FELD BALLETS/NY
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The body Feld clothes is music, and in the 26 years he’s been making dances he’s clearly developed an instinct for choosing cleverly and concealing and revealing cunningly. Take his approach to Bach’s Brandenburg concerti in Common Ground (1991). This is beautiful but familiar music, a kind of god in the pantheon of “classical” works and firmly identified with the 18th century. But for his piece Feld has devised a signature phrase with clear origins in jazz dance: an angular one-two tossing down of the arms (one teacher used to tell us about a similar phrase, “Pretend you’re throwing your gum on the ground”) and cocking of the hips. It looks 20th century, it looks American (shades of West Side Story: Feld danced in both the Broadway and movie versions), and somehow it perfectly suits the staccato bursts of notes in the first movement of the third concerto. The men in Common Ground, hopping in arabesque, kick back, and somehow that kick perfectly punctuates the music’s overall rushing force.
Common Ground’s multiple beauties are grounded in Feld’s unerring instinct for phrases that suit the music in unexpected ways. In the second section the women swing their hips back in a big, luscious circle; nothing about the movement genuinely resembles swimming, and yet it recalls that dreamy, slow-motion labor, just as the music does. In the third section, an excruciatingly slow duet, the woman, seated in the splits, grasps the man’s legs and pulls herself almost through them while he steps slowly forward; and in an odd way their painful, delicate progress fits the music’s sad, devotional air. In the fifth section the women walk stiff-legged on pointe, sometimes with their legs wide and thrown out a bit from the hips, which makes them look both birdlike and hyperconscious and brings out the music’s tender, musing quality. Often Feld ingeniously distorts classical steps or line, just as his dance brings Bach’s music into clearer focus by viewing it through the prism of the 20th century.
Up to this point the audience had been chuckling pretty often, but in the penultimate section, “Hard Times Come Again No More,” with the ensemble onstage “witnessing” reprises of earlier phrases, the movements no longer seemed funny. Somehow they were sad, though the synthetic music and recording–a white interpretation of the spiritual several generations distant from reality–kept them from tragedy. At that point we heard the anonymous woman preaching and singing about being reborn, and the raw pain and faith in her voice put all the trite business we’d seen and heard so far in its proper place. Gibson’s slow steps, traced on a diagonal across the stage and back, his convulsive dancing to the claps and shouts that power the woman’s singing, seemed the pure, economical truth. Some pieces of clothing are lovely for their fraying and wear, for their histories.
