Days, Dances, Deities

In The Day, Wendy Whelan's new hour-long collaboration with choreographer Lucinda Childs and onstage cellist Maya Beiser, which had its world premiere in August at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in the Berkshires, Whelan starts out all in white, costumed by Karen Young. She perches on a stool at our right, facing left in profile, her right leg bent before her, her left trailing behind. For fans of the New York City Ballet, where Whelan danced for 30 years, a light might flash in the brain: Apollo assumes the identical pose in George Balanchine's earliest surviving ballet, a young god eagerly preparing to watch his three muses dance in competition for his favor. It's as though Whelan, who often danced in Apollo in the role of Terpsichore, the muse of dance and winner of the contest, and who became a contemporary muse to such choreographers as Christopher Wheeldon and Alexei Ratmansky, has evolved to a higher degree of divinity.

Beiser now becomes the apparent muse to Whelan, playing two absorbing, related pieces by David Lang called the day and world to come. For the day, Lang provides a crowdsourced text, a kind of found poem collated from the internet, with every line beginning "I remember the day …," recorded in Beiser's voice, joined occasionally by Whelan's. Memory dominates the work's atmosphere—fittingly, since the music originated as a response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, which barely obtrude upon the dance except for its sense of the significance of everyday people and their lives. The impression of recursiveness wafting from Lang's score and Beiser's playing reinforces the feeling of dailiness—how waking every morning constitutes a kind of miracle, even if we merely, modestly rehash the identical activities of the day before. The work's enticing reticence rescues it from sentimentality or pedantry and fits the stoical distance of Whelan's dancing, mostly improvised upon Childs's larger movement scheme. As a ballerina at NYCB for 30 years, Whelan earned fame for her speed and angularity, but her dance in the day depends on slowness and even stillness, and, at 52, the elegant, muscular solidity that has replaced her wiriness.

Whelan's performance also depends on props, which she, in a post-performance talkback, called "a pain in the butt." She holds a ball with fabric trailing from it when Beiser reads, "I remember the day I fell in love." She uses long, thin rods to measure the stage—the world—like a Blakean god. Most significantly, she stretches thick elastic bands into triangles and rectangles that suggest portals, and at times she steps through them, moving from our world into another, a home of dancers or gods who share her special talents and powers. Whelan sometimes sheds her white over-gown to let it trail from her shoulders like a superhero cape, becoming a creature from another realm; just as often she is one of us—or a god or alien being playing one of us, discovering ordinary existence through her divine point of view, an apt role for a former ballerina on a quest for new symbols and new ways to perpetuate her identity as a dancer. The hypnotic motion, the slow and deliberate turns, the mesmerizing incantation of the poetic text, and the lush intensity of Beiser's playing make this the most fully realized work Whelan has performed since her departure from ballet. (She has returned to NYCB in an administrative capacity, as associate artistic director.)

Lang's score for The Day's second section, world to come, sounds darker and more anguished, a memorial to those killed in the World Trade Center attack. (The title and the buildings have the same initials.) Childs's choreography at first counters the sometimes harrowing music with a surprisingly classical calm. Whelan, now in gray-black, embarks on a series of surprisingly balletic moves—passés, balances, spins on both toes—but with modernist inflections, like the flexed wrists on her downward-extending arms during a series of turns. (Balanchine would have approved.) Whelan almost seems to be saying, "I remember...