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Flash Review, 4-3: LIfeless 'Portrait'
Feld's Life of Lincoln Stillborn Art
By Alicia Mosier
Copyright 2002 Alicia Mosier
NEW YORK -- With the creation of the Ballet Tech school, the New York
City Public School for Dance, Kids Dance, and the Ballet Tech company
itself, Eliot Feld has opened his arms to the young people of New
York over the past twenty years and given them the chance to learn to
dance. His Ballet Tech Foundation renovated the Joyce Theater and
helped to save the Lawrence A. Wein Center for Dance and Theater. The
man is a populist, heart and soul, and New York is the better for it.
Born in Brooklyn, reared on Balanchine and Broadway, Feld seems to
find great inspiration in the dream and the reality of America; that
inspiration is reflected both in his admirable work in the community
and in much of his choreographic output. "Lincoln Portrait," which
premiered last night at the gala opening of Ballet Tech's season at
the Joyce, is Feld's own dream of America -- an emphatically populist
vision of who we are -- set to Aaron Copland's score of the same name
and to his "Fanfare for the Common Man."
Copland, of course, was more Communist than populist, and these
pieces were composed at the height of his infatuation with the idea
that "communism is 20th-century Americanism." There's a whiff of
propaganda about them, or at least of kitsch. Feld's new work is more
or less apolitical but no less kitschy, in the way that only
something very heartfelt can be. He cast his dance with 13 dancers
from Ballet Tech, then recruited 45 people -- from his part-time
housekeeper to former members of his company to elevator operators --
to represent "who we are." "The People" (as they're called in the
program) were dressed in costumes from across the centuries of
American history: cowboy hats, hard hats, flapper dresses, Jackie
Kennedy suits, leather pants, tie-dyed shirts, this year's suede
skirts. There was a rabbi and a sailor, a woman with a baby, two
little girls in Catholic school uniforms. These folks, all 45 of
them, crossed the stage in parallel lines that weaved around and
around, turned to look at the audience, then climbed onto risers at
the back as "The Dancers," dressed in identical pale blue mini
unitards, came forward to clasp hands gravely and skip in circles and
tilt their heads to the horizon. You perhaps won't be surprised to
learn that one dancer grand-jeted into the mass of hand-holders
holding a huge American flag.
Sam Waterston gave a mercifully unsentimental reading -- sober,
slightly clipped, with no quavering bass tones -- of the text of
"Lincoln Portrait," which is made up of Lincoln's own words and (to
me, always slightly weird) descriptions of his height and
personality. (The text was also composed by Copland.) The words of
the Gettysburg Address -- "that these dead shall not have died in
vain, and that this government of the people, by the people, for the
people, shall not perish from the earth" -- cannot but bring tears to
your eyes, especially these days, when they have a new and vivid
relevance. I wish, though, that Feld hadn't had Waterston deliver
them from a raised platform at the back of the stage, surrounded by
the upturned faces of the members of the cast; it made him too much
the sainted prophet.
In brief remarks before the performance, Feld said his new piece was
a metaphor of the nation's motto, "e pluribus, unum" -- out of many,
one. Hence the historical costumes, hence the moving lines of people
(representing our immigrant heritage, one might speculate), hence the
crowd into which they gathered. I don't know what the
identically-dressed dancers were supposed to represent, apart from a
sort of abstract dream of American oneness. They jumped and jumped in
static motion, forever shuttled into formations that seemed meant to
look "united," but only looked hemmed in. Although Feld has said he
wanted to explore questions like "What does America look like?" and
"What does it mean to be an American?", I didn't learn anything from
this piece about those things -- not even the obvious. True, it gave
a stock definition of what America is: we come from many backgrounds,
and we live together proudly and in relative harmony, in continuity
with the ideals set forth by those who founded the nation. I did
wonder why, when the real America is so enlivened by its variety, the
stage picture looked -- despite the varied costumes, colors, shapes,
and sizes -- so homogenous and inert. (It takes a subtle hand to use
non-dancers well onstage; often their individuality is diminished
rather than amplified, and even more so when they are asked to be
"the people.") As a dance, "Lincoln Portrait" has almost nothing to
recommend it; a dance is not what it was intended to be. It is Feld's
own answer to Feld's own question, framed in Feld's own univocal,
sentimental, and somewhat overconceptualized terms. It's a populist
fanfare, utterly innocent, but more or less lifeless as art.
The gala program also included three recent pieces, "Yo Johann,"
"Pacific Dances," and "Apple Pie." The first featured Jason Jordan
and Jassen Virolas doing broad arching leaps and round-the-stage
lifts to Bach's Partita No. 3 in E major. The main pleasure of the
piece, I do not blush to say, was seeing two such great-looking young
guys filling the air with energy. That said, the choreography's
repetitiveness didn't give them room to really move. As for "Pacific
Dances," well, it does go on. The nine women in the cast were as
lovely as a flock of sea birds, and I loved the way the light changed
as the white cloth backdrop floated over the stage, but there were
just a few too many Hawaiian songs, waving arms, and swiveling hips.
"Apple Pie" was a Kids Dance production last night, and the kids
(most of them in junior high, I'd guess) were amazing -- such stage
presence! The girls were confident and smiling, and a few turned up
the heat; the boys eyed each other, good-natured and competitive. But
the piece, set to music by Bela Fleck and Joe McCracken, is full of
old-timey shuffles and some steps that look bizarrely like "shuckin'
and jivin'." The choreography has an "ain't that cute?" insouciance,
but on the bodies of these 21st-century New York kids it made me
cringe a little. Sometimes (several works by Paul Taylor come to
mind) Americana reveals Americanness. Sometimes, at Ballet Tech, it
obscures it.
Ballet Tech's spring season at the Joyce continues through May 5,
with six different programs.
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