wasn’t a dormitory at the School yet in those days. And it was just as well, because I wouldn’t have liked that. I ended up living – and this is another gift I got in a house from Jacques d’Amboise. He rented one of the floors to four girls, dancers. When there was a space empty, I could move in and that was great. I could live on my own, but the family was in the lower part of the house. It felt safe.

MH:  I suppose the School of American Ballet was a different experience for you?

WENDY WHELAN:  It was very different. They have a different emphasis on things and a different way of asking you how to express yourself. A lot of it has to do with modelling yourself and is much more about being a beautiful girl, about shaping yourself like a model. That was completely new to me. Nobody had ever talked about that when I was young. One of my teachers always used to say: “You need to wear some make-up!” For me that was really something – I am from the boonies, you know [laughing]. So I needed to change that, to become more womanly, more feminine, a more Balanchine-type of girl.

MH:  Are you saying that they didn’t emphasize the development of your technique that much?

WENDY WHELAN:  Actually they emphasized both, but for me the modelling was the strongest, because I already had a very strong technique when I joined the School. It was always something that impressed them a lot and I got into a very advanced class for my age. They were really OK with my technique – I was one of the strongest dancers they had. They eventually started saying: “Soften it up a little bit, become beautiful now!” [laughing]

MH:  You acquired this strong technical base in Louisville then?

WENDY WHELAN:  Yes, besides my English teachers, I had a teacher from the Paris Opera School, Cecile Heller who danced with Roland Petit, and another one who studied with the famous American teacher Maggie Black. I don’t know how all these people moved to little Louisville, but they brought this great information with them and I happened to be there at the right time.

MH:  Upon graduation you immediately started dancing with New York City Ballet?

WENDY WHELAN:  Actually, my very first performance in the school workshop was on the day Balanchine died. It was a bizarre situation. I was putting my makeup on for my debut in New York and the radio said he had died. Everybody was wondering what was going to happen with the company. Nobody knew. I didn’t really know where I would end up. There were a lot of people in the company at the time and it didn’t seem that they needed any more. As for myself, I really didn’t have my style defined and I wanted to be able to do everything. At one point I was invited to take class with ABT. I asked the headmasters whether I should go, but they told me that Peter [Martins] had a lot of interest in me. They left it up to me. I decided to stay and Peter invited me to be an apprentice the next year. I had to wait a long time because there were still a lot of dancers. I was an apprentice for 13 months while many people just go right in the company, being an apprentice for only a short period. In the end everything worked out great. Waiting and not getting things easily was definitely better for me.

MH:  Do you remember the first ballet you danced with New York City Ballet?

WENDY WHELAN:  Peter made a ballet for four of us, young dancers, called Les Petits Riens set to Mozart. He used three of the more prominent youngsters and I felt lucky to be included in that group. By the way, one of the male dancers in that group was Peter Boal. I was very, very nervous, because I didn’t know how he really felt about me. I had a lot of shaping to do, but I gave it everything I had. Because I had such a strong technique I was OK. Peter Martins has a real sink-or-swim agenda. He likes to throw people out to see what happens. If they swim, fine, he’ll give them another chance.

MH:  … and if they sink?

WENDY WHELAN:  He may give them another chance, but then he might cool off with them, maybe. You have to really prove yourself.

Again, I got little bits at the time. In many cases I didn’t really feel ready. They wanted me to learn the Sugar Plum Fairy, somehow I didn’t feel ready to do that. Finally, I did the Dewdrop, because it’s an energetic part. To be poised and calm was very hard for me. It’s taken a while to get into my body, but I enjoy it now.

I was in the corps for about five years. It’s long, but I do value all that time. I understand the mechanics much better. You are on the stage all the time and you are performing a lot. At New York City Ballet you don’t stand around with a spear in your hand for two years: you are out there jumping, turning around and partnering. And you are undoubtedly improving that way.

MH:  How do you approach a role that was created for another ballerina and do you consider it important if she is still around to coach you in it?

