Mikhail Baryshnikov: An Evening of Music and Dance.

JANUARY 21-25, 1998 REVIEWED BY ROSLYN SULCAS

Mikhail Baryshnikov is one of this century's great dancers--a performer who was able to extend the appeal of ballet far beyond its usual parameters when he burst onstage in the early seventies, and whose subsequent fame has enabled him to do the same for the contemporary work that he has presented through his small company, the White Oak Dance Project, in recent years.

At the start of the solo program that is his most recent artistic venture, he has only to appear for the audience to break into rapturous and prolonged applause. As becomes increasingly clear during the performance, he could present virtually anything to his enchanted public. The fact that he obviously cares about this repertory is testament to a dancerly intelligence that goes beyond the psychological need to remain onstage or a physical need to dance. Baryshnikov's choices speak also of his curiosity, at age fifty, at discovering new facets of the performing self, and about a remarkable desire to keep reenacting the role of the beginner.

In the four solos, interspersed with musical interludes by the White Oak Chamber Ensemble, that make up the salon-type program, Baryshnikov shows the chiseled focus and nuanced clarity that defined him as a classical dancer. He also moves into quite different terrain. Looking stern at the initial spontaneous applause, he soon relaxes into Mark Morris's 1995 Three Russian Preludes (set to Shostakovich). He gives wonderful weight and plasticity to the dance's folk motifs, playing with variations of speed and dynamics in rapid crisscrossing changements in turned-in Fourth Position, echoed by scissoring arms; slower attitude turns; little bent-kneed walks with hands held in prayer position; and sudden blurs of chaine turns.

In Jose Limon's Choconne (1942), the Spanish origins of the form are given expression through proudly lifted arms, turned-in wrists, and an angled head. While Baryshnikov perhaps lacks some kind of physical amplitude (height? weight?) for the solo, it gives him a chance to demonstrate the wonderful control that enables him to arrest motion at high speed and imprint a shape upon the eye. And the admirable restraint of his delivery gives full honor to Nicolas Danielson's beautiful rendition of Bach's Partita No. 2 in D minor for solo violin.

Kraig Patterson's Tryst (1997), to music from Bach's Concerto No. 3 in D minor, is less choreographically coherent. Perhaps for that reason, it becomes a transparent vehicle for Baryshnikov's own personality. Dressed in loose white pants and shirt, he is utterly charming in each of the work's three sections, shifting from debonair confidence to moody introspection, and building a motif of little impulses that traverse the body into a humorous, abandoned loosening of reins by the end.

In HeartBeat: mb, a premiere, Baryshnikov, wears a sensor attached to his bare torso that amplifies his heartbeat and turns it into the sound accompaniment for the dance. Unfortunately, this works better in concept than in the event. With "choreographic direction" by Sara Rudner, and sound design by architect Christopher Janney, HeartBeat, mb is interesting because it reveals the vulnerability of the private man behind the famous face (at times his heart was beating very fast), but, choreographically, it is little more than a series of special effects. The dance does, however, provide the perfect image of Baryshnikov as a performer. Like all great artists, he is transparently honest onstage; what he shows an audience through his dancing is perhaps the deepest truth that he is capable of expressing about himself. As such, HeartBeat, mb is perfectly apt.