Feld of Dreams.

As I have grown older--and very fortunately, so far I have--it has never been the blockbuster decades that have given me pause for thought or even grounds for anxiety. It has always been the year before, the nine rather than the zero. After all, once you have hit 40, well, damn it, you are 40, but 39 still has that dangerous touch of hopeless hope about it. No wonder that matchless comedian Jack Benny always insisted on remaining an increasingly unlikely, and increasingly funny, 39!

This July, Eliot Feld, who sometimes seemed an eternal boy choreographer, hits 59. So perhaps he should start a little early career accounting, in preparation for becoming a very lively sexagenarian. It is thirty-four years ago, at the age of 25 (when he really was a boy choreographer), that he staged his first ballet, Harbinger, for American Ballet Theatre. Now, 107 ballets and almost countless ballet companies later, he is back at his own Joyce Theater with his own Ballet Tech now approaching its fifth year as it ends its annual five-week spring season.

It has already been an eventful year for Feld. Earlier, on January 23, at the New York State Theater, for New York City Ballet, he watched the premiere of his biggest ballet yet: Organon, a work to Bach organ music using sixty-three dancers and a huge stage extending over the orchestra pit (not to mention a kind of jungle-gym contraption at the back for leading dancer Damian Woetzel to clamber through while discreetly disrobing). It was a spectacular event a long way removed from the possibilities open to Feld with his home team on his home turf at the Joyce Theater.

About a year ago, my friend and colleague Jack Anderson wrote that following the death of Jerome Robbins, Feld became America's leading classical choreographer. Certainly, with thirty-four years and an impressive repertoire behind him, he is America's most experienced choreographer. He has gone his own maverick way with undoubted and indeed enormous success. But I wonder what would have happened if that career had taken a more conventional path. With Organon, for the first time in many years, Feld was working with a large, infinitely strong classical company. How would it have been had he always had such opportunities at hand? Of course, the choice was at the very least partly his.

His career had started conventionally enough, training at the High School of Performing Arts and the School of American Ballet, and actually appearing as the Young Prince in Balanchine's original production of The Nutcracker in 1954 at the age of 12. You might have expected him, in due course, to have joined New York City Ballet. Yet at no time has Feld done the expected. As a boy, he danced in the musical Sandhog, and was soon appearing in the modern dance companies of Mary Anthony, Pearl Lang, and Donald McKayle. At 16, he danced in West Side Story on Broadway, later appearing in the movie version as Baby John. More Broadway followed, but in 1963, he changed tracks again, joining American Ballet Theatre. He also started to choreograph.

His first ballet was Harbinger, set to Prokofiev's Concerto No. 2 in G Minor for Piano and Orchestra, which ABT premiered in Miami on March 31, 1967, opening in New York on May 11. The day after, my review in The New York Times opened jocularly, quoting Robert Schumann on his first hearing of Chopin: "Hats off, gentlemen--a genius!" The phrase, which was not quite so unqualified as it might sound, probably hung round poor Feld's neck like an albatross. I recall that it absolutely infuriated Lincoln Kirstein. But everyone else in the ballet world seemed to agree that we had possibly seen the emergence of the most promising first ballet since Robbins's Fancy Free back in 1944.

The aptly named Harbinger was almost instantly followed by At Midnight, and it seemed that, at long last, ABT had gotten itself a choreographer who could make it a major player on the world stage. Oliver Smith, ABT's co-director with Lucia Chase, was particularly Feld's advocate, but Feld had other ideas. Ideas perhaps influenced by the fact that ABT had just mounted its first full-evening Swan Lake-for Feld might have guessed that the company's character was about to devolve slowly into the ABT we know today. So he formed his own company. When this broke up, Smith made a valiant try to lasso him back into the ABT corral. His second term with ABT as both dancer and choreographer was brief, and soon Feld was off again with his own company--refusing to be fenced in. Smith always felt that his final departure was a turning point in American Ballet Theatre history.

Certainly, had he stayed, the future of ABT and his own development as a choreographer might have been very different. In the post-Feld years, particularly during Mikhail Baryshnikov's stewardship, American Ballet Theatre had choreographers attached to it, notably Kenneth MacMillan and Twyla Tharp--but MacMillan created nothing of importance for it, and Tharp, coming from a different background, never seemed fully integrated into the company. Was Feld an ongoing loss to ABT? It is difficult to say, for in fairness, ABT has done perfectly well without him. So, was ABT an ongoing loss to Feld? An even more difficult question.

His achievements have been very considerable--and not only, perhaps even not primarily, as a choreographer. Together with Cora Cahan, he was the prime mover in the establishment of the Joyce Theater as a much-needed place for dance; he started the Ballet Tech School, which provides classic ballet teaching for many children in the New York City public schools; and he was a partner, along with ABT, in acquiring the Lawrence A. Wien Center for Dance and Theater on lower Broadway. Feld, even with his offstage activities, has left a big mark.

Yet I wonder (does he?) what would have happened had he elected to have taken a mainstream career--the kind where the production of an Organon would be more of a rule than an exception--instead of concentrating on his own more experimental and individualistic troupe, run like a modern dance ensemble rather than a classic repertory company. It's a thought.

Senior consulting editor Clive Barnes, who covers dance and theater for the New York Post, has contributed to Dance Magazine since 1956.