SINCE Jerome Robbins’ death, Eliot Feld has worn the unof ficial mantle of outstanding American-born classic choreographer. Or, as the critic Jack Anderson once put it: “Who else?”
Last year, New York City Ballet made Feld only the third choreographer, along with Balanchine and Robbins, to be given programs devoted solely to his work, the highlight of which was a revival of his dazzling 1969 ballet “Intermezzo.”
But in more recent years, that mantle seems to have slipped, as the 65-year-old seems absorbed by minimalist music and weird sets and props. Admittedly, the acute sense of theatricality that has always given his work its cutting edge rarely deserts him. At some level, often more visual than kinetic, his work entertains.
But the man could do so much more if he would turn back to the basics – dance for the joy of it, rather than a self-absorbed cleverness in theatrical gesture.
Case in point? His two world premieres now at the Joyce, “Undergo” and “Isis in Transit.” Both seemed big nuts with small kernels.
In “Undergo,” to a spare and sparse score by Meredith Monk, the athletic Wu-Kang Chen undergoes some vigorous movement and erratic, erotic jousting with Anthony Bryant, Christopher Vo and Ha-Chi Yu before packaging himself up in a huge roll of brown paper.
For the complex solo, “Isis in Transit,” the wondrous young Korean dancer Fang-Yi Sheu plays the Egyptian goddess of medicine and fecundity in search of her dismembered lover, Osiris.
The game Sheu battles along an incredible obstacle course fit for commando training, before ascending to heaven in a parachute harness as a happy, satisfied goddess. Congratulations seemed more in order than applause.
Completing the program are “Pursuing Odette,” a kind of deconstruction of Pavlova’s “Dying Swan” solo danced to the adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony by an elegantly contortionist Yu, with one bare foot and the other in a point shoe; and “Backchat,” which has three men climbing up and down a wall. It’s rough going.
ELIOT FELD BALLET TECH
Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Ave., at 19th Street; (212) 242-0800. Through Sunday.