Eliot Feld

Eliot Feld, born July 5, 1942, in Brooklyn, New York, is an American choreographer, performer, teacher, and director whose career spans Broadway performance, classical ballet, and contemporary dance. The son of Alice Feld, a travel agent, and Benjamin Noah Feld, an attorney, he trained at the High School of Performing Arts, the School of American Ballet, and the New Dance Group, and also studied with Richard Thomas and Donald McKayle. As a child he performed the role of the Nutcracker Prince in George Balanchine's original production of The Nutcracker, and went on to perform with the companies of Mary Anthony, Pearl Lang, and Sophie Maslow.

Feld's Broadway career ran from 1954 to 1964 and included West Side Story, Sandhog, and I Can Get It for You Wholesale. He was sixteen when he appeared in West Side Story, and he was subsequently cast as Baby John in the film adaptation; during the filming of the dance sequence "Cool," he performed while ill with pneumonia. His television appearances during this period included The Garry Moore Show and The Ed Sullivan Show.

Following his stage work, Feld joined American Ballet Theatre. At twenty-five he left the company to establish his own organization, the American Ballet Company, which later became known as Feld Ballet. In the early 1980s, he co-founded the Joyce Theater with Cora Cahan as a performance home for the Feld Ballet, and he was also instrumental in establishing the Lawrence A. Wien Center for Dance and Theater at 890 Broadway in New York City.

Since 1967, Feld has choreographed 149 ballets, with works performed by American Ballet Theatre, the Joffrey Ballet, the New York City Ballet, the New York City Opera, the Juilliard School, the Royal Danish Ballet, the Royal Swedish Ballet, the National Ballet of Canada, the San Francisco Ballet, the Boston Ballet, the London Festival Ballet, the Pacific Northwest Ballet, and Mikhail Baryshnikov, among others. His 1978 work Santa Fe Saga, set to music by Morton Gould, featured Baryshnikov and premiered at the Plymouth Theatre. Feld also planned a ballet for Baryshnikov and Patrick Swayze, a project that was prevented by Swayze's knee reconstruction. His choreographic output includes fifteen ballets set to music by Steve Reich, among them The Grand Canon, Medium: Rare, Aurora I, Aurora II, Echo, Bent Planes, Kore, Ion, Clave, Chi, Tongue and Groove, Proverb, A Stair Dance, Sir Isaac's Apples, and Isis in Transit. His most recent ballet, Pointing 3, premiered in New York in June 2018; choreographed for four Ballet Tech students, it is set to the second movement of Brian Eno's Music for Airports in an arrangement by David Lang. In May 2024, Feld and Ballet Tech announced that most of his ballets were being placed in the public domain.

Feld's approach to choreography draws on both ballet and modern dance, fusing elements of each. His works incorporate unconventional movement including somersaults, push-ups, sprints, and calisthenics, and range in musical source from Steve Reich to Johann Strauss II to Scandinavian folk music. Some works were inspired by Jewish material, and others reflect the influence of Martha Graham. His choreography also appeared in the 2001 Broadway revival of On the Town, performed in Central Park, for which he included dancers from Ballet Tech in place of the company's usual summer engagement at the Joyce Theater.

In 1978, Feld founded the New Ballet School with the belief that children should have access to dance training regardless of family income. Working in partnership with the New York City Board of Education, he auditioned more than 1,500 children at eight public schools, enrolling nearly 150 students tuition-free in a seventeen-week course. Since its founding, the school has auditioned more than 900,000 New York City public school students and invited more than 26,000 children to take free introductory ballet classes. The school was renamed the New York City Public School for Dance in 1996. In 1997, Feld merged that school with Feld Ballet to form Ballet Tech, creating a unified organization that provided a professional performing outlet for the school's graduates. In 2003, he disbanded Feld Ballet to concentrate on his educational programs. Ballet Tech's current activities include the tuition-free New York City Public School for Dance and Kids Dance, a pre-professional children's performing group.