Young Talent Gets Room to Stretch

New York choreographer, dance company head and teacher Eliot Feld had an epiphany more than a decade ago when he saw a group of third-graders out on a field trip.

“They were so animated and excited about going somewhere,” Feld said in a phone interview from his dance studios in Manhattan. “It occurred to me that there are hundreds of thousands of elementary school children in New York City, almost none of whom had an opportunity to discover if they had a talent or a passion for dancing.”

So he contacted the New York City Board of Education, and together they created a program to tap into this vast resource. Feld would go into various grade schools, audition kids and provide free dance education for the most promising ones. The training would continue through 12th grade and beyond.

Thus was born the nucleus of a school that would blossom into Feld’s Ballet Tech, a 27-member company that makes its Southern California debut Friday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, as the opening event in its 1999-2000 Contemporary Dance Series as well as a highlight of the Eclectic Orange Festival.

The school program seemed an ideal solution to a problem Feld began facing in 1976, when he moved his already established dance education facility into a huge, 17,000-square-foot renovated building in Manhattan.

“We hung out our shingle in the most traditional way, hoping to attack wonderfully gifted people,” he said. “It didn’t work. There was very little talent that passed through our doors.”

At first, however, even the public school program didn’t produce as much talent as Feld believed was out there, ripe for discovery.

“The children loved it. From Day 1, almost every single child wanted to try out,” he said. “But after a decade, we [had] made [only] a couple of dancers,” he said. “It was kind of hit-and-miss. Then it occurred to me that the idea was exactly right--but the scale was entirely wrong.

“Instead of 25 schools, we should go to all the schools. Instead of seeing 8,000 children, we should see 50,000 or 100,000.”

So, in 1990, Feld and the school board upped the ante, jumping from auditioning in 54 schools to 166. The next year, the total leaped to 215. To date, he has auditioned more than 375,000 children from 482 schools, and selected more than 10,000 children.

And he was right; a bigger net caught a lot more talented fish.

“We found many more talented children, 10 times as many when we were drawing from 40,000 [candidates] instead of 1,000,” he said.

Throughout this time period, Feld was also running his Feld Ballets/NY, a traditionally constituted ensemble that performed his highly regarded choreography and was put together in the way companies usually are--through auditions and hiring from a pool of elite dancers who descend on New York from all over the country.

Then in 1997, Feld took a new step. The expanded school program would merge with the professional company and vice versa. “It was the most interesting thing I could do,” he says.

*

One of the most talented and esteemed choreographers of his generation, Feld himself might have benefited from his school-to-company program had it been in place when he was a youngster. But instead, he came up through a more traditional route.

Born in Brooklyn in 1943, he studied at New York City’s School of American Ballet, the New Dance Group and the High School of the Performing Arts. At age 12, he danced in Balanchine’s “Nutcracker,” and at 16 he danced in the original Broadway production of “West Side Story.” He was a dancer in American Ballet Theatre, from 1963 until 1967, when he founded his first troupe, American Ballet Company.

His dancer’s life took a different turn after he made a stunning debut as a choreographer in 1967 with “Harbinger”--prophetic title!--created for ABT. The ballet, set to Prokofiev’s Fifth Piano Concerto, explored human relationships and proved an immediate success. Shortly after, he created “At Midnight,” a deeply felt response to Mahler’s profound setting of several Ruckert songs.

He would go on to establish his Feld Ballets/NY in 1974, and create more than 100 dances for it and other companies. His 1995 “Tongue in Groove,” for instance, is now in the repertory of Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project.

It was the “usual attrition” that made him strike out in his new direction three years ago.

“At the end of the contract year, [there were] people who wanted to try [dance] elsewhere or couldn’t bear working for me anymore,” he said. “This is an annual thing.

“With the growth of the school--about seven or eight dancers had already come from the school--I thought, ‘This may be the beginning of the future. Why not just make the company the extension of the school?’

“The other was an old model, a model that had very little to do with contemporary life in the city, with the makeup of the people surrounding my life in the streets and subways, and it had little to do with the music of our time.”

Other companies, of course, had schools. But nothing, at least in this country, had been attempted on such a scale or had drawn from such a diverse, urban population at such an early age.

Not surprisingly, he has found that the learning goes in both directions.

“There was a lot to teach them because the ballet tradition is long-standing, and it is venerable,” Feld said. “But they also had a lot to give, to remind us what the real world was like--not only who they were, but who we were and how ballet can be useful to tell our stories and our mythologies.

“I’ve found that very, very interesting. It has some grit to it. My recent ballets would never have happened if I had remained in Ballet Theatre for 30 years. That’s a different culture, a different set of values, it reflects in a more straightforward way the tradition.”

The programs draw upon older as well as newer choreography, indicating Feld’s faith in the talents of his newest dancers, whose ages range from 15 to 22, with most 16 to 19.

The importance of teaching and learning marks the company in other ways as well. Ballet Tech will spend a week before its Orange County performances in residence at St. Joseph Ballet, a Santa Ana-based company founded by Beth Burns to provide free or low-cost dance education and outreach to urban children. “This is a magnificent gift to us,” said Burns, who moved her company into a new 21,000-square-foot facility, built for about $3.8 million, on Oct. 9.

“Our kids will be a lot more inspired when they get to know these dancers are real people who have made a real commitment to their art form. And they will find out what’s more possible for themselves.”

Feld doesn’t feel that this is simply a matter of Ballet Tech doing St. Joseph’s a favor.

“The residency is mutually advantageous,” he said. “We try to train professional dancers, and they try to give people a sense of the alternatives life may have to offer through dancing. The two approaches complement each other.”

Critical reception to Ballet Tech has been mixed. While some writers have praised the energy and commitment of the dancers, others remarked on their inexperience and inability to mount large-scale ballets danced on pointe.

None of that seems to bother Feld, whose interests have shifted.

“In a certain way, I discarded some of the past and some of the old,” he said. “Some of the ballet traditionalists--especially initially--did not look on this very favorably. They regarded it as something seditious. But some people think being in a rocking chair is moving forward.

“This is an attempt to address the world as it is. I don’t mean to settle for it as it is. But I’m not interested in ballet if it’s a souvenir--because it has no animation if it’s a souvenir. It’s like nostalgia, and I would like the theater to be pulsing with energy, for the audience to find some truth, some reality, something present in the present.”

*

BALLET TECH, Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. Dates: Friday and Saturday. A shorter program will be danced Sunday at 3 p.m., $15 and $20, for this performance only. Prices: $28 and $32. Phone: (949) 854-4646.