of someone who demands a lot of bang for his calorie buck. It must be a dancer's ritual, I think, honed over years of measuring intake and expenditure, of juggling the demands of appetite with the need for lean, dancerly dimensions. But from the look of things, the young choreographer needn't worry.
Although he hung up his point shoes more than seven years ago, he appears able to spring back onto the stage at a moment's notice.
Not so, he says. At 34, it takes plenty to make the tendons and joints move the way they used to so easily.
lives just across the street, near New York's historic Ansonia apartment building - and he's keen to let me know what's good. "I'd recommend the vegetable wrap," he says, in an accent that contains both crisp English enunciation (he was born in Yeovil, Somerset, New Yorkese. I study him as he puts in his order of turkey burger, salad, hold the bread, diet cola.
He is slightly built, with the lean, ropy dancer's muscle that once propelled him into those famous big jumps as a New York City Ballet soloist. Those do in his publicity stills but he is still a boyishly handsome man, winter pallor and all.
For the first time since 2000, when he took his final curtain call at the age of 28, Wheeldon is back in dance class.
Fresh from a gruelling session at the barre, he winces as he explains why: in July, he will dance a short solo at a gala performance for the reopening of the Royal Festival Hall in London's Southbank. The and Michael Nunn, of Ballet Boyz fame. "They said, 'Can you make a piece for us?
', and I said, 'Why don't you make a piece for me?' I want to feel what it's like to be a dancer again, I want someone to people." He grins.
"So they have."
since crafting his first work, Le Voyage, at the precociously early age of 19, he has proved one of its most talented and prolific choreographers, creating more than 30 ballets for scores of companies, from his own New York City Ballet to the San Francisco Ballet, Royal Ballet, Hamburg Ballet and others, the way. He has been hailed as the great white hope of classical Again and again, Wheeldon has been branded ballet's wunderkind, saviour, reinventor, the next Balanchine.
Bring this up, though, and he'll practically gnaw his arm off in frustration. "When you use those words like 'anointed', 'saviour', I keep thinking, well, you know what happened to the saviour of mankind, he got hung up on a cross and left to die. Those kinds of words, it's so horrifying, actually.
"
Nevertheless, it's easy to see where the canonising impulses come from. Wheeldon, whose 2005 masterpiece After the Rain will have its Australian premiere in Sydney in May, has always reviews of his choreographic style over the years: spidery, "stupefyingly" inventive. He's had his dancers stand with their backs to the audience, upside down, pinioned to walls, corkscrewing around bodies but, remarkably, never without losing touch with classical ballet's aesthetic of pure form and line.
Wheeldon is an unrepentant point-shoe man, old-fashioned in his Bourne.
Purist he may be, yet no one could accuse Wheeldon of being Balanchine, to full-length story ballets, to a children's ballet No, he says, but he considers himself to be a sculptor. "So much of constantly shift the shape of two bodies together, or many bodies together .
.." his fingers pummel the air as he demonstrates.
A striking aspect of his style is its sheer complexity, its dizzying array of angles and vectors. His father was an engineer - I wonder if he himself has a mathematical bent. He laughs, shaking his head.
"Maths was my worst subject. In school, it's the only one I failed but I failed it spectacularly. No, I think I lean more towards the architectural.
"
Wheeldon's musicality has long been remarked on. He has a gift for matching bodies to notes and scores, for bringing new dimensions to the most disparate array of composers - Ligeti, Elgar, Dvorak, Beethoven, Rodgers and Hammerstein, the Scottish contemporary composer James MacMillan. He'd like to work with Bjork and has his eye on Osvaldo Golijov, among others.
Music is a constant element in his daily life - he wakes up to it, showers to it, goes to the gym with it playing in the background, he says. "It's just hard for me to imagine my life without music."
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