✦ Origins ✦
Alexei Ratmansky created Whipped Cream in 2017 for American Ballet Theatre, where he had been artist in residence since 2009. The two-act ballet received its world premiere at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, California in March 2017, followed by its New York premiere at the Metropolitan Opera House that May as the centerpiece of ABT's spring gala.
The ballet is built on a score and libretto Richard Strauss composed in the early 1920s under the title Schlagobers, a two-act ballet-pantomime choreographed by Heinrich Kröller that premiered at the Vienna State Opera in 1924, with Strauss himself conducting. That original production was poorly received and quickly disappeared from the repertoire. Ratmansky's Whipped Cream is not a reconstruction of Kröller's staging in the manner of his Sergeyev-notation revivals of works like The Sleeping Beauty - it is an entirely new ballet, with new choreography built from scratch to Strauss's surviving score and story. Ratmansky has said he had been drawn to the music and its whimsical premise for years, but that discovering the pop-surrealist paintings of artist Mark Ryden was what finally made the project feel possible, leading him to bring Ryden on to design both sets and costumes.
What Makes It Distinct
The ballet follows a boy who, celebrating with friends at a Viennese pastry shop, overindulges on whipped cream eaten straight from the jar and falls ill. Act I closes with a sweeping "ballet blanc" of sixteen female dancers evoking the dessert itself, before Act II strands the boy in a dark, sinister hospital ward presided over by a Doctor and an army of Nurses. A fantastical procession led by Princess Praline arrives to rescue him, and after the ward's liquor bottles intoxicate the Doctor and Nurses, she spirits him away to her candy kingdom.
Ryden's designs carry as much of the ballet's identity as the choreography: painterly, rococo-inflected backdrops and streetscapes populated by his own invented creatures, including a candy-cane snake and a snow yak, alongside costumes built to resemble cupcakes, liqueur bottles, and gumballs, topped with oversized hats and crowns. Ryden, a painter better known in gallery contexts than the theatre, has described his approach as building from a classical foundation and layering surrealist elements on top of it - a description that applies equally well to Ratmansky's choreography, which grounds the ballet's fantastical episodes in a fundamentally classical, pointe-based vocabulary even as the story tips from childlike wonder into something closer to menace.
Legacy
Whipped Cream drew attention on its premiere as much for Ryden's maximalist designs as for Ratmansky's choreography, with critics divided over whether the production's tonal swings between confectionery whimsy and unsettling hospital imagery cohered into a single work or pulled against each other. It has nonetheless remained part of American Ballet Theatre's repertory, returning in subsequent seasons as a reliably strong box-office draw and a showcase for the company's soloists in roles like Princess Praline.
Alongside Pictures at an Exhibition, the piece demonstrates the range of Ratmansky's practice at its furthest extremes: a plotless, abstract chamber work built from close musical response on one side, and a visually maximalist, fully narrative spectacle built around a single collaborating visual artist on the other, with his historical reconstructions occupying a third register entirely.
See Also
Read the full profile of choreographer Alexei Ratmansky.