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By Dance Possessed: Eliot Feld at Fifty
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20446 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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5 / 1992 |
1,464 Words |
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Gary Parks
Gary Parks is the news editor of Dance Magazine. |
You have to admire Eliot Feld for being determined--even if you think, as I do, that the path he's taken has turned into a dead end.
For Feld, almost alone among choreographers, runs a ballet company named after himself and devoted to performing his own works. That is, he runs his ballet company the way most modern dance choreographers run their troupes. The choreographers started doing this because the only dancers who could perform their idiosyncratic dances were the few they had trained themselves. But the ballet world has always operated differently. With a large repertoire of movements accumulated and codified over several centuries, ballet offers dancers and choreographers--and audiences--a sort of physical Esperanto: Once you've learned the language, you can understand what many different people have to say.
At a performance by Feld's company, however, the only accent you hear is Feld's. Oh, there have been occasional productions by other choreographers, but these are few and very far between. This restrictive policy obliges Feld to try to produce a wide variety of dances in order to vary his repertoire. Sometimes this works: Contrast the lovestruck ballroom couples of the beautifully detailed Love Song Waltzes (1998) with the rutting peasants of The Consort (1970), then place them along-side the bestial writhings of the fawn in Evoe (1991). But the obligation to provide an entire repertoire would strain the talents of any artist.
(Just in case, at this point, you're thinking, "What about George Balanchine?" let me hasten to add that the New York City Ballet has never been a one-choreographer outfit. Well, almost never. Jerome Robbins worked there for many years; when he did not, the company performed works by such distinguished choreographers as Antony Tudor and Frederick Ashton.)
Feld knows how to make a ballet; the problem is that he is also compelled to make up a lot of junk in order to fill out his programs. Since 1989, for example, he has been turning out a series of dances--Ah Scarlatti, Contra Pose, Common Ground, Savage Glance--filled with mind-numbing repetitions of brutally stiff and inorganic movement. Earlier, during the mideighties, Feld began a series of Johnny-one-note works to the minimalist music of Steve Reich, a series that continues to slog on. The newest installment is a solo, Clave, introduced this season. Does the choreographer who made such vivid (and dissimilar) works as Intermezzo (1969) and A Footstep of Air (1977) really find any of these tidbits
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