The restless, unsinkable upstart

New York — HE’S been a feisty, articulate, opinionated and prolific presence in the dance world for nearly 40 years. Ever since emerging as a choreographer in 1967 with two amazingly confident and distinctive works for American Ballet Theatre -- the bracing “Harbinger” and the profound “At Midnight” -- Eliot Feld has followed his own path and created a large repertory of diverse dances (130 and counting) that tend to defy, or redefine, traditional categorization.

The company he led for nearly three decades -- it evolved through several name changes, from the Eliot Feld Ballet to Ballet Tech -- was always a cheeky upstart alongside America’s larger, more established ballet troupes. Economic realities forced him to disband it in 2003, but he has rebounded to create a series of new works in a variety of settings. This spring, New York is virtually an Eliot Feld festival.

During its current season at the New York State Theater, the New York City Ballet is performing six Feld works spanning 37 years, including a commissioned premiere that is part of its biannual Diamond Project. The company performed all of them on two all-Feld evenings (making him only the third choreographer, after founder George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, to have an NYCB repertory program devoted to his work), and it is continuing to offer them individually this month.

Meanwhile, Feld has been working with a chamber-sized collection of former Ballet Tech members and Juilliard students on his current pickup project, Mandance. They will perform programs featuring four premieres at the Joyce Theater, a couple of miles south of the more august environs of Lincoln Center, during the first two weeks of June. Joining them will be a frequent Feld collaborator with whom he first worked nearly 30 years ago, Mikhail Baryshnikov, in “Mr. XYZ,” a sly, inventive solo Feld created for him in 2003.

Before Feld began juggling rehearsals for this spring explosion of choreography, he kick-started the city’s fall dance season in September with a vast, idiosyncratic undertaking. As part of its centennial celebrations, the Juilliard School invited him to choreograph a work employing its entire roster of dance students. Feld responded with the 80-minute “Sir Isaac’s Apples.” On an enormous set consisting of a vast ramp sloping toward the audience, more than 50 dancers rolled, slid, climbed and created kaleidoscopic patterns to the accompaniment of Steve Reich’s “Drumming.”

Clearly on a roll and relishing it, Feld made time for an interview first thing one recent morning before his round of rehearsals began. He remains dancer-slim and boyish, with a suggestion of impudence in his face. Only his gray hair hints at his 63 years. Casually dressed and resisting the urge to smoke until the interview was nearly over, he sat in his office at what’s been the Manhattan headquarters of his company, and its associated school, since 1978.

“Peter [Martins, NYCB’s longtime ballet master in chief] offered me an evening of my work. I consider it an honor, and I’m as pleased as can be. I’ve found dancers I like working with, who do the work well. It’s been mutually stimulating,” he said. “I like to think that, as ornery as I am, I’ve developed a rapport -- with many of the dancers, and with Peter, certainly. We have an appreciation for one another.”

The welcome mat NYCB rolled out marked the latest phase of a connection that goes back 52 years. The 11-year-old Feld, then a student at the School of American Ballet, was one of the two boys cast as the Prince in the inaugural performances of Balanchine’s “Nutcracker.” But his later career led him to American Ballet Theatre, and it was not until 1988 that the company Balanchine founded invited Feld to choreograph.

The work he came up with, “Unanswered Question,” set to various Charles Ives scores, unfurled almost surrealistically, with allusions to dreams and the circus. It was the centerpiece of the company’s recent all-Feld programs, along with the NYCB premiere of his elegantly simple, poignantly romantic “Intermezzo,” a 1969 ballet for three couples set to Brahms piano selections. After visiting the Feld of two earlier periods, the program closed with four short, quirky works set to contemporary American music.

The commissioned premiere, “Etoile Polaire,” was a solo set to a 1977 Philip Glass score. With typical unpredictability, Feld ignored the company hierarchy and chose Kaitlyn Gilliland, a willowy 18-year-old apprentice, for this sinuous, demanding work. He had admired her dancing at a School of American Ballet performance several years ago and recalled the impact she had made.

