DANCE REVIEW : Feld Work Exudes Freshness, Audacity

Whatever keeps Eliot Feld forever young in his response to the world, to music and to the building blocks of choreography remains one of the happiest secrets of 20th century dance. But plenty of evidence proved the point in the final two programs by the Feld Ballets/NY, Wednesday and Thursday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

For freshness and sheer audacity the works made recently, in his 50s, easily matched the major achievements of his 20s, when Feld became the overnight sensation of American ballet. Consider “Consort,” for instance, which began with snooty Renaissance court dances, then slowly descended the social ladder until earthy peasant sexuality took over completely.

Compare that potent 1970 social portrait to Feld’s depiction of the Old South in “Doo Dah Day” (1993) on the same Wednesday program: darkly comic vignettes that deliberately undercut the sentimentality of songs by Stephen Foster and contrasted with the true Americana emerging in the finale--a noble solo for Darren Gibson to a vintage black spiritual.

Uncompromisingly bold and occasionally nasty, these works came from a different wing of the Feld repertory than his sweet, innocent music visualizations such as “Harbinger” (1967), his first ballet and still remarkable on Thursday for the way it established an intuitive relationship with its accompaniment: Prokofiev’s fifth piano concerto. A sense of joyous improvisation has always marked this ensemble showpiece and it continues to offer the gentlest, most fanciful gymnastics imaginable.

On the same program, “Ludwig Gambits” (1995) found nearly all the dancers in the company onstage getting Beethoven’s fourth symphony into their bodies--the men slapping their chests, the women swinging their hips and everyone surging forth into complex ensemble sequences that combined demanding neoclassic steps with playful oddities such as body-surfing and even spelling the composer’s name with their torsos and limbs.

Yes, yes, you could argue that none of this was remotely appropriate for a monument of high European culture composed in 1806--that classical music means never slapping your chest (or anything else). But Feld has always taken music personally and he loved this score enough to use the energies, freedoms and vocabularies of the here-and-now to give its joyful explosions of sound maximum physical immediacy. And, anyway, how is music appreciation possible unless each listener makes an individual connection?

Finally, the sinuous solo “Ion” (1990) to music by Steve Reich reminded the Thursday audience of all the remarkable dancers that have inspired Feld over the years: from Christine Sarry to Karen Kain, Mikhail Baryshnikov and, currently, the tireless and virtually boneless Buffy Miller.

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The Feld Ballets/NY appears Friday at 8 p.m. and April 21 at 2 p.m. in the Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale. Tickets: $27.50-$32.50. (800) 233-3123.