Attitudes - Eliot Feld suspends Ballet Tech operations - Biography

Dance Magazine, Sept, 2003 by Clive Barnes

Times are bad. And if they are bad elsewhere, then they are particularly bad in arts funding. A recent casualty has been Eliot Feld and his Ballet Tech. It was, at least to me, completely unexpected. I had chatted with Feld a week or so earlier, and he seemed his usual wary, nervy, witty, charming, prickly, unsettled, unsettling self. The next I heard was a formal letter announcing that although Feld's Ballet Tech School would continue as before, the company was suspending its operations for the 2003-04 season. Feld's letter spelled out the cause and effect with blunt clarity. Part of his trouble stemmed, perhaps, from an overreliance on one major funding source (see "Hard Times for Ballet Tech," Dance Matters, page 19).

Feld's decision, brave but obviously and responsibly sensible, has been to "uncouple," as he puts it, the company and the school, "so that one might be preserved and thrive and the other be reborn." This will not be the first time that held and his company (under various names) have had to rise phoenix-like from their ashes, and somehow I am sure that Feld's indomitable phoenix spirit will once again prevail. But it is a somber admonition as to the state of our art and its finances. And perhaps a further warning for arts organizations that look for their eggs in too few baskets.

Feld was born a solo operator and a maverick. A student at the School of American Ballet, and in 1954 one of the first two Nutcracker Princes in Balanchine's Nutcracker, he joined West Side Story rather than New York City Ballet. But unlike most mavericks, he has achieved and built a great deal. Now a youthful 61, he can look back at a career that has involved not only the creation of dozens of ballets (with an unusually high track record of success)--he was also the chief motivator behind the creation of The Joyce Theater (without which the New York dance scene would now almost he unthinkable), as well as the prescient securing of the building at 890 Broadway as a dance center, and the remarkable success of the Ballet Tech School, bringing a free classic dance education to hundreds, indeed by now thousands, of students drawn from the New York City, public school system.

I have known and admired Eliot for years--since his first ballet, Harbinger, created for American Ballet Theatre in 1967. It seems a long time ago now. It also seems like yesterday. I can still recall the sense of freshness that Feld's choreography possessed, the palpable sense that one was in the presence of a true choreographer rather than a cute dance arranger. With any luck, Feld would prove the real thing. Feld's luck held, and he did. A year or so ago, Jack Anderson described Fold as America's leading classic choreographer, and despite the rising acclaim of Christopher Wheeldon, I think the appellation still sticks.

Feld has always gone his own, sometimes thorny, way. Following Harbinger and its swift successor, After Midnight, it would seem reasonable to expect that Feld would become Ballet Theatre's resident choreographer, probably in tandem with the great but by no means fecund Antony Tudor. But the young Feld upped and left, taking with him a few ABT dancers, such as the delicious Christine Sarry. to form his own troupe. After its initial failure, he was wooed back as both dancer and choreographer to Ballet Theatre--it was then that he first danced Petrouchka and Billy in Billy the Kid--but after creating another couple of works with the company, he again ran off, this time to form a company under the auspices of Harvey Lichtenstein and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Through all those years Fold has worked and worked, creating at least two ballets a year. Although in his early days he created works for quite a few companies, including the English National Ballet and the Royal Danish Ballet, for most of his career he has choreographed for his own companies and, on two occasions, New York City Ballet. He has run his company more like a modern dance troupe than a repertory ballet company, in that he has provided virtually all of the choreography. Even Balanchine did not have such chutzpah. In the early days he flirted with a classic or two--a botched version of Fokine's Carnaval (the last time the ballet was seen in New York, incidentally), and much later a short-lived but far more successful version of Nijinska's Les Noces--but for the most part, it has been Feld all the way.

The surprising thing is how rich and varied he has managed to keep his repertoire. He has his foibles--an over-reliance on mechanical gimmicks and a tendency to work too long at a certain kind of ballet or even with a certain kind of music--but generally speaking he is a wonderful choreographer who has (here comes the maverick again) almost determinedly eschewed the wider fame his genius deserved. A blushing violet, he has only really flowered in his own, small, cultivated garden, which for years has been called The Joyce Theater. Now if the dance world has any sense, it will seize upon Feld's enforced sabbatical and persuade him to plant a few of his flowers in other repertoires.