*

Renewable relevance

THE resulting evening not only was a chronological survey of Feld’s work but offered him an opportunity to look back -- not something he tends to do.

“Sometimes if you revive a ballet, it’s like reading an old love letter,” he said. “Some of them you read and go, ‘Oh, my God! You fool! You’re ridiculous.’ But when I was working on ‘Intermezzo’ now, I was quite appreciative of the invention. I thought, all these years later, ‘I’m not blushing. It really stands up.’ ”

He bristled at the suggestion that a very different sensibility was at work in “Intermezzo” compared with the more street-wise dances, incorporating elements of the contemporary vernacular, that he made for Ballet Tech in its later years. “Intermezzo,” after all, features elegant swains partnering women in romantic tulle skirts.

“For me, making a dance is always about trying to find the language that approximates, as best I can, what it feels like to hear the music,” he said, selecting his words carefully.

“That never changes. So ‘Intermezzo’ is just like ‘Ugha Bugha’ [a new male solo set to John Cage’s Third Construction]. Each is a response to a stimulation -- the music, one’s imagination, the dancer, what happens in the studio. The process is almost exactly the same.

“So I don’t sense these changes that an outsider might see and say, ‘He’s gone from here to there.’ I think I’ve tried to find ways to express my romantic nature in ways that seem consonant with the changes that have happened in myself, in the world, in my perspective. I think all of the works share aspiration, and that’s a romantic notion.”

The selection of Gilliland parallels the youthful tone his company employed as it evolved into Ballet Tech, which is also the name of the groundbreaking school -- now a full academic high school as well as a dance academy -- that Feld, a Brooklyn native, launched when he had the novel idea of auditioning promising kids at the city’s public elementary schools. They are given free classes (as well as leotards, shoes, etc.) at the company’s sleek, airy studios. The training is serious and rigorous, and a select few progressed enough to join his company.

“I never feel a generation gap,” he said when the subject of working with youthful dancers came up. “I’ll feel it sometimes when I’m talking to dancers after rehearsal and they don’t know who the Beatles are! But when we’re working in the studio, we’re colleagues. You collaborate and fulfill one another’s gifts by working together.”

Coaching Gilliland in the studio a week before the “Etoile Polaire” premiere, he pointed out one passage where he felt she was “not being funky enough. It’s not about how big -- it’s just conviction. It just takes confidence,” he advised, and her subsequent attempt added juice and expansiveness to the fluid solo. For a particularly twitchy passage, he asked her to bring out her “neurotic side.”

“There’s a particular pleasure, in the case of Kaitlyn, of helping her realize her own voice as a dancer,” he noted during the interview. “Often a young dancer, particularly in a ballet company, doesn’t understand the importance -- the necessity, the value -- of what they can bring, because conformity is such a large part of ballet dancing.

“I want a dancer who’s musical, who has a feeling for melody in space, for line -- and who has some mysterious way they move that’s particular to them,” he added. Those are qualities he also found in the members of Mandance, which in its 2004 incarnation showcased a dozen new works, proving that not having a full-time company was hardly holding him back.

When Feld announced the suspension of the company’s activities in spring 2003, funding cutbacks had created a $665,000 deficit for the organization that encompassed the company and the school. He said at the time that he was opting to ensure the continued health of the school.

Although he refers wryly to the period immediately afterward as “sitting shiva,” Feld is more realistic than bitter about his altered situation.

“My experience is that it has always been difficult and required an extraordinary act of will to maintain a company,” he said. “The general economic climate may be better at one time or another, but I’ve never known there to be enough money -- or too much money.”

Moreover, he has clearly found a variety of ways to keep himself busy in the studio, through his own initiative and the invitations he’s received.

“I’m busy making dances during much of the year,” he said. “I just go about my work. I try to say, ‘What am I passionate about? What dancer do I like? Where can we perform, how can I make a dance?’

“As a choreographer, you’re always proselytizing to dancers, trying to convert them to your sense of what you find engaging. So I’m proselytizing -- at New York City Ballet, at Juilliard. That’s what I do.”