WENDY WHELAN:  That doesn’t happen a lot. Lately I got to learn a few parts that Suzanne Farrell created. These are absolutely incredible and I couldn’t be farther from her as a dancer. It’s intimidating in a way, but it makes me look at it differently. I usually approach it in my more natural way but then I watch a tape of her and my approach flips to another approach, because she is just… I mean, there are no words for it when I watch her do her parts. It’s amazing, just magic. I did learn one thing, though. About ten years ago I was preparing the Haieff Divertimento for the Balanchine Celebration. Maria Tallchief, who was one of the originals, coached me in it and she had a million and one things to say about it. It was incredible, all that energy. Then, I showed it to Tanaquil Le Clercq and asked her if she had any input. She said: “Be yourself, don’t do anything Maria Tallchief asked you to do!” [laughing] I always remember that. However, the most important is that Suzanne was ultimately herself. And the best for me to do is to be myself, especially in the roles she created. It cannot be her. No way. Besides, from what I heard, Balanchine wouldn’t want you to be somebody else. He changed things from one girl to the next, for what suited them better and he enjoyed watching the antithesis of different dancers doing the same steps. How do they do it? Can they do it?

MH:  Who were the choreographers you worked with?

WENDY WHELAN:  There are quite a few. Ranging from Ulysses Dove and Twyla Tharp to Christopher d’Amboise and Jerome Robbins. Mostly, I worked with Robbins on his pieces. I created his Brandenburg, but that was really at the end and he was a little tired. But he still had quite a lot to say. I also worked with him on Opus19/The Dreamer and The Cage.

MH:  Many dancers dream of having ballets created on them. How do you feel about MH:  works that were created on you?

WENDY WHELAN:  When they create a piece on you, they really work on you as the source. Working with Jerry on Opus 19, he looks at you and he knows what you can bring out of it. But he doesn’t ask you to be Patricia McBride. He may say what he said to her, to do the same, but there is no way to be her. Yet, I love to watch the energy of the other dancers that these works were created on. There are so many different directions and to see that gives more shape to how I would try to express the choreography.

I like to dance pieces that were not created on me. I think that in many cases when somebody made something on me, they didn’t know me very well. It was like “Oh, she is very strong. She’s very athletic. So I’ll make something athletic for her.” I didn’t particularly wanted to do that, because it didn’t challenge me, it didn’t interest me, I didn’t find it attractive. It’s so important to be able to be understood at this point. At first, people didn’t really get me, and still people don’t really get me.

MH:  Has this something to do with your physical identity, your plasticity?

WENDY WHELAN:  Yeah, I don’t know what it is. People say I am kind of strange looking [laughing]. I am very flat. I’m not the typical female body. I’m not a particularly beautiful, young nymph. I don’t know, I’m more animal-like, I think. And it took a long time for me to understand that myself, too. I knew I wasn’t the Sugar Plum Fairy, because I don’t look like the Sugar Plum Fairy. But I figured that out later on.

MH:  But you danced The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake in the end?

WENDY WHELAN:  Right, those are ballets that are more difficult for me to do. I am really angular and I don’t quite understand the right approach to it. Often at NYCB, things were left up to us, we had to work on ourselves.

MH:  Was there nobody coaching you then?

WENDY WHELAN:  We had coaches, but it’s not like a coach you’d have at ABT, you know, people who have done the role numerous times. We didn’t have such people.

MH:  Why not?

WENDY WHELAN:  NYCB never did a full length Sleeping Beauty. And we wanted to make the Sleeping Beauty in our own style. It has a faster pace, less emphasis on the pantomime and so on. We are trying to update it. Yet the best thing is that I look at it for myself as the most amazing challenge. I learned so much about myself and about my dancing. To be able to get through them gave me tremendous confidence. After dancing both of these full lengths, I felt like I grew a lot. Even if I may have failed on stage, it’s OK, I grew as an artist.

MH:  Do you think it would be interesting for you to dance other full length classics like Giselle or is that part of a completely different world for you?

WENDY WHELAN:  [hesitating] At this point sort of. Maybe if I was a little younger, it would be more available to me and I would be more available to it and not so strongly in my direction of dancing yet.

MH:  The link between Balanchine and the old Russian Imperial ballet tradition, as we can see in ballets like Diamonds or Symphony in C, is obvious. Don’t you feel the same way about these ballets as about The Sleeping Beauty?

