DANCE REVIEW : Feld Dances Hit Peaks and Flats

From mistakes, the adage goes, we get some of our greatest ideas. And some of our dumbest.

A computer error in the summer of 1991 caused sprinklers to flood New York’s Joyce Theater, home for Feld Ballets/NY, and ruin the theater’s curtain. The dance season had to continue without it.

Choreographer Eliot Feld got the idea that all subsequent Feld company performances should be without a curtain. So, before the first “curtain” and before intermissions, his 18 dancers tune up like an orchestra, practicing bits and pieces of dances in front of the audience. Dancers are, after all, the instruments of choreographers.

These casual pre-performance maneuvers did not look choreographed Tuesday and Wednesday nights at the Spreckels Theatre, when Feld Ballets/NY performed two separate programs, but they did look faked, especially with Feld self-consciously holding slips of paper and supposedly giving last-minute directions.

After you finish rolling your eyes at the hubris, you have time before the program begins to lament the near extinction of live music from dance concerts, and a chance to glimpse the dancers as individuals.

All of these aspects--presence (or absence) of music, individuality of dancers and choreographer’s conceit--are essential to Feld’s work.

Feld, nearing 50, has created 72 modern ballets over the past 25 years. Of the eight dances performed over the two nights at the Spreckels, “The Jig Is Up” (1984) was the oldest, and was also danced here in 1985 and 1989. Mostly a full-company reel and romp to Irish and Scottish folk music, “Jig” has blood-pulsing passion in at least one segment, a let-your-hair-fly solo, convincingly executed by Sarah Kalmar. Unfortunately, such gut-felt expression was missing in some of Feld’s latest works on the two programs.

Feld likes his female dancers’ hair slicked back and ballet-tight, and tends toward highly stylized sequences and gestures--and sometimes outright gimmickry--for visual effect rather than emotional expression. He is inspired by music, he has said, and his dances move in direct relation to the rhythms, tempi and dynamics of the music he chooses.

For ‘Contra Pose” (1990), he took movements from C.P.E. Bach’s symphonies and pieced them together to fit his choreographic purpose. For a 1991 companion piece, “Common Ground,” he put together movements from various Brandenburg Concerti by J.S Bach. Further, from three Mozart symphonies, he stacked selected movements for this season’s “Wolfgang Strategies.”

“Contra Pose” poses again and again, framing dancers’ faces with bird-like gestures, ornamenting the basically mechanistic sequences. Dancers flow in wedges and diagonals with the uniformity and twittery nervousness of shore birds--or dying swans. They swing their arms, recalling whirligigs, and sometimes stop to pose confrontationally, giving the audience wry and wonky looks.

Feld’s similar “Common Ground” flaunts less, but is more mechanical and more closely tied to the treadling mathematical music. The choreographic machinations in both works are fun to watch when they don’t get crowded and jumbled up but are less interesting when Feld seems to have gotten stuck in his own cute impulses and therefore has to invent something even more cute to move forward.

The agile contortions of Lynn Aaron gave both dances a welcome artistic center. She was partnered by Jeffrey Neeck, not nearly the refined dancer the other men in the company are, but he has an upper body suited for lifting and a dance-star face.

With “Wolfgang Strategies,” Feld’s insouciance swells into the ludicrous. At first animated, the dance skips to mere cartoon, as a sylphish Giselle/Gothic horror ghost bride/soon-to-be Minnie Mouse (impossible to swallow but danced wonderfully deadpan by Joan Tsao in white veil and kneepads) is carried about and tossed high in the air by an irreverent ensemble. Mozart, a playful rascal himself, might have liked this. Maybe not.

Feld’s penchant for Steve Reich’s minimalist scores has inspired two dances for the dance-nobility and exceptional talent of Buffy Miller: Tuesday’s “Kore” (1988), performed here by Miller in 1989, and Wednesday’s “Ion.” “Kore” is a paean to Persephone, “radiant maiden of the spring,” according to program notes, but she was also the goddess of the mythical underworld, of death. In this exquisitely crafted solo, Kore/Miller seems imbued with a pastel-tinted life force, and lifted off a pedestal to celebrate, unthreateningly, her sensuousness.

She was impeccable and magnetic. Only when the dance takes on occasional and minute hints--a pointed finger, head kinked in profile--of the dark goddess Kali, do we see that we are missing the goddess’ dark side, the dance’s intellectual shortcoming.

Besides Miller and Aaron, Feld has another uniquely individual dancer, 22-year-old Darren Gibson, whose performance in “Evoe” Wednesday was not a single muscle contraction short of spectacular.

“Evoe,” a Dionysian cry of exhilaration, continues Feld’s fascination with Diaghilev/Nijinsky and the Ballet Russes, his attraction to Debussy’s music, and his dipping into the great dance kitty for exotic movements and themes. Gibson, dancing nearly nude, may have been the sexually awakened faun of the classic “Apres-Midi d’un Faune,” but he was much more--magnificent animal, actor, dancer, artist, memory, dream--so much more that one is transported into his world. He never leaves it, not for one creature blink. He folds and unfolds like a butterfly, he hisses wide-mouthed like a lizard or bellows (silently) as a young, hoofed beast. He leaps high or wallows on the ground, thrilling to the newness of his animalness.

This was Feld at his best, thoroughly fresh and evocative.