Feld Ballets/New York
Eliot Feld has such good taste sometimes it makes you want to scream. I think it makes him want to scream too. Fortunately for him and us, a man of his experience–he’s choreographed 86 ballets in 28 years and has danced with American Ballet Theatre, with the company of African-American choreographer Donald McKayle, and in the cast of West Side Story, on Broadway and in the movie–can let go whenever he wants.
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The ending of Consort, a dance for four couples, is even tackier. The piece begins with symmetrical, stately motions, the men bundled into velvet jackets, the women covered right down to the tips of their toes. But gradually the skirts are tucked up, the jackets doffed and shirts unbuttoned, as the men and women become more casual, shall we say. More than a dance about sex, however, Consort is a voyage of musical discovery, as the music becomes increasingly militaristic and powerful and the men are transformed into lusty conquerors, humping the air, then swinging the women, straddled on their hips, backward in great arcs. Rape or ecstasy? More likely ecstasy, given the free-love era in which Consort was made; still, the piece also suggests the chauvinism and taste for world conquest that characterized the Renaissance. At any rate, the music doesn’t seem nearly as polite as it did at first.
Maybe ugliness is in the eye of the beholder–maybe I see such things in Feld’s work because I want to. But so much of his choreography is pretty, repetitive, or both that one does notice the kinks, the jangles, the nerve endings. Ah Scarlatti, which by my reckoning is about 35 minutes long, seems to go on forever; but it’s also marked by sections as emotionally wrenching as any I’ve seen from Feld. The duets between Darren Gibson and Patricia Tuthill bring out all the torturous sexual tension in Scarlatti’s music (played live on harpsichord by Peter Longiaru), a tension that without such dancing we might never have heard. In these duets Tuthill repeats the large, flowing motions from her solos earlier in the piece but is manipulated through them by Gibson, often kneeling almost invisible behind her: she leans against him while he grasps her thighs, one at a time, from underneath to move them through gigantic ronds de jambe en l’air. Later he clings to her ankles, prostrate, as she pulls him along the floor with her big, elegant steps. Then, in the splits, she almost crushes him beneath her as he rolls under her crotch, moving her along like the figurehead on a ship, her arms raised triumphantly.
There was agreement on one crucial point, however: that when the body is exhausted, the spirit shows through. This is something I’ve observed in all varieties of dance, from flamenco to postmodern. DanceAfrica this year had spirit in abundance, and it didn’t matter whether it showed through the rigid roles of traditional African dance or the cool, angry attitudes of hip-hop.
