Ballet Tech Makes All the Right Moves

Most of the people who agonize over the future of American ballet worry about nothing so much as how we’re going to keep luring star dancers from Havana, Copenhagen, Moscow or Madrid to prop up our increasingly uncomprehending and even perverse restagings of the 19th century classics.

Not Eliot Feld. Starting in 1978, this maverick ballet modernist has been training promising New York City public school children in ballet as an expressive, contemporary movement language. And just two years ago, he disbanded his own company to form Ballet Tech, an ensemble comprising graduates of this now-extensive, tuition-free, city-funded project.

Besides the laudable accomplishment of helping expand the dancer pool beyond those middle-class white kids whose parents can afford to send them to ballet classes, Feld has given himself something that made the two programs by Ballet Tech at the Irvine Barclay Theatre over the weekend deeply satisfying.

Call it unanimity of style--the sense that everyone in his magnificently diverse, handpicked young company reflects exactly the same technical, musical and expressive standards, exactly the same vision of classical dance.

Don’t bother looking for unanimity of style at American Ballet Theatre. Nor will you find it at the Royal Ballet or the Royal Danish Ballet these days. But Feld glories in it. And besides relying on it for traditional corps synchrony--for instance, those traveling group arabesques in his 1981 ensemble showpiece “Play Bach” on the Friday and Saturday mixed bills--he makes it into a creative testament, linking it to his lifelong celebration of individuality.

Think of it as “E Pluribus Unum” turned into an artistic mandate, embodied by a company that not only looks like America in the 1990s but dances with a youthful energy and athleticism born on our streets and then sharpened by the training process.

Sharpened so keenly, in fact, that it becomes genuinely scary in “Yo Shakespeare,” a virtuoso 1997 male duet to an assaultive score by Michael Gordon. Danced Friday and Saturday by Jason Jordan and Nickemil Concepcion, the piece can be seen as a study in gang machismo, with the menace as strongly delineated as the camaraderie; but it also brilliantly showcases the dancers’ mastery of dynamic extremes--slow/fast, soft/hard, tight/loose--while sustaining the feeling of explosive, out-of-control male energy.

If “Play Bach” uses antique harpsichord partitas to show games and friendly interplay evolving into highly structured yet still breezy classical dancing, “Yo Shakespeare” traces the breakdown of all structure until only brute impulse remains. And two solos danced by Patricia Tuthill show Feld working inside formal structures that imaginatively reflect the works’ accompaniments.

In “Echo” from 1986 (danced Friday), Tuthill strongly dispatches a lexicon of fearsome steps, yet conveys the sensual, even glamorous, image objectified in her glittery harem costume. Every repetition and evolving permutation in Steve Reich’s score is physicalized in the footwork, with Tuthill managing to execute each repeat freshly.

The new “Cherokee Rose” (danced Saturday) makes a two-piece black-and-white costume by Frank Krenz a full partner in the choreography, its floor-length skirt sometimes held high and wide, like an eagle’s wings, or at the very end held above and behind the dancer like a saintly aura. Music by Jerry Douglas and Peter Rowan helps Feld display Tuthill’s range.

The familiar suites “Paper Tiger” (Friday) and “The Jig Is Up” (Saturday) mine a style conventionally labeled demi-caractere: halfway between pure classicism and folk dancing, indeed using the resources of the former to evoke the latter. Nostalgic Americana colors the footloose “Paper Tiger,” from 1977, set to a collection of Leon Redbone songs, while the equally frisky “The Jig Is Up,” from 1984, explores pre-”Riverdance” Irish and Irish-American idioms using music by the Bothy Band and John Cunningham.

Ballet Tech looks fabulous in both, and whether you consider the company the future of American ballet or a doomed children’s crusade, Feld has given his company and his audience an updated, personalized classicism that is like nothing else under the sun.