Mysterious histories

Mikhail Baryshnikov and White Oak dance on

by Marcia B. Siegel

Every piece on the program of White Oak Dance Project last weekend at the Shubert Theatre seemed to have at least one other dance behind it. The company itself is a little bit fictitious, provisional. Outside of a few fast-disappearing commissioned works, the dancers and the repertory have all come from somewhere else and are trying to find a way to work for now. You can't help thinking about where they've been and how they happen to be here.

White Oak was started in 1990 to back up the great ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov, who wanted to ease off the rigors of his native craft but not stop dancing entirely. The eight dancers do small choreographic works interspersed with his showcase solos. The company has been handsomely supported by the late Howard Gilman; it even has a resident string quartet to provide live music. This seems like a fairly standard vanity set-up, along the lines of Nureyev and Friends in the 1970s and several subsequent ballet-company spinoffs. The star draws in the audience and gets to dance some novelties while giving work to other dancers as well. But White Oak's operating plan contradicts the idea of a star vehicle. There's no artistic director, only manager personnel, and with an admirable but wholly unrealistic modesty Baryshnikov simply lists himself alphabetically among the dancers.

There's a strange atmosphere of permanent attrition around the company. With Baryshnikov remaining at the center, the dancers seem to change all the time. At first they were all veterans of other companies, and it was a pleasure to see the mature way they interpreted the work. There was a certain amount of turnover built into this, and not only because age places a strain on a dancer's ability to withstand and overcome injury. Heavy hitters like David Parsons and Mark Morris would drop in for a season or a few performances, then go on to other commitments. As the White Oak personnel shifted, so did the repertory. The company that came to Boston this time was almost entirely new to me, with Jamie Bishton and Ruthlyn Salomons, I think, the longest-established members. The dancers seemed younger and perhaps hadn't worked together very long -- the biographies in the program didn't always say when the individual came on board.

I felt the lack of ensemble most strongly in Kraig Patterson's Y, which is set to the first three movements of the Debussy string quartet. Patterson choreographs in the note-for-note manner of Mark Morris, with whom he dances. Wearing impeccable gray velvet and satin clothes by Santo Loquasto, the five dancers grouped and regrouped, seemingly with no other intention but to fill the stage in varied ways. They gestured severely, kept time with the jittering violins, formed and dissolved partnerships. There seemed to be no center to the dance, except for a tilted, two-foot silver disc that was planted center stage. This was usually ignored by the dancers, but sometimes they would hover over it, as if to warm themselves. Toward the end, each one crossed over it, ritualistically stepping on it as he or she went. But there was never any real clue as to its meaning.

The shadow dance in Y was a version done by Kraig Patterson's own dancers, who apparently created a sense of a family or a community through the way they connected the movements and worked with one another. I know about this only by hearsay, but it would make more sense than the impersonal, almost didactic way White Oak conveyed the piece.

Paul Taylor's Profiles is a solid addition to the repertory, bearing the mark of a master who's confident of his ability to swim way out beyond the breakwater and take the audience with him. Profiles is even more impersonal than Y, but its very oddity is disarming; we don't look for family or friendliness, let alone love in the usual expressive sense.

As the string quartet plays Jan Radzynski's minimalist score -- a sonorous beehive, with the instruments tacking and buzzing close in around one central tone -- two couples shuffle across the space, their feet going one way, their torsos twisted flat. Knees bent, ankles flexed, arms sharply hooked, fingers curled down to the first knuckle, they seem locked into immobility. Yet they're able to yank their limbs different ways to change their shape and direction. They can jump in the air, mount each other's chest or shoulders, carry each other, and even almost embrace. Being so straitjacketed, they seem unusually intense, even touching, in their struggles to connect.

Most audiences probably have no idea that Profiles is a choreographic sketch for Paul Taylor's pop-art version of Le sacre du printemps. It had its premiere in 1979, a season before the comic-strip characters, the bizarre, interwoven double plotline, and the Stravinsky two-piano score came together in that amazing work. What predominates in the severely two-dimensional Profiles is the ferocious inventiveness that made Le sacre possible.

Opening night at the Shubert, the central attraction was Baryshnikov's solo appearance -- there's one on every program. I guess by now the White Oak audience isn't expecting him to do Albrecht from Giselle. There's been plenty of hype about his age (50), and his search for challenging material to keep him dancing, and the Christopher Janney/Sara Rudner piece HeartBeat:mb that's oh so chic in a nation of avid hypochondriacs.

The idea is that the dancer is hooked up to an electronic monitor that plays his heartbeat through a sound system for all to hear. Janney made the piece for Rudner in 1983, and others have performed it since then. Rather than set choreography, it's a tightly structured improvisation; the dancer really creates the piece each time. According to Rudner, Baryshnikov's is the first "theatrical" version. When it was created, the downtown dancers in New York were beginning to move out of the lofts and were adding smart production elements to their low-budget experiments. Rudner says HeartBeat was one of the most important pieces in her career, and she hopes to perform it again herself in an upcoming season. In the '80s, a thing like a heart monitor would have been part of a serious exploration of movement, not a gimmick.

Well, if anyone can keep an audience's sensationalistic instincts at bay, Baryshnikov can. He was shirtless, so you could see the electrodes taped to his chest, and he looked fit but not hunky the way male dancers do nowadays. He looked like a middle-aged guy going for a check-up. He put himself through the movement equivalent of a doctor's inventory -- breathe, now rotate your arms, now start circling the room, now hang over and rest. The monitor thumped reassuringly. When he raised his left arm or tilted so his chest collapsed in a certain way, the monitor rumbled like rocks tumbling into a cave.

As he increased his activity, the heartsound would speed up, then slow down again as he gave himself a breather. But it stayed remarkably regular, so regular that he began to use it as a rhythmic accompaniment, dancing little syncopations and ornaments on it as he perambulated. What an idea. Later on, the string quartet played Samuel Barber's familiar Adagio for Strings, and Baryshnikov worked up to some strenuous leaps and jumps that climaxed just as the music did. The monitor was racing but still steady.

Jamie Bishton did a long solo to begin the last piece, Neil Greenberg's Tchaikovsky Dance, and it looked lush and romantic after the stringencies of the rest of the program. There was plenty of subtext to this one, too. Greenberg danced for years with Merce Cunningham, and he's absorbed the Cunningham/John Cage aesthetic. Dancers came and went, did long or short phrases, faced in different directions sometimes and worked in planned ensembles sometimes. At no particular time, the musicians would break into the grandiose finale of some Tchaikovsky quartet. Then there'd be silence.

Once in a while a supertitle would appear on the backdrop, telling us the name of the dancer we were watching, or giving us a bit of personal information: "Jamie was the youngest dancer when he joined the company." "Now he's the oldest (except for Misha)." Halfway through the dance, Baryshnikov and Ruthlyn Salomons entered on opposite sides of the stage. They were out of town until this point in the choreographing, the supertitle told us.

Greenberg's dance reminded me of the playful years of the Cunningham company, when Cage was alive and it was a matter of principle that you let accidents become part of the dance, let the dance take in the dancers in their own best ways. And though Baryshnikov has plenty of years to go yet, he provided the kind of sober, attentive presence in the dance that Cunningham projects now -- the gentlemanly, paternal desire to blend in with the company, and the knowledge that when he's on stage the audience doesn't see anyone else.