NEWS
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Feb 05, 2010
Event Inviation
Ghosts World Premiere - San Francisco Ballet
GHOSTS WORLD PREMIERE
Choreographer: Christopher Wheeldon
Composer: C. F. Kip Winger
Performed by the San Francisco Ballet
"Lovely, serene passages face forceful, chilling interludes in this world premiere by Christopher Wheeldon that features music by two-time platinum recording artist, Kip Winger." ~SF Ballet Website
February 9, 2010 8:00pm
February 10, 2010 7:30pm
February 12, 2010 8:00pm
February 14, 2010 2:00pm
February 18, 2010 8:00pm
February 20, 2010 2:00pm
February 20, 2010 8:00pm
Hope to see you there!
http://www.sfballet.org
http://www.sfballet.org/performancestickets/buytickets.asp
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PRESS and PROGRAM NOTES
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"Any new ballet by Christopher Wheeldon is an event; "Ghosts" is his fifth San Francisco commission, a large-scale work set to an original score by the pop world’s Kip Winger." ~ San Francisco Chronicle
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"Christopher Wheeldon has announced the music that will accompany his new work for the 2010 Repertory Season. The piece, Ghosts, will premiere on Program 2, and is set to a classical score by the same name composed by Kip Winger, lead singer of the band Winger." ~ Voice of Dance
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"A few personal picks from the many inviting local musical events of 2010....the world premiere of Christopher Wheeldon's Ghosts, to music by platinum recording artist Kip Winger. ~San Francisco Classical Voice
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"Ghosts: Suite No. 1 for Orchestra"
"Kip Winger studied ballet for years, and was in a ballet company at age 19. "Since then, in the back of my mind, I've known I would try to take on the idea of writing music for dance. I've always been wanting to write orchestra music for dance."
Between tours and rock recordings, he's studied music. He was encouraged by a professor at Vanderbilt University to translate his rock music writing "into these instruments and see what happens." The result "Ghosts," and there are more to come.
When he wrote the first movement for "Ghosts," Winger had "a particular choreographer in mind," Christopher Wheeldon. Wheeldon heard it, "liked it," and "asked me to make it 20 minutes. Strange things in life where it actually worked." Wheeldon, in fact, has choreographed a dance to "Ghosts" that'll premiere with the San Francisco Ballet in February. ~Explorer News
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Christopher Wheeldon goes out on a limb (Interview Excerpt)
Q: Your next San Francisco Ballet commission, "Ghosts," premieres February 9. Can you tantalize us with a few words about it?
A: The inspiration came from a short piece for violin and piano written for me by rock musician Kip Winger. I wished it could have been longer. In a couple of months, Kip had it fully scored, extended to 25 minutes, recorded and on my desk. I was surprised at how something this lyrical and beautiful could have come from a rock musician. The ballet seems to be about a group of people who have lost their lives together and may be drowning. ~San Francisco Chronicle
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PROGRAM NOTES
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Ghosts©
In Christopher Wheeldon's newest ballet, Ghosts, the title--that single, potent word--engenders lingering images in the mind. The name comes from the score, composed by C.F. Kip Winger. And though the music has its eerie moments--"it's kind of silvery, the way the piano creeps in and out," says Wheeldon--without that title it could have been interpreted in many ways. But once you hear the word "ghosts," there's no turning back. Lovely, serene passages face repeated attacks by forceful, chilling interludes, as if something out there doesn't want to be forgotten.
Composer C.F. Kip Winger, who became interested in classical music composition as a young dance student, met Wheeldon in 1997, when a friend took him to watch rehearsals at New York City Ballet. Ten years later, after seeing Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company perform three of the choreographer's ballets, Winger says he was "extremely inspired" and sat down to write a piece for him. At the time, Winger was working in a recording studio that had been a hospital in the early 1900s, and he "could sense a mystical presence in the atmosphere; several different characters were emerging in the text of the music," he says. "The title Ghosts popped into my head when I was writing the cello solo in the first movement."
Winger began his music career at a young age, performing professionally at age eight with his two older brothers. As a teenager, he studied classical guitar and composition with Sam Guarnaccia at the University of Denver and continued his training at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the University of New Mexico, and Vanderbilt University in Nashville. A bassist with Alice Cooper's band in the 1980s, Winger formed his own eponymous band in the '90s, releasing two platinum albums, Winger and In the Heart of the Young.