WENDY WHELAN:  Peter would like me to feel that way about it. I remember he used to say when I was rehearsing Sleeping Beauty: “You should do this variation like it’s from Divertimento nr. 15.” But I just didn’t get it. I was thinking about my character. It’s complicated to me.

Balanchine didn’t have so much of a face on his ballets. To me it was more a physical expression; it was basically about the music rather than a story. I enjoy expressing the music more than expressing a character. It comes easier to me and I feel much more at home. Music is all important to me. My favourite composer is Stravinsky - and thank God most of him is abstract.

MH:  When you prepared Beauty and Swan Lake did you watch videos?

WENDY WHELAN:  Yes, I watched Makarova, Cynthia Gregory, all kinds of performances. I feel like I got to a point where it was under my belt. Especially, after doing three seasons of full-length Sleeping Beauties. When I was in the third season, I knew where to relax, where to push, how to balance it. Swan Lake I’m still figuring out how to balance it out for myself. The very first season we did Swan Lake, I worked really hard on it, running it straight through every day. I was so concerned with the stamina that I tore a muscle of my stomach because it was so tight from all that work. Maybe I should ask my friend Julie Kent at ABT how she rehearses for her Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty. They do it all the time.

MH:  Do you come to see other ballet companies?

WENDY WHELAN:  I actually missed a lot that I wanted to see. But two things that put me through the roof and gave me great joy for weeks were Pina Bausch and Forsythe. They really blew my mind. We just never get to see them.

MH:  You danced Forsythe yourself?

WENDY WHELAN:  We had done Forsythe in the spring and we saw them the summer after. I felt a new approach coming from seeing them. It’s all about time. The more time you spend with something, the more you get to see and listen to something, the more you understand it and the more you just blend with it.

The Forsythe piece we did is Hermann Schmerman pas de deux. I did it here in London quite a while ago but afterwards he mounted it on us. I danced a lot of shows, night after night, and really got it into my system. I feel like I really digested it and now I adore performing it. I feel very liberated.

MH:  It comes easier to you than The Sleeping Beauty?

WENDY WHELAN:  Yes, I’m actually trying to be me, and not that 16-year old princess. I never felt like that as a person [laughing]. I’m a little too down to earth for that, I guess, to feel easy in that kind of stuff.

MH:  Which other ballets are your absolute favourites?

WENDY WHELAN:  There are certain ballets I love to watch, but which I wouldn’t particularly do well. Duo concertant for instance. I can watch that 8 thousand million times and be happy or be moved by it every single time. I love La Sonnambula, Liebeslieder Walzer, Mozartiana. The Balanchine romantic ballets I particularly like. It pulls out my heart to see them. I also enjoy the variety of Rubies and Diamonds.

I did so much Stravinsky so early that it remains really my deep, old love, but my body is interested more in the romantic side of things lately – maybe because of getting older and more mature. I like to relate more with men on stage. I enjoy dancing with certain partners a lot, and different partners in different works. I loved dancing with Peter Boal in Opus 19/The Dreamer. We really had chemistry in that particular piece. I feel I have a common issue with Nikolaj [Hübbe] in certain pieces, with Jock [Soto] in others. I feel so lucky I can do this, with these particular guys.

MH:  I suppose a career is also made by disappointments?

WENDY WHELAN:  I take every disappointment as a gift. If I am disappointed, I try to make the best out of it. All the mistakes that I made were meant to be made, for some reason. It’s just my human evolution – I’m supposed to grow. I look at everything as an experiment and as a learning experience. If something bad happens, it’s for a reason, and it’s OK.

It definitely keeps me brighter, more positive. Sometimes it’s hard to look at it that way, but I do work on that. I feel it’s important not to let things get you down but to think that whatever is happening, is correct for the moment.

MH:  You are self-critical?

WENDY WHELAN:  Very, very much. But I try to ease up on myself, because that doesn’t really help you. When I was younger it helped. But getting older it makes you a little bit of a rotten person when you are constantly down on yourself. When other people were giving me a compliment, I used to go “No, no!” and walk away. I realized that was very rude to do. Peter Martins would be so mad with me. “Why do you always walk away?!” But now, I accept that not everything is perfect. Part of the beauty of things is the mistakes.

