DANCE REVIEW : Feld Ballets Returns to UCLA : Troupe performs ‘Endsong’ in silence after Richard Strauss’ estate refuses permission to use his Four Last Songs.

L.A. hasn’t seen Eliot Feld’s company dance since 1984, and some of us have been going quietly crazy in the meantime wondering what this prodigiously talented New York choreographer has been up to.

A three-day engagement by the Feld Ballets/NY at Royce Hall, UCLA, which ends tonight, provides some answers. Nine of his 11 works on different daily programs have been created since that watershed year.

The program that opened the run Thursday, however, proved inconclusive and unsettling. The haunting “Endsong,” which received its premiere in New York in February, was flawed entirely for reasons beyond Feld’s control.

However, “Contra Pose” (1990) is not particularly encouraging for the direction it suggests the choreographer has been moving in.

Even “The Jig Is Up,” a romp created in 1983 to traditional Irish and Scottish music, doesn’t seem much fun anymore.

Attention was riveted upon “Endsong” because Feld had choreographed the work to Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs, but the Strauss estate, as Feld explained to the Royce Hall audience, denied him permission to use the music. So the company danced the ballet in silence, as it had in New York.

Feld added that he missed the music desperately and at least one member of the audience missed it desperately too.

Without it, the work, for 10 women and one man, often looked like an abstract, sometimes eerily beautiful but strangely paced movement study. A corps of women in billowing pastel gowns created swirling patterns. Lynn Aaron, the lithe heroine, passed from tense isolation through episodic partnership with Jeffrey Neeck to a final merging with the corps.

Some striking, poignant moments: Aaron’s falling backward with Neeck supporting her under the neck, her leaps onto his arm, her slowly assuming the gestures and moves of the corps.

But much seemed mere to-and-fro-ing, with events spurred by something, but what we could only guess. Of course, they were tied to the unheard text and music, Feld being too musical to be arbitrary.

Also bound to the music but in a cold, mechanical way is Feld’s “Contra Pose,” set to a score composed of reassembled movements of symphonies by C.P.E. Bach.

Every move, every twitch, every allusion to Balanchine’s “Apollo,” no matter by what combination of dancers, reflects a musical accent, gesture or rhythm, but without illuminating or opening up a single measure.

Feld seems deliberately restricting himself in movement vocabulary, yet prone to pack bar after bar with some kind of ingenious but coolish move.

The company danced “The Jig Is Up” dutifully. Feld’s commentary on this earthy music now looks rather tony and prettified. In tossing her hair about and taking freeze-frame positions in her solo, for instance, Sarah Kalmar evoked high-fashion ad campaigns. Still, we did get an opportunity to watch the elfin, incandescent Geralyn DelCorso, even if she was partnered by the stolid Neeck.

All the works began with the curtain up and the dancers warming up in full view, a legacy of a recent mishap at the Joyce Theater in New York that rendered the front curtain useless. Feld apparently likes the effect; if so, why extinguish the lights before starting “Endsong”?