sarma

Maybe this whole business of Bicentennial dances isn't going to be such a bore after all. The way that choreographers respond, and the choices they make are revealing. Eliot Feld's Excursions traffics not with nostalgia, but with theatrical stylizations of ideals. The four sections of his ballet (set to Samuel Barber's music of the same name) are forays into an American moral landscape - a paean to clarity, speed, great distances, vigor, plain manners, work.

Excursions is like Balanchine's Western Symphony in its formality and abstractness, but the manner is very different. Western Symphony is a Petipa ballet with a vernacular twang, a boisterous, but well regulated kingdom whose courtiers are disguised as cowboys and dancehall girls. But in Feld's sharp, pristine open spaces, even such vague roles as these rarely appear.

Feld builds his dance out of brilliantly distorted stereotypical gestures but never lets the dancers stop to indulge in them. The air on stage seems abrasive; the light sharp enough to burn flesh.

Christine Sarry is the leader. She scouts the dance territory for everyone else. Shrugging, prancing, grinning, reckless, but precise, she reminds you of Christine Sarry in Rodeo. But that's inescapable; she's not that woman. Give or take a few gestures, she could be a surrogate for Feld himself. And this is one of the ballet's most bracing-and most formalizing - devices: that most of the time the six women and men in the cast share common dance material. Pale, delicate Michaela Hughes and Linda Miller bounce through the same jutting, broncobusting phrases as the men. Edmund LaFosse (who partners Sarry when there's partnering to be done), Jeff Satinoff, and Patrick Swayze shimmy their shoulders when the women do. Alone together they all squat, chin in hand by imaginary campfires, straddle horses.

The first section bursts out as an elated surveying of space. Oh what a beautiful morning! And the dancers shiver in mid-jump, snort up air that is palpably fresh. In the second dance, a whiff of blues in the music invades the dance. Sarry, twisting her leg, is for a second recognizably stubbing out a cigar(ette?), but the gesture, perfectly rendered as to intent and focus, is still not pointed up as a gesture; it's introduced as a motif. This is the part with the most (the only, as I remember) malefemale byplay. Hints of a cheerful honky- tonk lustiness.

Part Three is a loping, saddle-easy affair. The image of the dancer as combined horse and rider harks back to Oklahoma, Rodeo, and Billy the Kid. But, as I said, Feld doesn't dwell on such things. He embeds them in such intricate, unusual, smartly paced dancing that your eye has to grasp them on the run. And actions like chest scratching (men only), mid-air bucking - seen as pure, vigorous dancing, instead of as moves in a contest between brawny men and flouncing girls - become newly useful thematic material instead of sentimental references. Part Four presents the deeds and behavior of Part Three wound up into a breathtaking celebratory tempo. It ends with all hands in a comradely pose as if on a corral fence, while one breathes out "Sheeit!"

In this razor-walking choreographic feat, Feld has sacrificed some of the camaraderie between dancers which he usually creates, in order, I think, to avoid the possible banality of the roles usually associated with the movements he's chosen as a springboard. The dancers travel through a space, but their dancing doesn't mold it. Despite their high spirits, the landscape seems as vast and barren as the moon; and, although Sarry is superbly, unsentimentally warm, the ballet has something of the cool audacity of a man shattering the silence of Grand Canyon by shouting "Hello!"