DANCE REVIEW : New Works by Feld Ballet at Symphony Hall

Many of Eliot Feld’s most haunting ballets are social portraits: imaginative evocations of intricate codes of group behavior.

Like archeologists reconstructing an object from only a few fragments, Feld recreates a vanished ambiance out of movement artifacts. And when those too have vanished, Feld reinvents them--as he does in “Skara Brae,” one of the new works danced by his accomplished and versatile company during its final two programs in Symphony Hall on Friday and Saturday.

Set to traditional Irish, Scottish and Breton music, the piece represents Feld’s attempt to envision the life of a tiny settlement in the Orkney Islands 5,000 years ago. As in an ornamental frieze, there are formal motifs that define communal style: upraised, tangled arms for the women, a weighty stag jump for the men.

We also see actions conveying a sense of the hardness of life in Skara Brae--the women’s keening motions, for example, or the men tensely beating their sides--and ritual passages in which Buffy Miller and Joan Tsao are each hauled away mournfully.

To what? Their weddings? Their sacrifices? Feld doesn’t say. Some of Skara Brae’s mysteries will forever be unexplained, in ballet as in history. But what exists is fascinating.

In his ballroom ballet “Love Song Waltzes” (to Brahms), Feld carefully constructs an elaborate quasi-documentary character study that reveals as much about the Victorian values of the group as the intimate passions of its eight members. Each young couple tells its story in several duets, but the heaviness of the period costumes and furniture along with the sense of decorum in the mime and dance interplay distance us.

The dancing looks florid, deliberately overburdened, but Feld does allow one couple (Lynn Aaron and Jeffrey Neeck) to break the rules and dance together in the astonishingly fluid, Feldian style of our own time.

It’s as if their love momentarily sets them free and it is this surging, quicksilver style that Feld explores in “Embraced Waltzes” (to Chopin piano pieces played by Peter Longiaru). Choreographed two years apart, these suites couldn’t be more different.

In “Embraced Waltzes,” the eight dancers are dressed in something like an idealization of contemporary practice clothes and Feld’s interest seems focused on dance issues, especially the invention of lifts that become signatures for each couple.

Many of the lifts are quick and playful, with the woman an active participant rather than just dead weight. And because they are conceived as statements of identity, instead of special effects, their technical daring becomes less significant than the ideal of trust that they express. A piece with plenty of physical thrills thus always manages to remain deeply thoughtful.

It is exactly this insistence on establishing a social or emotional justification for dancing--along with his frequent use of ethnic vocabularies--that causes some people in American ballet to consider Feld a maverick, not quite classical. The criticism is an old one, and Feld has frequently addressed it in interviews. With “Petipa Notwithstanding,” however, he addresses it in a large-scale dance showpiece.

Choreographing to that credo of contemporary structuralism, Terry Riley’s “In C,” Feld gets at key principles of classical dance that have nothing to do with academic style. Indeed, his dancers compulsively wag their heads, dangle their hands and launch limp-footed kicks. But if the vocabulary is exotic, the sequencing and spatial design are sometimes identical to the pristine entrance of the Shades in Marius Petipa’s “La Bayadere” and other hallmarks of classicism. That’s the point.

Feld understands that anything repeated becomes formalized, and so does anything done in unison. He knows that the process of counterpoint is classical regardless of the materials chosen--rolling, flailing, even scratching. So with humor but great pertinence, he delivers his evidence, idea by idea, through dancing of meticulously calibrated wildness.

Obviously, in a Feld repertory that already stretches from the Neolithic to the postmodern, “Petipa Notwithstanding” can’t exactly be considered a plea for artistic freedom of choice. But it is a demand that we expand and update our notions of classicism so they embrace something more than 19th-Century Franco-Russian ballet and its offshoots.

In a less conservative era, this demand would be needless, if not silly. In the 1980s, it seems almost revolutionary and long overdue.