Ballet in New Wrapping

At intermission during most dance performances, the curtain falls, the lights come up and the theater empties; patrons head out for a smoke, a jolt of caffeine, a stretch. But when Feld Ballets/NY is the attraction, all bets are off.

To begin with, there is no curtain. Often a majority of the audience stays in the auditorium, watching technicians rejiggering the lighting equipment and performers warming up for the next number.

“The last time we were in L.A.,” laughs ballet master Eliot Feld, “the audience came right up to the edge of the stage and talked to the dancers. It was very sweet.” Feld is sitting in the conference room at the Joyce Theater, shortly before his company ends its 5 1/2-week ’96 New York City season and heads for Southern California and performances at the Orange County Performing Arts Center (Tuesday through Thursday) and at the Alex Theatre in Glendale (April 19 and 21).

In response to the intermission chumminess, Feld says, he is sometimes tempted to put up “Please Don’t Feed the Animals” signs, like the ones you see in the zoo. But he’s not tempted to restore the curtain.

What is now a trademark began as an accident. A flood at the Joyce some years back damaged the drapery, and Feld’s company had no choice but to perform without it. Now he insists on the curtain-less arrangement wherever the company plays, and often you’ll see the slight, gray-haired but boyish 54-year-old onstage with his dancers, joking and encouraging them before the show starts.

In the 30 years since he began choreographing, Feld has made 89 dances, and he runs one of the country’s most unusual ballet ensembles. More like a modern dance company in that he’s its sole choreographer, it’s definitely classical in its vocabulary, but it’s also dedicated to the demystification of the classical, to making relevant what some may perceive as an esoteric art form.

In fact, the undraped stage is a kind of inadvertent symbol for the upfront commitment of Feld Ballets/NY: The company wants to make ballet accessible to a broad spectrum of people on both sides of the footlights.

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Feld is Brooklyn-born, a product of New York’s High School of the Performing Arts and School of American Ballet, and he danced in the Broadway production of “West Side Story” when he was only 16. He founded Feld Ballets/NY in 1974 and three years later the New Ballet School, a farm team for the company that offers free dance training to New York City public school kids, auditioning 30,000 of them annually.

Because the New York public schools are predominantly populated with black, Latino and Asian American kids, it goes without saying that Feld’s training program will have a salutary impact on the effort to diversify the now practically lily-white ballet community.

It has already affected the makeup of Feld Ballets/NY. The company’s lead male dancer, and Feld’s co-ballet master, is Darren Gibson, a 25-year-old African American who began studying at the New Ballet School when he was 9.

“I used to be surprised when I saw a black person on the stage,” Feld says. “But I’ve known Darren now for 16 years. He’s changed me.”

Adding dancers of color is only one of the ways the Feld company pushes for diversity. The performers have a variety of body types as well as complexions--some of the women are more curvy than ballerina-willowy, for example. And this season, two student apprentices are performing major roles with the full company.

From Feld’s perspective, his ensemble’s physical qualities both match and inspire his brand of choreography, which regularly adds vernacular movement to a ballet base and is set to pop tunes as well as serious contemporary and classical music. “In insidious, seditious ways, often quite positive [ways],” he says, “as my ballets have moved away from 19th century models, I’ve attracted certain kinds of dancers.” And, vice versa.

At OCPAC and the Alex Theatre, Feld Ballets/NY will present nine works in four programs, including Feld’s earliest dance, “Harbinger,” and his latest, “Paper Tiger,” a combination that neatly brackets the choreographer’s stylistic range.

“Harbinger” was made for American Ballet Theatre in 1967, while Feld was a dancer there. It’s pure Feld; in its time, its fresh, freer version of ballet movement, set to Prokofiev, was something of a revelation. And at one point, the work’s colorfully clad dancers come together to form a formal rainbow--diversity with a capital D.

The newly minted “Paper Tiger,” a suite of dances set to 11 songs arranged and performed by Leon Redbone uses both movement and music with African American vernacular sources, and each and every costume is a patchwork of color. The movement vocabularly is engrossing not so much for its classical structure, but for the way it brings the world of the ragtime era front and center, incorporating techniques from mime, vaudeville and the dance hall. It’s more about feeling than about form, relying for its structure on the shape of the pop lyrics that Redbone sings.

When it premiered on March 1, “Paper Tiger” met with critical enthusiasm and an audience response that caused the New York Times to label it a hit. It represents the first time choreography has been added to Redbone’s twangy, bluesy, almost tropical singing. Though Feld had long been a fan of Redbone’s, it was a suggestion from Mikhail Baryshnikov that caused him to consider the music for a dance score.

