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Aleksandr Petrovsky comes to town
Or, Mr. Big’s defeated rival dances at Boston Ballet
BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

Creative dance in Boston gets a shot in the arm this weekend from Sex and the City’s Mikhail Baryshnikov, who’s concluding his current solo tour with two benefit performances at Boston Ballet’s Grand Studio on Clarendon Street to benefit the Ballet and Summer Stages Dance at Concord Academy. The idea for the fundraiser originated with Summer Stages directors Amy Spencer and Richard Colton, who are looking to involve more local dancers and audiences in the eight-year-old program that has brought top teachers and cutting-edge choreographers to the area. This year’s Summer Stages season will feature a stellar workshop faculty and performances by David Parker and the Bang Group, Donna Uchizono, Tere O’Conner, Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer, and three legendary women, Carmen de Lavallade, Sara Rudner, and Martine Van Hamel, in a program of solos curated by Gus Solomons Jr.

In addition to offering fellowships for emerging choreographers who’ll work under faculty mentorship toward a showcase performance at the end of the summer session, Spencer and Colton are expanding their outreach this year with a series of mini-grants administered through five area dance centers. Boston Arts Academy, Boston Conservatory, Green Street Studios, the Dance Complex, and CrashArts’ Ten’s the Limit will select recipients of free tickets to the Baryshnikov performance, the Summer Stages series in July, and master classes in Concord with Daniel Nagrin and David Parker. The Surdna and LEF-New England Foundations and the New England Foundation for the Arts have already chipped in for the mini-grants.

Perhaps no classical dancer of his magnitude has been as adventurous as Baryshnikov in exploring the past and future of dancemaking. Now 56, he’s extended his own performing years with new and experimental works crafted for his mature talents. Dance fans will know that every performance at this stage in his career could be historic. Beginning with his first modern role, Push Comes to Shove, which Twyla Tharp created for him at American Ballet Theatre in 1976, Baryshnikov brought a slew of contemporary and postmodern choreographers into the ABT repertory. He began a long and productive association with Mark Morris with the 1988 Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes, a work that will enter the Boston Ballet repertory next week. His White Oak Dance Project was an innovation all by itself, one that allowed dancers and crossover choreographers to be seen by unusually broad audiences. Now he’s pushing the boundaries again with the Baryshnikov Arts Center (under construction in New York), which he’s thinking of as a laboratory to promote "interdisciplinary experimentation and collaboration" with rehearsal studios and a performance space.

The network that twines all these people together drew in Colton and Spencer via the Tharp company. Colton actually taught Baryshnikov the marathon 13-minute solo he and William Whitener danced in Tharp’s 1980 Brahms’ Paganini. (Baryshnikov never performed it.) In the early ’90s, both Colton and Spencer danced with White Oak, in works by Mark Morris among others. They hope to stimulate new dance ideas and creativity through their Concord programs and in town as well. Boston Ballet fosters year-round classes and programs throughout the area, so the interface between these two institutions could lead to exciting cross-fertilization.

Featuring works by Lucinda Childs, Eliot Feld, and Cesc Gelabert, "Solos with Piano or Not" will take place in Boston Ballet’s Grand Studio, 19 Clarendon Street in the South End, March 19 at 8 p.m. and March 20 at 7 p.m. Tickets are $500 for Friday night’s performance, which includes a reception with Baryshnikov, and $250 for Saturday night’s. For reservations, call the Ballet at (617) 695-6955 or visit www.bostonballet.org or www.summerstagesdance.org.


Issue Date: March 19 - 25, 2004
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