Feld Ballets/NY.

Joyce Theater March 7-April 9, 1995 Reviewed by Caroline Kahn

Each year the indefatigable Eliot Feld produces a batch of premieres, all of them new but not all of them fresh. The five new works presented this season confirmed that repetition compulsion continues to plague Feld, keeping his company at an artistic standstill.

Chi, which the program tells us signifies the body's "life force," was the first of several familiar enterprises. Feld has brought the lush dancing of his muse, Buffy Miller, and the music of Steve Reich together again in a meandering solo that fails to live up to its title. Surely the "life force," whatever it may be, is more than the bundle of vague New Age energy that Feld conjures up. Inspired by Indian dance, the choreography is set almost exclusively for the arms and wrists, which Miller circles inward, all the while flirtatiously cocking her fetching head and stretching her creamy, alabaster neck. Curiously, the piece also involves minor gymnastics on a pair of barres. Miller suspends herself, twitches, and writhes, all with a smile, but to what end?

In Gnossiennes, set to the music of Satie, Feld again explores the unexplainable. The title is translated in the program as "those possessing spiritual or mystical knowledge." Miller, maternal and reassuring, appears here accompanied by a kittenish Ha-Chi Yu, a company apprentice. Whether it's the inchoate spirituality of crystals or Scientology that Feld has in mind, the piece succeeds. Undulating purposelessly, with too much time and space on their hands, Miller and Yu appear more like drifting sea anemones than sages. Eventually four glittering nymphs join in, completing what amounts to a static, albeit beautiful, scene.

The four nymphs reappear in Ogive, dancing again to Satie. The dance takes its cue from architecture, an ogive being a rib across a Gothic vault. Translating such a specific architectural form into dance terms is not easy. The result is a myopic, formal study as braced and stolid as a cathedral itself. This idea, however dry, seemed to be Feld's point. The dance is a freedom cry. Caged in by four pairs of splayed legs, soloist Darren Gibson beats his breast and sways mournfully, muscles taut to the breaking point. Yet he cannot break free. The ballet is set in stone with Gibson cast as a live, tortured fossil.

Less cerebral than Ogive were Feld's two ironic premieres, Tongue and Groove, customized for guest artist Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Ludwig Gambits, yet another raucous ensemble ballet pitted against a symphonic score, this time by Beethoven.

Great composers seem to bring out Feld's most irreverent, goofy self. Fun and games, however, flatter the company, whose formidable spirit is never more in evidence than when engaging in a playful romp. Ludwig Gambits tells the story of the tortoise and the hare, a subject of relevance to Feld since despite an enormous output of choreographic energy, he has tended to end up in the same place.

Tongue and Groove, in certain respects the least ambitious of the premieres, revealed Feld at his best. True, Baryshnikov can do virtually no wrong, but the success of the piece did not lie with his prodigious talent. The dance is a mere teaser, a seemingly simple flight of fancy danced to vigorous, syncopated clapping performed live. In a black unitard and jazz shoes, Baryshnikov alternates cheeky noodling with understated leaps and turns, the purity of his movements matching the unadulterated sound of the clapping. With Tongue and Groove, Feld rediscovers himself, tapping a genuine source from which blithe, delightful movements flowed freely. If only more of his work possessed such unstudied individuality.