Eliot Feld Ballet Company. - Joyce Theater, New York, New York - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, July, 1996 by Gus Solomons, Jr.

Eliot Feld keeps churning out dances with the formula he's evolved over the years of hanging inventive motifs, involving tricky physical coordination, on canvases of textural music. He has a gift for finding odd, unexpected, and surely uncomfortable shapes to bend and twist the human body into, as this season's two new ballets demonstrate. In contrast to its title, Paean (a song of praise) has dancers trudging in deep lunges with arms slicing the air in an arcane semaphore. Feld devises cleverly shifting patterns, which substitute for moves that carry dancers broadly through space. In the blink of an eye four couples transform into one quartet of men and one of women. A circle opens into two parallel lines which then splice, becoming two rows of three men, ringed by the women. Henry Cowell's music for strings provides a lush, dynamically neutral rhythmic canvas, on which Feld paints his intricate repetitions. But the dancers' slogging persistence projects dutiful obedience to their choreographic taskmaster rather than joy.

In the second premiere, Paper Tiger, Leon Redbone's carefully cultivated eccentricity meets Feld's calculated zaniness. The gravel-voiced singer stretches a canvas of bluesy popular songs, on which Feld doodles with fifteen picaresque characters, togged out in Willa Kim's fabulously motley wardrobe: Dickens by way of Threepenny Opera. Loose-jointed gamines in wacky hats and midi skirts sashay; bereted chaps in overalls cartwheel; everybody saunters in syncopation, like a New Orleans jazz funeral promenade. Clay Jackson, getting lofted by three guys by the handles on his suit, is a live-action Harvest Moon, "shining on" spooning lovers (Buffy Miller and Matt Rivera). Later, Katja Wirth hauls and mauls Jackson by those handles in "I Hate a Man Like You." Feld-trained protege Jassen Virolas scurries around madly on tippytoe as a cartoonish "Sheik of Araby." And in a surrealist treatment of "Sweet Sue (Just You)" Philip Gardner, featureless in a blank mask, moons over a disembodied torso floating around him on a wire armature, just out of reach. Tiger is lightweight fun with a sardonic edge and an especially stylish look, thanks to Kim's costumes and Allan Lee Hughes's novel lighting design that includes a bank of instruments head-high behind the dancers.