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DanceThe picture that sized up Mikhail Baryshnikov for his new audience in the West was an Avedon shot that ran in Vogue in October 1974, four months after the dancer defected. He flew straight up from the page, arms outstretched, chest bare, sky behind himhuge. He flew out of the lap of Vogue and into light. The move could have been the trick of a diver or a gymnast, but the body was pure balletthat immaculate musculature, the privilege in space, those toes. Baryshnikov had chubby cheeks, which was a shock, and big, round, sad, silent-movie eyes, a blue that sighed the word persecution. And it turned out he was small, about five feet six inches. So his round cheeks and round muscles and round-as-a-compass pirouettes and tours en lair made him seem cherubic, a kind of opulent ballet angel. We knew he came from the Kirov, but with his blazing perfection he could just as easily have dropped from the sky, son of the sun. I remember tearing that photo out of Vogue and tacking it to the butter-yellow wall of my college dorm room. The word Apollonian was soon tacked to Baryshnikov. In Gennady Smakovs book The Great Russian Dancers, you find him in the chapter titled Dancers Without Category, an honor he shares with Vaslav Nijinsky and Rudolph Nureyev. All three came from the Kirov, all three popped the worlds perception of the male dancer. But the first two were hotbloods who inspired writers to enraptured animal metaphors big cats, gold slaves, jungle lust. As exotically and marketably Russian as Baryshnikov was, he did not channel Dionysus. He was more like the love child of pantherine, dance-or-die Nureyev and icecap cool, super-correct Erik Bruhn, dance gods of the Sixties who had a romantic fascination with each others techniques (and a very brief fling). Misha was intense and aloof, charismatic and mega-correct, hot and cold. Though he was never dance-or-die like Rudi, when Baryshnikov was into his work, it was all systems go, classical dancing on a par with Vladimir Nabokov on a literary riff: plush, precise, the pedant in a paradise of plosives. It was articulation pressing the boundaries of the language, self-consciousness at critical mass (eternity just beyond the sound barrier). Misha was a man not a panther. That was the turn-on. His sensuality lay in his phenomenal, formal purity. He was objectivity imploding, conservatism climaxing. Which is why he made such a match with choreographer Twyla Tharp (one of those feminists who only really respects men)they played mind games with the classical syntax. In his dancing with American Ballet Theatre, Baryshnikov was always physically rapt, but over time his heart was missing. His Albrecht in Giselle became more false not less, as if Misha couldnt believe in the ballet anymore. The boil of his brisés in Act Two, a diagonal that always stunned the audience, well, they boiled harder, as if to heat up the performance. Eventually, Baryshnikov stopped dancing the prince roles. And that ravishing fifth position of his legs crossed in an airtight X, thighs and calves having the tempered curves of Brancusis Bird in Spaceactually seemed less ballets Middle C, its intimation of infinity, than a place closed in, alone, a confessional molded to his use. Its funny, I can drum up memories of Baryshnikov dancing, but what floats up on its own is his face. I remember him looking out from his classical technique as if trapped in it. Baryshnikov left ballet when he left his post as artistic director of ABT in 1989. Hed had it with the board, the development department, the whole arts marketing circus. And hed had it with the New York critics, who poo-poohed his expensive production of Swan Lake, and questioned his leadership of the company in ways theyd never questioned his dancing. American Ballet Theatre lost an imperfect, inspiring director and has been improvising ever since. And Baryshnikov? He defected again, this time quietly. In 1990, with Mark Morris, he founded a small modern dance company called the White Oak Dance Project. But can he be a modern dancer? Last fall Baryshnikov made a guest appearance with the Tricia Brown Company at BAMs Next Wave Festival. Together, they danced her solo If You Couldnt See Me. It was a startling embodiment of the old adage: You can take the boy out of fifth position but you cant take fifth position out of the boy. There was Brown, in her pigeon-toed, plain-Jane, haywire styleindecision in actionand there was Baryshnikov, doing the same steps at the same time ten feet away, making them look like commandments cut in travertine, neat, deep, decisive. The antithesis of the Brown style, he pulled the eye away from Brown and made the dance his solo (she became periphery). Such favoritism wasnt supposed to happen, of course, but you cant blame the brain waves for seeking order. He does look different these days. A picture of Baryshnikov by Fergus Greer ran in The New Yorker a week before White Oaks BAM engagement.[1] The face that used to be so round is now lean, that used to be all cheek is now all forehead (the Luke Skywalker hair has been shorn). Baryshnikovs expression is stern, even severe, gravity pulling at his chin. And the shot itself puts him in a tight frame in which he doesnt fully fit and yet attempts to do a dance (actually, an awkward, right-angle hand position from Merce Cunninghams Septet). This photo sums up Baryshnikovs situation in the White Oak Dance Project. That ballet space and sky is long gone. The name White Oak comes from a Florida-Georgia plantation owned by the Gilman Paper Company, whose chairman, Howard Gilman, has put money into the company and given it a place to work. The words White Oak also propose a kind of parallel stature: Baryshnikov has left the pillars of classicism for the equally wise and pure Earth Mother oaks of modern dance. Nevertheless, its not a particularly coherent or categorical bunch of dances hes put together and there seems to be no curatorial basis for whats included. Rather, White Oak reads like a personal collection of totems and taboos, a repertory that revolves around Baryshnikov, what he thinks he should try, and what he doesnt want to do again (i.e., anything he did before). Hes cultivating a garden of think pieces and abstinenceor to put it another way, theres too much forehead and not enough cheek. Its been a long time since Ive seen such a dour assemblage of dances. Both programs contained the late Erick