MODERN RISK GROWS STURDY OAK.

MODERN RISK GROWS STURDY OAK

WHITE OAK DANCE PROJECT

BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC BROOKLYN, NEW YORK JUNE 11, 2000

REVIEWED BY DORIS HERING

Inevitably, the 10-year-old White Oak Dance Project is still centered around the performing persona of co-founder Mikhail Baryshnikov. His dance language now has to do with the subtleties of timing and with the beautiful seriousness that underlies the true artist.

One of the century's great dramatic dancers, he brings a unique dimension to the non-dramatic dance he favors for White Oak. How eloquent his shoulders were as he manipulated a red ball in Yvonne Rainer's After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. How wistfully playful he appeared in the solo Peccadillos, which Mark Morris made for him. And how sensitively he blended with the other dancers in John Jasperse's See Through Knot. In addition to Baryshnikov, the wellknit company consisted of Raquel Aedo, Emily Coates, Rosalynde LeBlanc, Michael Lomeka and Emmanuele Phuon.

Although See Through Knot and Peccadillos were premieres, and After Many a Summer Dies the Swan was a new view of earlier choreographic materials, the program, which also included two Trisha Brown works, had a few bald spots.

Something was missing in After Many a Summer. It turned out to be Rainer's own dancing. As a performer in the 1960s, she radiated a sturdy, schoolgirl charm. It gave a welcome freshness to her choreographic forays into everyday action.

During the work, whose title may allude to Baryshnikov's current attitude toward his former ballet-virtuoso career, the dancers were engaged in walking about the stage and up one side of the proscenium; they strode alone or in clusters, rested on chairs, counter-tugged at a long, white cord. There was also an interminable sequence for two women lying side-on-side, with one repeatedly rolling off her partner. The dancers were generous with their involvement in this naive landscape.

As the participants clustered and peeled away and as the sound score by Stephen Vitiello and Frances-Marie Uitti became more intense, See Through Knot assumed the serpentine mystery of a rope coiling and uncoiling. The company danced it with cool stylishness.

Pianist Ethan Iverson looked like an adult version of the cartoon character Schroeder as he picked away at Satie on a tiny piano. But as Baryshnikov negotiated the bouncy patterns, his interpretation had more nuance than the choreography.

Much of the avant-garde of the '60s, and even into the '70s, had to do with intentionally mundane movement. It avoided a poetic dimension. But Trisha Brown found room for the dimension. Perhaps it explains why much of her work has endured beyond that of her Judson Church contemporaries.

The program highlight was her Glacial Decoy, in which the women, in diaphanous white gowns, sifted on and off. Behind them, four large photographic projections kept moving from right to left. The images, many of them fragmentary, had a solid life of their own, and as the dancers glided through their peaceful ritual, the effect was of a pristine bloom slowly taking form in the shadow of a freight train.