2 Box Seat Tickets to San Francisco Ballet, Sunday, April 11th at 2pm. Box H.

Rush©
Composer: Bohuslav Martinu
Choreographer: Christopher Wheeldon

Set to a forceful and energetic score by Bohuslav Martinu, Christopher Wheeldon’s Rush sweeps, swirls, and flows with sophisticated movement.

The score was “like a force of nature,” Wheeldon admits. “Both the first and last movements are incredibly vigorous. I spoke with the dancers about finding ways to make their bodies look like they’re being sucked backwards.” The biggest challenge, he says, was the second movement, a pas de deux. “What do you do with panoramic, epic-sounding patterns in the orchestra when you’ve decided to use only two dancers? I had choreographed too many steps, so we edited away, trying to find the right places for certain movements to hit the music, as opposed to creating shapes that mirrored what was going on in the music.”

Rather than choreographing “what you hear on the surface”—sketching out, note for note, what’s being played—Wheeldon chose to go deeper, finding the imagery in the music. “At the end, there’s a section where I was pulling my hair out,” he says. “It’s almost like the troops come charging across the stage, and I could do one of two things: have the troops charging across the stage, and a whirlwind of movement; or we could do nothing, and maybe in our minds we’d see this whirl of movement. It’s like that moment in the vortex of a twister and it’s still; it’s peaceful. It’s the moment for everyone to take a deep breath and prepare for the fireworks of the last movement.”

Musicality and imaginativeness are what Wheeldon values most, and he credits his audience with the ability to appreciate those ingredients. “You don’t choreograph down to an audience,” says Wheeldon, who spent his boyhood enthralled with theater in London’s West End. “You find ways to bring them in, and to transport them, and inspire them, but you don’t condescend to them. Ballet can be intimidating—some of my ballets can be intimidating. But I always try to find a way, even when I’m working with incredibly complex music, to give them that spoonful of sugar now and then.”

Program notes by Cheryl Ossola