Feld Ballet celebrates a birthday - 20th anniversary season

NEW YORK CITY - Feld Ballets/NY will perform at the Joyce Theater in Manhattan from February 15 through March 20 in celebration of its twentieth anniversary. Two of the season's three scheduled premieres, MRI and Doo Dah Day, received previews in New York City in August.

MRI, set to music of Edgard Varese, is performed on high bars and cargo nets suspended eight feet above the stage. The acronym refers to the diagnostic medical technology known as magnetic resonance imaging. "I was asked not to use the [Varese] title Arcana by Boosey & Hawkes" musical publishers, says Feld. "An MRI [picture] is seen on a screen, which is vertical and horizontal, and that is how the ballet is seen - the movement is invading the vertical, which is usually unoccupied. And MRI gleans information from inside the body, information that is otherwise unavailable, and the procedure simply states the facts, it doesn't comment on them. The title MRI captures that aspect of the ballet."

Doo Dah Day (subtitled "no possum, no sop, no taters"), according to Feld, "is an astringent complement to six songs of Stephen Foster. In the 1850s when Foster was composing the likes of |Beautiful Dreamer' and |Linger in Blissful Repose,' many in this country had little repose, blissful or otherwise. Earthly doings seem a fitting counterpoint to these idyllic fantasies."

The third premiere, Doghead and Godcatchers, is Feld's 80th original ballet. He describes it as "a tale about the choreographer and the dancers making things, and about desire and aging."

Other ballets to be performed include Aurora I, Common Ground, Contra Pose, Evoe, Asia and Savage Glance. Buffy Miller will perform three solos: lon, Kore, and Clave. There will be four revivals: Echo, a solo danced by Lynn Aaron [see Lynn Aaron: No Dull Tulle, page 82]; La Vida; Play Bach (last seen nearly seven years ago); and Skara Brae.

Feld says that this twentieth-anniversary milestone has no great significance for him personally. Reflecting on the beginnings of the company and its accomplishments, he states: "We invest in the future. In three years, half the company or more will come from the [affiliated] New Ballet School."