Hawkinss last dance, Journey of a Poet, a work made in 1994 as a solo for Baryshnikov, and expanded posthumously into an ensemble. Set to a swarming string quartet, Hawkinss creepy-crawly plastique moderne makes Poet seem a crawl through Kafka, an abstraction or refraction of Baryshnikovs late Eighties Broadway performance as the cockroach in Metamorphosis. Poet is baloney, and also cause for concern. Doesnt Baryshnikov know how bad it is? And just because he commissioned the dance does that mean we have to see it three years later? Both programs also featured the engagements premiere, Remote, a long and punishingly austere ensemble work by young choreographer Meg Stuart (with equally punishing string music by Eleanor Hovda). Warning bells went off when I read André Lepeckis program note, a two-hundred-word tone poem that began by quoting T. S. Eliots still point of the turning world and went on to describe Remote as a dance moving around the limits of dancing. Reversing time, cutting time, expanding it to its annihilation, etc. Luckily I had read The New York Times the previous Sunday, wherein Stuart explained that she was actually deconstructing a pirouette. And so Remote begins with dancers spaced out (both meanings), inching around in glacial slow motion, belaboring the head snap of a ballet spot, succumbing to Le Sacre spasms, starting over and over again. Time expands. As for annihilationgrainy, gray projections of lost highways, barbed wire, empty windows, and blurred crowds hit the cyclorama in narrow shafts, like St. Sebastian arrows in the social skin. That pirouette, if you hadnt already guessed, is symbolic. Pirouettes, like man, are self-involved and solipsistic, isolated and alienating. Pretty soon the pirouettes look not deconstructed so much as detonated. Its a stage full of victims, everybody tripping and lurching, blown up and homeless. Two dancers try to Only Connect. Only they cant. Baryshnikov does a pretty good imitation of a bag man whos needling the audience and nodding off. The dance ends with Jamie Bishton in a cone of dust motes, convulsed. That Stuart sustains the first half of Remote, the pirouette part, with such tonal security is an accomplishment. The dance is also slickly performed. But Stuarts heavy, high school message is clichéd and dated. And on the evidence of Remote, her choreographic hand is echt Eighties, her sense of the body in space derivative, a meeting between Twyla Tharps violent off-centeredness and Anna Teresa de Keersmaekers repeating-decimal expressionism. Im not surprised that most of Stuarts work has been commissioned and performed in Europe. They eat urban angst for breakfast. The two swing dances on the programs offered respite, though they too were lit low and dusty. Merce Cunninghams Septet is an early charmer, one of the last dances in which he choreographed hand in hand with the music, Saties Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear (piano for four hands). Cunningham not only teases his titlethe dance requires six dancers (Les Six?)he teases the Twenties of Satie and St. Denis, posing his dancers in archly arty modern dance tableaux, framing them in air quotes, in Saties moments of studied stillness. With Baryshnikov at its center, you feel Marcel Marceau in the air, too, for Misha plays happily with Cunninghams mimelike emphasis. Its perhaps more than Cunningham would wish for, but endearing all the same. Unspoken Territory, a 1995 solo by Dana Reitz for Baryshnikov, was the blessing of the engagement. It is performed in silence, with Baryshnikov costumed in a chiton, apricot-shaded and sheerhe seems a Grecian ghost. And in fact he begins the piece in relief, as if hed danced right off the surface of an urn, the power of his profile still acting upon him. It is a stream-of-consciousness solo, a passage of unheard melodies. Jennifer Tiptons lighting is a succession of half-lit geometriespyramids and trapezoidsbeamed down from the fly space, pitched in from the wings, widening and narrowing. Baryshnikov travels along rims of light, bobs in jars of shadow, strikes majestic poses in silhouette. He turns himself to stone, a centurians horse, wakes suddenly to his own image and fingers his face like Narcissus. Free association gives way to refrain. In a repeating sequence of two steps, a leap, and a landing, the rhythm of his feet on the floor is so powerfully certain that the soundsscuff, scuff, silence, and a plumphcome to seem code for the secret self. That airborne absence is the closest Baryshnikov comes to touching his soul in this repertory. Unfortunately, Unspoken Territory does- nt compensate for the pleasureless, lusterless whole, the lack of kinetic kick. Its hard not to feel theres something punitive in this Project, hard not to hear Baryshnikov saying something like: you didnt appreciate me at ABT, didnt see how serious I really was. I may be reading this in, and it may be unfair. But at the very least, White Oak shows his taskmasters taste for the dogmatic and the coldhow he takes seriousness way too seriously. Why such dark tones and gloomy lighting? Why must string quartets sound like crazed cicadas or Soviet experiments? Why no joy, and so few jumps? Baryshnikovs solos are so à terre youd think he ordered the air off-limits. And yet in the instances when he performed a jeté (in Septet) or a series of turning leaps (the Hawkins) you felt a sigh go through the audience its him, hes dancing. Who is Baryshnikov in this company? Large and lordly on the ballet stageand make no mistake, even standing still little Misha flooded the Metropolitan Opera House with his presenceBaryshnikovs chief challenge here is to blend in, stay small. In the sense that the stylistic requirements of these dances scale him down, make him human, he does blend. He dances with modesty and commitment and splendid articulation. But without classicism theres no critical mass, and without mass theres no Misha. Its tempting to view Baryshnikov, in his self-imposed downsizing, as a statement on the diminished state of ballet. I suspect he wouldnt fight that interpretation. But I dont think its that simple. Baryshnikov has always had a withholding side. He used to give his audiences wonder upon wonder. Now he wants to make us work.
Notes
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 15 May 1997, on page 55 Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/mishaimpossible-jacobs-3337
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