One weekend in the early 1990s on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, 19-year-old dancer Christopher Wheeldon found himself at a loose end. He had recently moved from London to join New York City Ballet. “I hadn’t really made any friends yet and I remember a really lonely Sunday afternoon going to the cinema,” says Wheeldon. “There used to be a great art house at Lincoln Center, called Lincoln Plaza.” The film he saw there was Like Water for Chocolate, an adaptation of the Mexican author Laura Esquivel’s magical realist novel about thwarted love.
“It just really stuck with me,” says Wheeldon. “I’m a bit of a hopeless romantic, I suppose.” Back then, he had no idea that 30 years later he would still be living in New York, now an internationally successful Tony and Olivier award-winning choreographer, turning the movie he saw into a ballet.