MH:  What makes a ballerina for you?

WENDY WHELAN:  That’s a hard one. I never really think about that so much. I just did class with the Royal Ballet. I saw Darcey Bussell, Sylvie Guillem, Tamara Rojo,... and I was thinking – these are the ballerinas! These were the dancers I heard so much about and now I am in the same room with them. Thrilling.

MH:  Were you really that impressed?

WENDY WHELAN:  Yeah… it’s different. It’s very different in Europe as compared to the US. You observe them and then I see myself, and I start thinking: I’m not like that! It’s strange. I have been hanging out with some of the girls from our company, they are just normal women, you know.

MH:  Well, so are the others....even Sylvie Guillem is a normal woman.

WENDY WHELAN:  [laughing] I know they are, but it’s so different. It’s hard to explain. I’m out on stage and I feel one way. But then, I know people who look at me and say, “She’s a very strange dancer – strange body, strange style….” It’s not for everybody and it’s not typical. But it’s right for me. So, I don’t really feel that I fit into that category, in the same way.

MH:  I guess one could say that Sylvie Guillem has a very strange body as well. Yet, everybody accepts her as a ballerina.

WENDY WHELAN:  Yes, but she makes the absolute best of whatever she has.

MH:  Don’t you then?

WENDY WHELAN:  Well, hopefully I do. I did a lot of gigs, international galas with many different people. And there is always the Europeans and the Americans. They have a very different approach to everything. And I respect that. But I also hope they would respect my approach and what I do.

MH:  Do you feel the same towards the dancers from ABT, take Juliet Kent?

WENDY WHELAN:  Yeah. I enjoy watching her. For me she is a ballerina. But I know her, she’s a friend. I don’t know these people here in Europe well enough and there is always some intimidation. Maybe it’s because they do these classical ballets more and are on top of them. We do our ballets and we are on top of them. We look at them and we understand what they are doing, because it’s pure classical technique. But they look at us and do not understand what we are doing - I think it’s something of that. You know, they look at Rubies and say: “That’s easy, because it’s just jazzy” - But it’s not! It takes whole decades of studying that technique, to be able to pull it off. I don’t know whether they really understand us. And part of me feels that they don’t.

American ballet is so young compared to European ballet and maybe they value ours less: Americans are in the Met, the modern art museum, but we, Europeans, have the great statues. Let’s wait another hundred years to see how this American ballet stands up.

MH:  Yet, I think one can safely say the New York City Ballet performances are appreciated here?

WENDY WHELAN:  Well, we had incredible receptions here in London and the previous week in Copenhagen. It’s so nice to show our ballets to people who don’t get to see them all the time like in New York. What I enjoy the most is to hear somebody from the Paris Opera or from the Royal Ballet say: “I really love dancing Symphony in C!” That makes me feel great, because that’s how I feel about it. We are so lucky to have the repertoire we have. There are some other things I would like to taste, something like Netherlands Dance Theater, or some more Forsythe, but for the most part we have some incredibly delicious food.

MH:  It’s important that you preserve it - Is it preserved?

WENDY WHELAN:  It’s kept as best as it can be. Of course, it’s up to dancers. People like Peter, Merrill Ashley, Sara Leland, Karen von Aroldingen, they give you all the information they have. But if the dancers no longer trust them and take it lightly, then it will lose. You have to really respect them. Anybody whom Balanchine touched on these ballets needs to be respected, because they are the only ones that have the bits of magic left in them. They know, they understand where it comes from, what it’s about. Our rep is so abstract that it can easily get twisted. I remember learning Symphony in Three Movements and Violin Concerto in the same year – it’s both Stravinsky, it’s abstract, and you are in leotard. But it’s not the same. The whole mood is so different and you need to do this with this intent, that with this feeling and so on. You cannot possibly do them the same way. It’s important that the understanding, the concept of the choreography continues to be passed down. And it’s really important to have these people around, because he made these ballets on them… They were there.