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Christopher Wheeldon: Dance will always be around. It is so much a part of
human nature. I mean, we don’t exactly live in the kind of society
where dances are part of everyday life in a way that you know, you
go to an African country or even still you know, in parts of
Southern Spain with the gypsies and the flamenco dancers, dancers
in their blood. It’s in there. It’s the way they communicate with
each other. It’s not, that’s not something, that’s not a part of the
life that we’re involved in. I mean, in everyday life, I mean. It’s
in our blood and we communicate with it daily in the studio but it’s
not a way that you can sort of communicate with society in
general.

But dance will always be there on some level. Ballet, I don’t
know. Ballet I fear for a little bit because ballet’s becoming more
and more about revivals. It’s becoming more of a museum art
form. And part of the reason is young choreographers today are
far more drawn to working in a more contemporary; we’re using a
more contemporary dance vocabulary. So, that worries me
because I’m a ballet choreographer. And I actually like that crazy
way that point you think that, because for me that’s what makes a
ballerina so interesting. It makes the body so strangely sculptural
and changes the musculature of the way a woman looks when she
dances. You know, you stopped ‘coz the weight distribution is
completely different from when you’re on flatfoot, when you’re on
heels.

Suddenly, you’re perched on this tiny little piece of, basically,
pieces of paper and glue, you know, piled on top of each other and
somehow, when the body is on that thing, on that strange point, the
musculature, the look of the body changes completely. And it’s a
beautiful poetic vocabulary to work with. It’s just, I guess, this
less demand for it so young choreographers are drawn to working
in flat shoe. And that frightens me a little bit.

I mean, in some ways, I guess, I am kind of rebelling against the
trend of being opting for a slightly more kind of generic form of, I
don’t mean to say that contemporary dance is generic because it’s
not. When it’s really good, it’s absolutely fantastic. It can often be
very, very powerful. And I admire a lot of contemporary
choreographers. But there is a slight danger of everybody kind of
heading in one direction. And I think that that ultimately compete
dangerous for ballet.

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