By JANE RUBINSKY

A dancer's relationship to gravity is a complicated matter. The great Vaslav Nijinsky seemed to defy it: Asked once to explain how he achieved his astonishing leaps, Nijinsky said he simply went up in the air and paused there for a bit before coming down. Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey were among those who celebrated the pull of gravity—Graham for the connection of the dancer to the earth, Humphrey for the arc of "fall and recovery" created by the dancer moving off-balance.

Eliot Feld, whose new work, Sir Isaac's Apples, launches a yearlong series of centennial commissions. (Photo by Bruce Weber)

Evading conventional gravitational expectations while traversing new choreographic territory continues to fascinate—a quick search on the Internet reveals more than one dance company performing airborne, with the assistance of ropes and harnesses. But what if, without even leaving the floor, it could become a force in the choreographer's exploration of suspended movement? That premise is behind Eliot Feld's ballet Sir Isaac's Apples, which will receive its premiere this month by the Juilliard Dance Ensemble and launch a yearlong series of special commissions for Juilliard's centennial. Set to music by Juilliard alumnus Steve Reich ('61, composition)—the composer's seminal 1971 work Drumming, to be performed live by the Juilliard Percussion Ensemble—Sir Isaac's Apples will involve more than 60 Juilliard dance students from the senior, junior, and sophomore classes, performing on a giant ramp that fills the Juilliard Theater stage, sloping down from a height of 16 feet in back to the front, and stretching across the stage's entire width.

Both Reich and ramps have fascinated Feld since the mid-'80s, when his ballets Aurora I and II, set to Reich's Music for 18 Musicians, premiered at the Joyce Theater. Those earlier works had dancers alternately working against and giving into gravity, running and leaping diagonally up and down the ramps and sometimes unfolding their prone bodies into patterns that slid down the ramp's surface. The 63-year-old Feld (who received an honorary doctorate from Juilliard in 1991) had long hankered to create a ramp ballet of epic scale, but the needs of such a work are "prodigious," he points out. "The ramp is close to 3,000 square feet of hypotenuse, and so the only place rehearsals could take place is on the stage," he said in a recent interview at his Ballet Tech headquarters. Of course, few venues can offer the luxury of commandeering an opera-house stage for close to three months (from construction of the monumental ramp, through evolution and rehearsals of the work, to performances), along with a resident company of 60 highly capable dancers. But when Feld approached the Dance Division's director, Lawrence Rhodes (who had performed with Feld's company for several years in the '70s), the opportunity to meet these unique challenges in the process of creating a stunning work to honor Juilliard's centennial made perfect sense.

Feld has never been one to take the easy road. As a boy growing up in Brooklyn in the late '50s, he was on "at least a partial scholarship" at the School of American Ballet ("only because there were no boys," he insists) and was cast as the little prince in Balanchine's new production of The Nutcracker. But after two years at S.A.B., says Feld, "I thought—as Peggy Lee has intoned—'Is that all there is?'" At New York's High School of Performing Arts, he "kept flip-flopping" between majors in ballet and modern dance. "I think, in some way, that pull between the two has been the dialogue for the rest of my career." A role as Baby John in the stage and film versions of West Side Story led him to consider briefly becoming an actor—"but acting felt like make-believe, while dancing always felt quite real to me." Returning to New York from filming in L.A. and taking ballet classes with Richard Thomas, recalls Feld, "I used to cry in class, because I'd look in the mirror and the disparity between what I felt like, what I wanted to feel like, and what I looked like was so shocking." Still, when American Ballet Theater held auditions, Thomas pressed Feld to go—which he did, reluctantly. He was passed over for "some very pretty boy with beautiful feet who couldn't dance a step, and that really pissed me off. Damn whether or not I wanted it; I just didn't want to be rejected for bad reasons!" Feld redoubled his efforts and passed muster six months later, joining A.B.T. in 1963. He rose through the ranks from corps to soloist and choreographed two works for the company before leaving in 1968 to establish his own company.

