Master of His Domain

By TERRY TEACHOUT

Drop by Lincoln Center whenever a work by Jerome Robbins is on the program at the New York City Ballet, and chances are you'll see a 26-year-old Brit with a long neck and a big, bright smile. N.Y.C.B. soloist Christopher Wheeldon is engaging and reliable, and he knows how to make the most of a Robbins role. But last week he swapped his tights for a business suit to take a bow with 62 children from the School of American Ballet as 2,000 dancegoers yelled their heads off. The occasion was the premiere of his own Scenes de Ballet, which confirmed what balletomanes have been saying for the past couple of seasons: Wheeldon is not only a fine dancer; he's also the best young ballet choreographer around.

Unlike dancemakers who favor the hard-edged, stripped-down contemporary idiom that he crisply dismisses as "technoballet," Wheeldon is an unabashed classicist. His style, a bracingly confident fusion of George Balanchine's structural clarity with the sunny lyricism of Frederick Ashton, is respectful of tradition without stooping to imitation. He's also a sucker for tutus, toe shoes and moonlit pas de deux. "I don't have much angst in me," he says. "I love to be romantic."

That's evident in Scenes de Ballet, set to the delectable score by Igor Stravinsky. Ian Falconer's set depicts a ballet classroom bisected by a barre and an imaginary mirror; the cast is similarly divided into "real" dancers and their "reflections." At one point, a child gazes into the mirror and her image vanishes, replaced by two teenagers who dance together rapturously as she looks on, spellbound.

But Wheeldon can do much more than conjure up spun-sugar fantasies. The witty Soiree Musicale, which the school premiered last year, for instance, contains a show-stopping tango in which a femme fatale picks up new partners one by one, eventually dancing with a dozen admirers simultaneously. And Corybantic Ecstasies, given its premiere in March by the Boston Ballet, is a tough-minded, tautly argued work that shows off Wheeldon's ability to infuse the disciplined language of classical ballet with high emotion.

Born in Somerset, England, Wheeldon entered the Royal Ballet School at nine and started making up his own dances shortly thereafter. Hired by the Royal Ballet in 1991, he spent two restless years in the corps. Fascinated by the ballets of Balanchine, N.Y.C.B.'s founder, he left for New York City and took class with the company. "If I hadn't done that," he says, "I might still be back in London, standing on the side of the stage holding a tray." Instead, ballet master in chief Peter Martins, always on the lookout for promising young male dancers, offered him a job.

Robbins promptly cast Wheeldon in Dances at a Gathering, his signature piece. Martins, after looking at videotapes of dances Wheeldon had made as a student, invited him to do one for the School of American Ballet in 1994. Three years later, Wheeldon choreographed his first work for the main company. Slavonic Dances, a folk-flavored ballet with a fire-eating solo for Monique Meunier, the company's most exciting young ballerina, drew critical raves and kicked off a new phase of his career.

Wheeldon's speedy rise to the top is partly due to a nearly complete lack of competition. The top American choreographers, Robbins and Eliot Feld excepted, have mainly preferred modern dance to ballet. Hungry for premieres, classical companies are increasingly turning to modern crossovers like Mark Morris and Twyla Tharp, whose highly personal reworkings of ballet technique are often refreshing but rarely idiomatic. While a few regional ballet masters are doing interesting work, none to date have won much more than local celebrity.

Small wonder, then, that companies coast to coast are clamoring for Wheeldon's crowd-pleasing yet intelligently crafted ballets. This summer he'll be making his first dance for the San Francisco Ballet and his second, a new version of Stravinsky's Firebird, for the Boston Ballet, as well as working on a dance-themed film by Nicholas Hytner (The Object of My Affection). "If a company calls and I have the time," he says cheerily, "I'll do it." There's just one catch: if they want somebody trendy, they'll have to call somebody else. "Ballet has to move forward, yes, but it doesn't have to lose its magic and romanticism and lyricism," he explains. "Romanticism will never die."