The Unanswered Question
This is a one-act (single-evening) ballet made by Eliot Feld to a suite of eight Charles Ives compositions, assembled under the extended title 'The Unanswered Question: Some Intimations of the American Composer Charles Ives.' It had its premiere on April 30, 1988, at the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, presented within New York City Ballet's American Music Festival, with lighting by Allen Lee Hughes (credited to the Feld Ballet) and costumes by Willa Kim.
It belongs to a small cluster of ballets set to Ives that circulated in and around New York City Ballet in this period, including Peter Martins' own Calcium Light Night (using one of the same scores Feld draws on), Jerome Robbins' Ives, Songs, and George Balanchine's earlier Ivesiana. Its place in the catalogue is as a discrete Feld work rather than as a Balanchine or Robbins title, distinguished from its neighbors by choreographer even though it shares source music and festival context with them.
What is danced
The article gives no synopsis, cast breakdown, or description of steps, holds, or technique, so nothing about the actual vocabulary danced can be responsibly stated from it. What can be said with confidence is structural: the ballet is built from eight separate Ives pieces — The Unanswered Question, Calcium Light Night, Fugue in Four Keys, Mists, From the Housatonic at Stockbridge, Sonata No. 2 for Piano and Violin (In the Barn), Remembrance, and An Old Song Deranged — which strongly implies a suite form of discrete, contrasting movements rather than a single continuous narrative dance, each presumably calling for a different mood or grouping of dancers to match Ives' famously disjunct scoring (spatially separated forces, hymn-tune quotation, layered tonalities).
Because the record and the article are both silent on the movement vocabulary itself — no mention of pointe work, partnering, ensemble patterning, or named roles — any claim about technique (classical, neoclassical, or otherwise) would be inference from Feld's general career rather than something this article supports, and is deliberately withheld here rather than guessed.
Context
The premiere sits inside New York City Ballet's American Music Festival of spring 1988, a company-wide programming initiative built around new and existing ballets to American scores. The article's own cross-reference — noting that Peter Martins, Jerome Robbins, and George Balanchine had each already made or would make ballets to Ives for the same company — places this work in a specific, traceable lineage of choreographers repeatedly returning to Ives' concert music (rather than to a purpose-written ballet score) as a resource for abstract, ensemble-driven dance-making in the New York City Ballet orbit.
Staging history
The article documents at least three points of critical attention over roughly two decades: an Anna Kisselgoff review dated May 2, 1988 (shortly after the premiere), a Jennifer Dunning review dated January 7, 1989, and a further Jennifer Dunning review dated May 1, 2006. This spread suggests the work, or at least its subject, was still being written about and possibly restaged or revisited by 2006, though the article does not state directly that a new production or company took it up in that later year — only that a review exists from it.
How to watch it
Because the ballet is stitched from eight independent Ives pieces rather than a single through-composed score, listen for the piece to shift character abruptly between sections — from the sparse, spatially divided writing of The Unanswered Question itself to whatever more song- or dance-like textures the later pieces (In the Barn, An Old Song Deranged) supply — and watch whether Feld's staging marks those shifts with changes of grouping, lighting, or costume rather than a continuous narrative through-line. Note Willa Kim's costuming and Allen Lee Hughes' lighting as credited design elements shaping how those transitions read.
Credits
- composer: Charles Ives