“I adore Leon Redbone,” Feld says. “The interpretation of music is very important to me. How Leon sings these songs gives them a world, a universe. He’s a tragic clown.”

Redbone, in a telephone interview, observed that he’s drawn “to music that has a lot of weight [or] is novelty-esque. [The novelties] break up the mood for the more somber and morose slow tunes, which I prefer.” He has recorded 10 albums, one of which went gold, and his hard-to-categorize sound has made him a bit of a cult hero.

For the opening night of “Paper Tiger,” Redbone came into Manhattan from his home in rural Bucks County, outside Philadelphia. It was his first look at the dance, and like most of the critics, he gave it a pretty good review. “I saw a lot of work. I tend to notice work. I was quite fascinated by the whole thing,” said the growly-voiced singer. He was also impressed with how completely Feld managed “a visual recreation of the music” in “Paper Tiger,’ which has antic, patchwork costumes by Willa Kim, some unusual, exposed lighting by Allen Lee Hughes and an overall aspect reminiscent, in a peculiarly American way, of the livelier productions of Diaghilev’s visually splendid Ballets Russes.

All of which matches his own concerns: “I have a visual sense for the music,” Redbone says, “it has to stay true to a certain sense of period. I rely on a sense of colors and mood in my approach to the arrangement. . . . I was surprised to see all those things I think of when I put the music together actually represented.”

The community dancing through Redbone’s music includes 15 men and women who might be the dregs of a weekend of marathon dancing or a bunch of vagrants shacked up under a boardwalk at Coney Island: Obviously dispossessed, all they have is one another, the night and the music. They’re cheerful and grim by turns. They make romance, they make trouble, they grope for lost love, they bay at the moon.

Feld notes the similarities between his new work and the startling 1993 “Doo Dah Day,” set to Stephen Foster songs, which will also be seen at OCPAC. “The ballets are way at the end of a spectrum, a kind of anti-aesthetic, an antidote to the sentiment of the music. Both of them are dark at their centers.”

The works also evoke African American dance styles; Feld cites Gregory Hines as an influence on “Paper Tiger,” though he himself, he claims, “could never do any tap dancing: A time step would send me into horrid anxiety.” Both works are subversive, appearing cheerful on the surface but concealing deep veins of painful experience.

In fact, the charm of the new ballet is its juxtaposition of the silly and the serious. There are nonsense songs like “Diddy Wah Diddie” and the dark Jelly Roll Morton blues “I Hate a Man Like You,” in which dancer Katja Wirth literally drags and pulls the hapless Clay Jackson, stomping on him and grinding him into the light-latticed floor.

To Redbone’s rendition of “Shine on Harvest Moon,” Buffy Miller and Matt Rivera entwine their legs in a cheerfully affectionate duet while, hoisted high by his fellow dancers, Clay Jackson portrays the actual moon. Philip Gardner, wearing a deadpan white mask, perhaps best embodies the sweet sadness of “Paper Tiger” as he strolls the stage always a step or two behind the fragile facsimile of a female torso that’s suspended on wire from his shoulders, floating always just out of his reach.

There are no sylphs in this ballet, though its men in their strutting get-down style could certainly pass for princes in some neighborhoods. When Redbone sings “Salty Dog” and the dancers start barking, you know Feld has moved his medium to a new place.

To explain his approach to choreography, Feld always returns to the music. “I start out with the feeling the music gives me; I do the ballet to verify that the feeling can be put into form. Dances are the embodiment of sentience. . . .

“To reduce it back into the slag of language. . .,” he says, then shakes his head mournfully.

“I don’t go in with a narrative. When I get some feeling from the music, I begin imagining the cast--this would be nice for two or a group. It’s such a complete chemistry--it’s like breathing. Finding a name for the ballet is also useful, even if you throw it away eventually.”

Feld’s devotion to the music, once he chooses it, is complete. “I only listen to music if I’m looking for [something] to dance to, and then I stop, because it would be promiscuous to listen to other music during the heat of a relationship. It would be unfaithful.”

Ultimately, Feld describes his artistic task as the ability ‘to recognize the accident” that works.

A choreographer, he tells me with a serious smile, “is somebody who doesn’t know what they want, but knows how to get it.”

* Feld Ballets/NY performs at Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, Tuesday to Thursday, 8 p.m., $18 to $49, (714) 556-2122. Also at the Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale, April 19, 8 p.m., and April 21, 2 p.m., $27.50 to $32.50, (800) 233-3123.