Wendy Whelan: Moments of Grace recently aired on WNYE, a local educational station; produced and directed by Tom Thurman it was originally made for KET, Kentucky Educational TV, and has a strong emphasis on Whelan's childhood in Louisville, Kentucky. In the documentary it is left murky how and why Whelan started at the School of American Ballet in New York when she was 15, in 1982, but she was actually encouraged by her teachers in Louisville, Cecile Gibson and Robert Dicello, to audition for Suzanne Farrell when Farrell came to Louisville scouting for students. Whelan does mention benefactors in Louisville who enabled her to move to New York but no details are given and no information is forthcoming about her education after her one year in a Louisville high school.
To me the oddest thing in the documentary is that there is no mention whatsoever of George Balanchine, who died in 1983, and whether Whelan ever met him. There are interviews with choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, with whom Whelan has had a long collaboration, and Whelan's husband, David Michalek talks about Jerome Robbins. There is a long excerpt of Whelan dancing in Robbins's In Memory Of but there only momentary glimpses of Whelan in Balanchine's Agon and Symphony in Three Movements and the ballets are not identified. Whelan was a superb interpreter of Balanchine's Stravinsky ballets; her angular movements were better suited for the intensity of these modern ballets than the softer romantic ballets in which she was also cast. Perhaps a clue about the absence of Balanchine in Wendy Whelan: Moments of Grace comes when Whelan, who can be quite articulate, says she does not dwell on the past but only thinks of the present and the future.
There is plenty of film, taken by her father, of Wendy dancing when she was five and six years old, and her parents and siblings reminisce at great length. There is also a considerable amount of footage of Wheeldon ballets, just not enough of Wendy Whelan dancing Balanchine.
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