Dancers fascinate

Review

Whether the members of Feld Ballets/NY hopped across the stage on their toes or glided across on their backs last night at the Maine Center for the Arts, their disarmingly simple yet fascinating movements expressed both mathematical precision and emotional depth. Clearly, choreographer and artistic director Eliot Feld has created a quirky approach to dance that is faithful to the traditions of classical ballet but interested in stretching not only the bodies of his dancers but the imaginations of his audiences, too.

The ensemble presented four pieces. The first, “Ah Scarlatti,” was an ah-so-entertaining celebration of movement, almost to the point of being a dance of worship. The dancers grasped their elbows, wiggled their hips, flexed their toes and waved their arms in flock-like unity. The jerky, angularity sometimes resembled movements associated with the martial arts, softened by the grace inherent in ballet.

“Charmed Lives,” performed by Aaron, Darren Gibson and Joan Tsao to music by Maurice Ravel, was a dreamy modern piece. The dancers gently wrapped their legs around one another, sweetly rested their heads on each other’s backs and gleefully leaped through the air like playful deer. The lighting created the effect of an enchanted forest, and the lack of tension throughout the piece suggested a utopian fantasy of tenderness, harmony and festivity.

The intensity level increased with Buffy Miller’s solo number “Ion.” Dressed in a vibrant red and deep maroon dress with clinging, baggy pants underneath, Miller began slowly moving into the white lights off stage as if she were moving through a labyrinth. As the dance quickened, Miller’s hands moved through the air, alternating between knife-like slicing and swan-like pantomime. As lights projected an airy square onto the floor, Miller raised her arms in steeple positions and flexed her toes in right angles to her ankles as if she performed a ritual dance in the morning light at an oriental tea room. “Ion” was charged with electricity and offered the most intriguing choreography of the evening.

In the final piece, “Contra Pose,” many of the earlier images resurfaced but with an increasingly amazing complexity and precision. Clasping elbows, stopping for momentary tableaus, popping into the air, the dancers resembled lively insects performing a mating dance to movements from symphonies by C.P.E. Bach. While some dancers marched across the stage with tiny, methodical movements, others would fly through the air or flutter their arms in unison, pursuing variations of the same motif. The dancers, dressed in black unitards, created a domino effect as they laid their bodies together at the front of the stage and paused for a moment of almost perfect symmetry.

The evening attests to a Feldian stylistic, one that pays homage to the past but never takes itself too seriously. Trademark movements — the abrupt hand and arm work, the funky hip shakes, the flinging flexed toes, the freeze-frame tableaus — never slip into gimmickry but rather achieve an elegance that is somehow rollicking and sophisticated.