On Dance

...Another hallmark of Feld's choreography, however, is its flow: The performers' entrances and exits often seem mere dynamic changes in a continuum...

...And although the Joffrey season that just ended did not offer some of the company's most important recent acquisitions-ballets like Jooss' "Big City" and the Satie-Massine-Picasso "Parade"-10 new works and revivals did point up the extraordinary range of contemporary American choreography...

...Created for Birgit Keil, a guest artist from the Stuttgart Ballet, the piece is a short solo set to a music-box harp score by Albert Roussel...

...The other high point of the Joffrey season was Twyla Tharp's exhilarating new "Happily Ever After...

...In "Astarte," a bizarre look at love, passion is cold-eyed...

...Feld also presented three works that are new to the company...

...Both have loyal-and energetic- followings...

...there are few big jumps or lifts as punctuation...

...By keeping the Wagnerian-scaled emotions muted, Joffrey hints at both the passion of the moment and the societal restraints of the day...

...The contrast is great with a "museum company" like the Joffrey Ballet, where director Robert Joffrey lovingly collects works representative of different schools and periods of dance for his troupe...

...A billowing, lurching white screen with enormous color films of the two dancers projected on it dwarf the performers at times, underscoring the puniness of men and women in a world ruled by technology...

...In its unassuming way, the Joffrey Ballet has whettted our appetites for what is to come...

...Both are director's companies, very much the tool of a single creative impulse...

...Against a dark, smoky, back scrim the black-suited dancers-a woman and five men-line up and break from formation to lunge, spin, slide and fall throughout the stage space...

...On Dance JOFFREY ANDFELD KICK IT OFF BY JENNIFER DUNNING THE OPENING of the busy fall dance season has come and gone not with a salute from the big guns, the American Ballet Theater and the New York City Ballet, or a scattershot of exotic imported novelties, but with the pop of diminutive Bicentennial firecrackers...

...The series of individualistic solos for the three, each of whom vies for the affections of a much put-upon partner, is danced to a score by the early 19th-century pianist-composer, John Field...

...The work comes alive when the rollicking country music of Snuffy Jenkins, Pappy Sherrill and the Hired Hands begins to be somewhat monotonous-a better foil for a tightly-spun, beautifully detailed solo (danced by Tharp on opening night) and for the brilliant group dance that follows...

...She circles some celestial studio self-absorbed, her pale, rippling chiffon tunic and paler face themselves almost absorbed in Thomas Skelton's opaque lighting and the shining white stage covering...

...Another touching moment followed when LaFosse knelt simply at the front of the stage...

...In this, the "Cacklin' Hen and Rooster Too" section, Tharp's spare, uncompromising early style and her later quirky manner of breaking up and reassembling traditional phraseology come together breathtakingly...

...To the songs of Wagner (some of them set to the poetry of Wesendonck), dancers sweep on and off the stage, embrace and flee each other...

...And so "Impromptu" never flags...

...He is a modest and unprolific artist, but his range mirrors that of his company's repertory...

...With the revival of "Astarte," a 1967 psychedelic rock ballet, came one of the engagement's two high points: the rediscovery of Robert Joffrey, choreographer...

...Since Keil seldom sustains a phrase, Feld fashioned a work for her full of abrupt changes and shifts of direction...

...The new dance season promises much-from a possible Balanchine premiere and full-evening "homage to Bournonville" at the New York City Ballet to a long-awaited week on Broadway for Merce Cunningham...

...While the result owed something to Kurt Jooss' epic antiwar ballet, "The Green Table," it had a power all its own...

...Feld himself danced the Pimp, looking, with his amusingly well-scrubbed Whores, like someone who scampered out of a decadent Berlin bar of the '30s...

...Although his present dancers are for the most part capable and well trained, if a little lacking in expressiveness, echoes of the original performers still cling to each role, so sensitively did he probe and display their personalities and ways of moving in the initial productions...

...But despite its fleeting charms, this character study would seem to be more a piece d'occasion than a substantial future staple...

...There was a wonderful first solo for the Soldier, danced with an af-fectingly lumpish innocence by Edmund LaFosse...

...Of the 12 works by Feld in this season's repertory, four were dances he set in the early '70s for the American Ballet Company, his first group...

...In "A Soldier's Tale," the most valuable addition to the repertory, Feld displayed his special gift for gutsy and brooding dramatic dance...

...Feld's output has been varied, albeit a little grimly colored, but putting together a rounded repertory has always been a problem...

...Indeed, Feld's uncanny grasp of a dancer's idiosyncracies is one of his most notable stylistic traits...

...He stared down as if at his reflection in a stream-Feld knows the value of stillness-unaware of the slimy Pimp behind him...

...The Joffrey Ballet began a month of all-American choreography on October 13 at the City Center, and a week later the Eliot Feld Ballet followed suit with a five-week season of Feld's unique brand of home-grown dance, developed out of his peculiarly American urban sensibility...

...The two groups have more in common than their overlapping appearances in New York...

...It is a passionate evocation of the love affair between Mathilde Wesendonck and Richard Wagner, seen in restrospect through Wesen-donck's eyes...

...The Stravinsky score-program music with a vengeance-has tripped many a choreographer, but Feld chose to ignore some details of the libretto and make a more abstract statement about the effects of war...

...Feld has caught the peculiarly soft way Keil's spikey, angling body can move, bringing out the nymph in a rather hard-looking ballerina...

...One senses that for Feld even a pause to prepare for a traditional classical pirouette would violate the stream of movement...

...Throughout, like a mindless leitmotif, waves of anonymous soldiers surged, stumbled and crawled across the stage...

...JOFFREY'S "Pas des Deesses" (1954), also shown this season, is an affectionately wry look at three famous prima ballerinas of the Romantic era...

...Only an occasional gesture or expression startles us back to a reality other than that world of shifting tides of bodies...

...Eliot Feld Ballet if you love dance," proclaim Feld's promotional posters, suggesting the kind of discipleship his dark, pithy dances often seem to demand...

...For all its virtues, though, "Happily Ever After" is marred by a long first section of expendable, interchange able-lo oking, typically fractured "kartoon kut-ups" performed by four guest dancers from the Tharp company...

...The dance is a series of ritual lifts and twinings by an impassive '60s goddess of destructive love and the hypnotized youth who comes onstage from the audience, methodically strips nearly bare, and at the end walks to the back of the stage and literally out of the theater...

...The final Joffrey creation given this season was "Remembrances" (1973...

...Yet in their own ways, they are the Yin and Yang of the smaller dance companies...

...It was well illustrated by "Impromptu," the single premiere he presented this season...

...the company has certainly brought out the best in her, and so has she in a select group of Joffrey dancers...

...The piece has all the delioacy and charm of the period lithograph by Jacques Bouvier that inspired it, and not even the occasional mugging of the current cast could blur its wit...

...We'll lift your spirits," the Joffrey advertisements promise...

...he was all sudden pivots, immediately establishing the character as a darting, shifting non-protagonist...

...It is rumored that Tharp intends to work closely with the Joffrey in the future...