Yo Johann
Pacific Dances
Apple Pie
Lincoln Portrait
Ballet Tech
Joyce Theater, New York City
April 2, 2002

Do you like the music of Philip Glass, Steve Reich or other minimalist composers? Is repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition interesting to you? I can listen to music in this style for some time, but visually, I get bored quickly when a choreographer makes only a few steps and then fills out a dance with myriad variations of the same phrases.

I realize there is a school of thought that accepts the use of minimalism and repetition as a valid approach. I am definitely from some other school that wants to see more material than was offered in Eliot Feld’s presentation at New York City’s Joyce Theatre early in April.

I do think Eliot Feld has a gift for concocting wonderful movements and phrases of them. I wish he would go back into the studio and come up with more of this great material to fill out his dances. Instead he arranges and rearranges this clever but meager fare into an entire piece.

All this complaining about repetition notwithstanding, the opening duet on this program, Yo Johann (set to music of J.S. Bach), was a nice bit of camaraderie for Jason Jordan and Jassen Virolas, two wonderfully lanky, well-muscled lads whose canons were great to watch: one would jump and the legs would explode like a firecracker into a split, then the next would follow suit but with an entirely different quality. He would float up and throw the legs into the split as if in slow motion. It didn't seem he'd have time to finish the movement before coming down, but somehow he did.

Only in the third (and final) movement did they really have the opportunity to rope us into the fun. Usually mugging to the audience and cutesy gestures make one recoil, but these two fellows made it work, wrapping up an energetic piece that left the audience charmed and satisfied.

Pacific Dances, with a distinctly Hawaiian flavor, featured a gaggle of the company's women suited in tank-topped, short-legged, white unitards. A large sheet of white parachute material made an interesting complement to the work, a sort of dancing set piece. Manipulated by people at its edges, the fabric created the effect of rolling waves, crashing surf, billowing clouds, tropical breezes and other pleasant experiences one might delight in on a Hawaiian honeymoon.

Honeymoon indeed: this piece smacked of sex on a tropical holiday. The hints of Hawaii created an air of calm and relaxation while the ensemble provided the languid lovemaking— as a woman wading in from the surf drips with salt water, so did these women drip with sex appeal. Feld's movements for them included rippling arms and slow paddle turns propelled by one deliciously undulating buttock. I confess to enjoying this repetition but on the whole, Feld’s overuse of the material diluted the enjoyment of watching the steps, which was a shame because those steps were initially so striking.

The third piece on the program, Apple Pie, featured students from the school. There were a lot of gifted students, and some not-so-gifted but who soldiered bravely on through the steps. The work was not a bad vehicle for the kids, but for the audience it was another exercise in formations and arrangements of relatively few movements.

The final piece on the program was the premiere of Lincoln Portrait which I found distressingly unsuccessful. I realize it’s terribly unpatriotic of me to dislike a work of this nature, particularly with times being what they are, but I’ll make bold and say that a good and worthy cause does not make a dance about it good and worthy simply by association. Don’t even get me started on all the bad AIDS dances out there and the critics who fawned over them.

What did work very well in this piece was a large group of mostly non-dancers (I was reminded of Liz Lerman’s "Dancers of the Third Age" troupe.) Their costumes ranged from rich to poor and from centuries past to present-day attire. These folk walked on in patterns, paused and did other such things as can be organized for huge groups of non-dancers. The variety of the people— old and young, fat and thin, dark and pale— demonstrated a sense of unity among a diverse people and spoke volumes about what Americans conceive their country to be. The other components in this ballet only detracted from the eloquence of this group’s statement.

These other stray elements were an onstage narrator, a presumably accomplished actor, who recited texts by and about Lincoln, though he was occasionally drowned out by crescendos in the Aaron Copland score.

There was also an ensemble of dancers, but after a few literal gestures, which gave one hope for a cohesive piece, they began to dance rather abstract phrases which seemed to have little to do with anything and certainly no connection to the other bodies on stage.

There were some unfortunate flurries of activity where a dancer lept about with a rippling American flag held overhead. I suspect the intent was to conjure up a sense of patriotism, but the effect did not even conjure up patriotism’s twisted sibling jingoism: it registered as hackneyed, and in my opinion, embarrassingly so.

Photo: Lois Greenfield