The ramp for Eliot Feld's Sir Isaac's Apples being built in the Juilliard Theater. It measures 16 feet high, 44 feet wide, and 40 feet deep. (Photo by Lisa Yelon)

As early as the mid-'70s, Feld was listening to Steve Reich's music … and didn't get it. "And I thought, 'Eliot, you are such a reactionary, old-fashioned fascist!'" he laughs. "Because it didn't do any of the things that music stemming from the classical tradition up until then had done, and I could not give up the kind of implied narrative that existed in all Western classical music … though I didn't know exactly what it was that I couldn't give up at the time." But he kept listening, and eventually found himself released from the expectation of a climax in the music—"that place where the strings come in, and it swells and hits the home chord, like Liebestod or something." What he discovered instead was "a kind of ecstasy," he says, "which stems partly from Steve's obscuring the differentiation between the upbeat and the downbeat, so it's ambiguous. And suddenly, the music kind of shimmers and lifts off the ground; it starts to float. The ramps are really an exploration of a changed relationship to gravity."

Sir Isaac's Apples presented a number of dilemmas for the Juilliard Production Department, says Keith Michael, who coordinates those efforts for the Dance Division. Chief among them was hanging the lights over a huge ramp with such a steep rake. "You can't put a ladder on it; you can't have a counter-rake to make a level surface, because it wouldn't stay in place," explains Michael. The solution was a kind of bosun's chair hanging from a pipe, "so someone who is strapped into the chair can move himself along the pipe and get to the lighting overhead."

The ramp's surface itself presented difficulties: a vinyl covering—which Feld had used in his Aurora ramp dances—didn't stay put and was too slippery. Working directly on the wood itself, the dancers experimented with various shoes, to see which worked and which didn't. (The sneaker of choice has a wraparound rubber sole, with an edge that can be used as a brake from any position, including prone—and 60 pairs had to be tracked down, over the Internet, from stores all over the country.) Other elements of the dancers' costumes also needed to facilitate either braking or sliding. (Juilliard gratefully acknowledges Juicy Couture and Capezio for donating clothing for the production.)

Aurora I, another ramp dance choreographed by Eliot Feld with music by Steve Reich. The ballet premiered at the Joyce Theater in 1985. (Photo by Susan Cook/Martha Swope Associates)

Not the least of the challenges was coordinating the dancers and the musicians. Performances of Reich's score can range from 55 to 80 minutes, because the number of repeats of individual measures varies depending on how the phasing and progression in the music unfold—but the choreography is "set." Digital L.E.D. monitors (designed as part of the set) will enable the performers to synchronize themselves with each other at certain agreed-on points, allowing the musicians the necessary freedom while ensuring that they "catch up" to the dancers and the music and dance are a consistent length. The digital displays will also function as visual signposts for the tumbling, frequently upside-down dancers.

While the ramp itself—at 16 feet high, 44 feet wide, and 40 feet deep from front to back, a bit less than Feld's envisioned 3,000 square feet—is too huge to be constructed anywhere but in the theater itself, Feld did begin experimenting last spring on a smaller ramp in his studio that replicated the 24-degree angle. Aside from the scale, the steeper slope of the ramp for Sir Isaac's Apples will put more emphasis on exploring the possibilities of friction in a prone position, rather than speed. "Sliding down the ramp," explains Michael, "you can actually move quite slowly and transform the shape as gravity takes it down the ramp, as opposed to having to create the shape by jumping or running."

Eliot Feld: Sir Isaac's Apples Juilliard Theater Wednesday, Sept. 28- Sunday, Oct. 2 For time and ticket information, please see the calendar.

"If you can imagine," says Rhodes, describing the work in progress, "it's like you're going to see people falling through space, twisting and rolling—a kind of slow-motion thing, mesmerizing, sort of like abstract art in motion." Though his ramp dances don't exactly look classical, Feld insists that "their DNA is at the essence of classicism. They are about nothing more than motion and form; in that sense, they're about as Petipa as anything I've ever done," he says, referring to the 19th-century choreographer of such classics as Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake. "For me, it is about the investigation of shape and composition, pure and simple." Bartok's string quartets, he points out, now considered avatars of the evolution of the classical tradition, were first perceived as cacophonous, chaotic aberrations. "The evolution of classicism is what keeps it alive: What is the next necessary mutation?"