Feld Ballet offers four premieres.

NEW YORK CITY--Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines will be guest artists at the opening performance of Feld Ballets/NY, which is scheduled to launch its spring season at the Joyce Theater in Manhattan on March 7. The opening-night program will present other guest artists, too--one hundred children from the New Ballet School, which is affiliated with the Feld company. The audience on opening night also will see the premiere of Gnossiennes, one of four new ballets Eliot Feld has choreographed for the season, which will run through April 9.

Gnossiennes, set to music with a mysterious oracular atmosphere by Erik Satie, will be performed by six women led by Buffy Miller and Ha-Chi Yu, an apprentice with the company and a student at the New Ballet School. Martin Pakiedinaz designed the costumes.

Although Feld says that no particular theme has been piquing his imagination--"Each ballet is a special tease of my mind," he remarks--the choreographer seems to be thinking in French a good deal. He has also used Satie's music (a score for piano called Ogives, which consists entirely of chords) for a second new dance. The ballet Ogive is a work for dancer Darren Gibson and four women who at times literally support him. The title suggested the concept of support. The word ogive is an architectural term that refers both to a pointed Gothic arch and to the diagonal rib of a vault, two of which cross at the vault's center.

The third new dance of the season is Chi (titled after the Chinese word for spirit or life force), a long, rigorous solo for Miller choreographed to Steve Reich's Six Marimbas. It is the fourth solo Feld has made for Miller: "I'm going to do it until I get it right," he quips. Chi also is the tenth work Feld has made to music by Reich. "Recently," he comments, "I started to feel some strange similarities between the Reich pieces and French impressionist music--I'm not talking about structure but about emotional quality; they just feel akin."

Feld promises that there are no Mickey Mouse ears in Ludwig Gambits, even though the title of this season's fourth premiere recalls Wolfgang Strategies, made in 1992, in which the choreographer did incorporate Mickey Mouse ears. Wolfgang Strategies was set to music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, of course, and Ludwig Gambits, just as logically, is choreographed to a Ludwig van Beethoven score--the Fourth Symphony. The ballet is a work for the full company.

Feld has scheduled six revivals: The Consort (to music of John Dowland and others, choreographed in 1970); A Footstep of Air (Beethoven, 1977); Over the Pavement (Charles Ives, 1982); Aurora (Reich, 1985); Love Song Waltzes (Johannes Brahms, 1988); and Fauna (Claude Debussy, 1990).

The sixteen-member company will be augmented by apprentices from the school, including Yu, who is seventeen years old. Yu had had some previous ballet training when she auditioned for the New Ballet School in the summer of 1990.

This season the company will expand its Kids Dance program, which Feld describes as "children dancing for children." Kids Dance is designed to introduce youngsters to ballet, and since the performers are age-mates of the spectators, "it's not patronizing to the children," the choreographer says.

Last spring the project consisted of two public performances of a single program; this spring there will be five matinee performances for the public and two public-school performances, with two separate programs. Students at the New Ballet School will appear in works by Feld and by David Parsons.