DANCE REVIEW : Feld Ballets Closes UCLA Engagement

Viewed as a survey of Eliot Feld’s choreography from the late ‘70s to the present, the final two programs by Feld Ballets/NY over the weekend in Royce Hall at UCLA suggested Feld has lately become stuck in formulaic structures and dry musicality.

The earliest work, “A Footstep of Air,” created in 1977 and danced Saturday, remained a buoyant, inventive series of crystalline and tightly constructed--even if repetitive--character vignettes.

“Skara Brae” (1986), probably the high point of the Friday program, retained its serious focus and impact, creating imagined communal rituals and an aura of impending doom.

But “Common Ground” (1991), set to rearranged movements drawn from Bach’s “Brandenburg” concertos, on Friday worked so determinedly against the music that it sounded mechanical.

A corps of women enters with on-the-beat, stabbing pointe work, a group of men engages in endless exclamation-point jumps, the choreographer repeats bite-sized movement motifs--all while Bach spins out flowing lines.

As in “Contra Pose,” on Thursday, the Royce Hall stage suddenly looked crowded and busy, as if it were not large enough to accommodate all the activity. Other company works, created earlier, did not suggest such a compacted muddle.

In Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 11, Feld hears a grim, one-sided war between the sexes, or at least that’s how he used it in “Savage Glance” (1991).

Feld requires Jeffrey Neeck to partner--perhaps manhandle is a more accurate words--a lithe, pliable, accommodating Lynn Aaron, while a Grahamesque corps of seven women comes and goes, flexing its way across the stage.

Neeck repeatedly shakes a rag-doll Aaron draped across his neck, reaches through her legs to turn her round and over, straddles her on the floor as she attempts to escape him. Repeatedly.

But this ballet was all of a piece compared to the grab-bag incoherence Feld offered in “Wolfgang Strategies” (1991), set to three movements from Mozart symphonies.

Part company aerobics class, part mystic mumbo-jumbo, part Mouseketeer testimonial, this work perhaps should be charitably considered Feld’s ironic commentary on the Mozart bicentennial. But it’s a mess.

In spite of everything, the company danced superbly, vibrant with energy and glowing in precision. To highlight a few names: Nancy Latoszewski was the perky Sally in Our Alley and Griff Braun, David Bushman and Marcus McGregor the high-spirited trio in “Footstep of Air.”

Buffy Miller danced two extended solos, both set to music by Steve Reich: the strenuous, episodic, unrewarding “Ion” (1990) on Friday; and the voluptuous, sculptural “Kore” (1988) on Saturday.

The fine and expressive Darren Gibson offered a tour de force Friday in “Evoe” (1991), Feld’s overlong vision of yet another incarnation of Nijinsky’s Faun.

Willa Kim designed the attractive costumes for all the ballets. Allen Lee Hughes created the moody lighting for all the works except “Savage Glance,” which Feld himself lit.