What Winger gave Wheeldon was only one movement, and though the choreographer liked it, the six-minute piece was too short for a ballet. So he asked Winger if he would extend it. "About six to eight months later I got a box in my office, and it was a fully orchestrated, fully recorded and scored piece of music with a note saying, 'Dear Chris, hope you like it,' " Wheeldon says. He decided to use the score for his fifth commission for San Francisco Ballet; Ghosts brings the tally of his ballets in the Company's repertory to nine.
The score's title got Wheeldon thinking. He wondered if there might be a narrative in it, so he read Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts "in case [the play and the music] happened to align, and of course they don't," he says. "And then I thought maybe it's just the atmosphere of ghosts. Maybe [the dancers] are ghosts but they're not telling a specific story—they're just sort of there, sort of left." Drawing further on literature in his early explorations of theme, Wheeldon turned to the poems of Edgar Allen Poe: "The City in the Sea," "To One in Paradise," "Lenore," "The Valley of Unrest." With evocative phrases like "death looks gigantically down," "melancholy waters" and "lilies . . . that weep above a nameless grave," poems influenced Wheeldon's creative process without becoming literal onstage.
Wheeldon ended up with the idea of a mass gathering of souls, as there might be after a tragedy, but with the intention of creating only atmosphere, not story. "You're not quite sure where you are or whether these people are rea--are they characters or are they not? So it's more like perfume than a heavy sort of ghost story," he says. A forbidding stage environment and shreds of realism in the costumes combine with the choreography, music, and mood to create images of a community struggling to define itself, its people united by their search for understanding in a world unknown to them.
With four musical movements, the ballet is "big and complex," Wheeldon says, "[with] a lot of steps, a lot of quite complicated corps de ballet work." He worked especially fast on this ballet, creating classicism-entrenched contemporary movement, tossed with jazz and modern dance influences, that challenges even Damian Smith and Yuan Yuan Tan, the versatile principal dancers who dance the pas de deux.
"The pas de deux is extremely difficult," Tan says. "It's not very long, but it feels long because there are a lot of lifts, and Damian is never putting me down. We do a lot of intense movement, but it's so beautiful." She says Wheeldon didn't suggest images of ghosts and death to her, and she approaches the role as if "it's a relationship, like husband and wife. That's how it feel--just like moments of tenderness, and the movement, and the vision we're making." Sometimes, she says, dancers don't need much to work with: "Keep it simple and let the steps help you."
According to Smith, all of the ballet's partnering is extremely difficult. "Every moment there is an intertwined, off-balance, tangled partnership that never seems to unwind, a kind of thread that's constantly knotted." His arm curving through the air as illustration, he explains that "if your arm is wrapped around her neck, you have to keep it there and lift her--no changing grips." Adding to the challenge, he says, is the layered movement quality. Though the music might be legato, "[Wheeldon] wants us to dance it very sharp, direct, and precise, to kind of go against the music, and then choose moments when we are more lyrical and soft with the arms." Although in previous ballets Wheeldon has matched movement to music in less symmetrical ways than is typical of classical ballet (perhaps most noticeably in his trio of ballets set to the music of György Ligeti), in Ghosts he emphasizes the shifts in contrast. "He wants a definite transition between those two qualities of movement," says Smith, "so strong and sharp and direct, and then soft and seamless."
In rehearsals Wheeldon often asked the dancers to shift their center of gravity off their supporting leg, at times yielding their weight to the floor, at others conveying a floating feeling. Twists on classical steps expand the vocabulary: chaînés (two-footed turns) speed up into spins; slow, leaden walks push across the floor; women on pointe drag one leg behind them ("an homage to Michael Jackson," Wheeldon says). "I love the freedom of not ever putting any restrictions on what I do in the studio. It's a wonderful feeling to go in there and think, 'I can do anythin--let’s see where we go with this.' "
As Wheeldon has matured as a choreographer, he has found that the rewards of his art have changed. Earlier in his career he was too fixated on the final product to appreciate his time in the studio. Now, although he concedes that what goes before audiences is still very important to him, he can see that he "wasn't fully absorbing the riches of the process itself. And now that's my favorite thing. Now it's about all the discovery with the dancers, with the designers--the first time you see the model, the first time you run the pas de deux, the first time you see the set onstage, the first time you hear the orchestra--those are all really magical moments."
Program notes by Cheryl Ossola
