© Lois Greenfield 'Isis in Transit' reviews Sheu in reviews recent Ballet Tech reviews more Rachel Straus reviews Discuss this review (Open for at least 6 months)

The 65-year-old Brooklyn born choreographer—who performed the Prince in Balanchine’s 1954 Nutcracker, in Jerome Robbins’s film version of West Side Story and who was deemed in 1967 the new choreographic wunderkind when he was a corps dancer with American Ballet Theater—always goes out on a limb. Indeed Feld’s roving mind never stops. What if we tried this, and then this, and then that? I could almost hear him saying as I watched his work. In the case of Isis—to his beloved Steve Reich whose minimalist compositions have inspired at least 12 of his works—Sheu’s journey as the Egyptian goddess in search of her loved-one’s remains resembled a confidence course a tri-athlete could admire.

In black underwear, Sheu’s trip included crossing miniature triangles (representing mountains), balancing on a metal dish (resembling an erupting volcano thanks to Aaron Copp’s fiery lighting), being battered by plastic rods (which looked like attacking trees when Sheu hung her taut frame on them); descending in a glass coffin (think Dante’s Inferno crossed with a cat scan) and ascending in a metal frame (which levitated her like a butterfly). Wow! That’s a lot of “scenic elements,” as the program called them, and as fashioned by Mimi Lien, who received Live Design’s magazine 2007 Young Designer to Watch award. But Sheu deserves more than maneuvers on her knees, back and balls of her feet. Sheu’s genius lies in her phrasing: In a back arch, a coil to the floor and lunge into space, she can demonstrate the grammar of dance’s language—its poetry. Feld only gave Sheu prepositional phrases that brought her expertly, thanks to her dramatic force and physical precision, from one inventive object to another.

Undergo, the second of three premieres in Feld’s two-week season, resembled a dark water fish tank in which four creatures pushed against their barriers, swished their exotic tales and repeated tasks with little hope of finding light. To nine Meredith Monk works, the dance began to feel like dangerous undertow when dancer Wu-Kang Chen’s extended solo of struggle devolved into wrestling with a 20-foot roll of paper. Before Chen became a failed Mummenshantz dancer, the brown paper hung on enormous spools, an eye-catching cross between a Calder mobile and an old-fashioned printing press.

Why Feld isn’t interested, at least this year, in making dances that cover space and create their own architecture is beyond conjecture. It’s clear that the artist, whose catholic tastes earned him a reputation of aiming to choreograph the entire history of dance, is in his set design phase. Beside the paper sculpture in Undergo, the quartet of dancers underwent maneuvers beneath a large piece of plastic, on top of a glass box, and in costumes by Loie Delft that cut up the body like it had gone through a paper shredder.

Also on the program was Pursuing Odette (2006), danced with luxurious pliancy by Ha-Chi Yu, and BackChat (2004), which featured homoeroticism and Herculean feats thanks to the talents and brawn of dancers Anthony Bryant, Wu-Kang Chen and Adrian Danchig-Waring and to Feld’s love of pushing the envelope.