sarma

I think that Mazurka may be the most individual ballet that Eliot Feld has ever choreographed. The entire work, a formal suite of Chopin mazurkas danced by four couples, seems to articulate the tensions that exist between lovers. Feld makes you terribly aware of the forces that make bodies spring away from other bodies or coil in toward them, that proclaim who shall lead and who follow and who sidestep.

Feld has based the structure of his ballet on accounts of the dance as it was performed in l9th-century Poland: an opening procession, a series of showy solos and duets and ensembles, a closing group dance.

The dancers (Christine Sarry and Richard Fein, Elizabeth Lee and John Sowinski, Helen Douglas and George Montalbano, Naomi Sorkin and Edmund La Fosse) have been elegantly dressed by Rouben Ter-Arutunian in dark costumes, the men flaunting one dashingly asymmetrical white collar-point. But, for the most part, Mazurka doesn’t appear to be taking place at a gathering. You don’t envision a place or a society; for the dancers, the “place” is inside the music or inside the soul, the “society” the person closest. There is very little changing of partners. And there are no onlookers.

The form of the mazurkas defines the dancing. Perhaps that’s why the ballet makes you sense motions and emotions pressing and shifting to fulfill themselves within severe limits. Almost every dance takes off with three repetitions of its opening phrase. Steps and gestures proper to the mazurka recur everywhere - folded arms, stamps, small side-traveling hops with one foot lightly beating the other. Bold, weighty moves often give way to a sputter of small, rapid, almost irritable ones.

All the dances are passionate, but whether brooding, or exultant, or flashing, the dancers never stop to indulge in anything; the momentum of the mazurka pulls them along. Mazurka isn’t ingratiating. It’s too fast and too difficult for that. All that is strange and harsh and devious in those lovely somber melodies has gotten hold of Feld. The dances are full of unrest: The dancers reverse directions seemingly in mid-air; while the impetus is carrying them one way, they somehow muster their weight to pursue a new path. In one group section, all the dancers take up a devilish pattern begun by Sarry and Fein in which the partners rush past each other, and the next instant you see them they’re standing on one leg, grasping each other by one hand. In a remarkable solo, Helen Douglas opens her arms from overhead, lifts one leg to the side, and bends her other knee slightly; but something unusual about the lean of her body, the focus of her head makes the gesture look irresolute - a ballet position canted off balance by the pressure of emotion.

There are passages in Mazurka as beautiful as astonishing as anything I’ve ever seen. And in some way, the speed of the ballet does make the complexity more dazzling. Perhaps one of the reasons the ballet seems so complicated is that Feld has kept partners dancing so close together. These days when quite a few male choreographers - think of John Neumeier - have ironically responded to women’s-lib by creating pas de deux in which the woman is no more than a pliable statue to be hefted around, Feld’s patterns are unusually, strikingly, companionable. Partners often dance side by side in unison or in teasing counterpoint, with the man occasionally slipping his arm around the woman’s waist or something so that she can fly briefly off the floor - as a natural, if heady extension of what she’s already doing. In the duet for Douglas and Montalbano, she soars into slow leaps, supported almost invisibly by her own hand pressing down on one of his. What big lifts there are are memorable, partly because they don’t happen every second, and partly because the dancers don’t play them up by gritty preparations. Christine Sarry, following Richard Fein off stage, suddenly - in the middle of doing something else - bounds into the air, turns, and is caught and carried away. While our breathing stops.

I imagine that what will happen now with Mazurka is that Feld will allow pianist Peter Longiaru to slow a few dances down (unlikely) or that he will lash and cajole his superb dancers until they can achieve and maintain the speed of lightening (more likely).