✦ Origins ✦
Christopher Wheeldon created This Bitter Earth as part of a larger contemporary work, Five Movements, Three Repeats, which premiered in August 2012 at the Vail International Dance Festival for Fang-Yi Sheu & Artists. The duet took on a life of its own almost immediately: within a month it had entered New York City Ballet's own repertory, danced by principal Wendy Whelan — then in the final years of a decades-long NYCB career and increasingly drawn to contemporary choreographers outside the company's core repertory — partnered by a fellow NYCB dancer.
The piece is set to a track assembled by composer Max Richter that layers his own composition "On the Nature of Daylight" beneath Dinah Washington's 1960 recording of the song "This Bitter Earth," which gives the duet both its title and its unusually direct emotional register, built from close, unbroken partnering between two dancers. Wheeldon, already an established name in narrative and abstract ballet-making on both sides of the Atlantic, used the piece to work in an unusually intimate, small-scale format compared with the large-cast story ballets and company works he was best known for at the time.
Structure
The work is a short, continuous pas de deux rather than a multi-part piece, built almost entirely from sustained physical contact between its two dancers — lifts, falls, and recoveries performed with minimal separation, phrased to follow the swell of Richter's strings and Washington's vocal line rather than a beat-driven musical structure. The choreography deliberately avoids overt narrative, building instead a single sustained emotional arc of intimacy, dependency, and loss across its brief running time. The piece leans heavily on off-balance weight-sharing and momentum-driven lifts rather than the classical supported adagio vocabulary Wheeldon draws on in his story ballets, giving the duet a searching, unresolved physical quality that mirrors the layered, elegiac quality of its combined score.
Reception & Legacy
This Bitter Earth became one of the most widely performed, filmed, and shared contemporary duets of the 2010s, its reach helped by video circulating well beyond usual dance audiences. It played a central role in relaunching Whelan's career as a commissioner and performer of contemporary work after her New York City Ballet retirement in 2014, and it has been frequently restaged by other dancers and companies since, often serving as a reference point for what a short-form contemporary ballet duet can achieve. Its success also helped demonstrate the commercial and critical viability of short-form contemporary duets migrating from festival programs into a major company's mainstage repertory, a path other companies and independent producers have since drawn on for their own contemporary-leaning commissions.
Its scale and format also make it a useful counterpoint to the large-ensemble works elsewhere on this site: where pieces like Sadeh21 build meaning from a full company moving as one, This Bitter Earth shows how much emotional weight a contemporary choreographer can carry with just two bodies and a few unbroken minutes of stage time.
See Also
Read the full profile of choreographer Christopher Wheeldon.