He
Never Dances
in the Same River Twice
Mikhail
Baryshnikov
Zellerbach Playhouse
June 2003
reviewed
by Ann Murphy
Timing
is everything. Late in June I saw Mikhail Baryshnikov
in a solo performance at the Zellerbach Playhouse in
Berkeley accompanied by the pianist Koji Attwood. The
next day, cleaning through the unwieldy heaps in my
study, swearing to make order before summer hit, I stumbled
upon an issue of Dance Ink from the winter
of 1993. I flipped to a reprint of a review, now nearly
thirty years old that told of Baryshnikov’s historic
performance at the Maryinsky Theater in February 1974,
a few months before he defected to the West. Written
by Vera Krassovskaya and translated by Vera Komarova-Scanlan
and Elizabeth Kendall, it was repressed in the Soviet
Union for a decade, reprinted in Dance Ink
another decade later, and, ten years after that, serendipitous
fodder for my thoughts on the concert.
The high-priced Berkeley event, with tickets at $86
and $60 to raise money for the Baryshnikov Arts Center
in New York, was an evening Baryshnikov casually called
"Solos with Piano or Not…an Evening of Music and
Dance." It had about it the searching but playful
character that had come to define the White Oak project.
The difference was that the "Solos" performance
was presented by Baryshnikov alone on an intimate scale
in a theater with 500 seats. This gave it an arty, "downtown"
air rather than the flashy, polished feel you get in
a large concert hall, even if the audience was the same.
While
people often haven’t known what to think about the Russian
emigré’s offbeat efforts, their faith in him
is constantly buoyed by his stardom. In fact, his star
status gets people to pay attention to dance they wouldn’t
otherwise view, even for free. Think of him as the John
Lennon of the ballet world: heartbreakingly lyrical,
endlessly versatile, and a moody outsider intent on
using his fame and wealth to push artistic boundaries
rather than to bask in the fatuities of power and fortune.
That he has something profound to demonstrate, and that
he subverts the art hierarchy while using it to push
the art form, makes him something of a noble anti-hero,
a rare phenomenon in any realm.
But
none of this is new. What Krassovskaya reports is that
thirty years ago at the Maryinsky, Baryshnikov was commissioning
work, undermining the expectations the public had of
his virtuosity, and opting for intellectual and emotional
depth in performance even though it was dangerous for
him to do so. Before he fled the Soviet Union, he performed
three dances made for him, and what Krassovskaya writes
about that concert is eerily apt today: "Some were
upset at the absence of obvious virtuosity, though everyone
could see that the demands of plasticity, on Baryshnikov
above all, were unusual. Others noticed that the content
of each ballet didn’t lie on the surface. Indeed, each
ballet’s content unfolded in a complex interaction between
the music and the dancing…."
Something
almost identical could be said of Saturday’s concert.
While Baryshnikvov displayed even less of his historic
virtuosity than he did in last year’s White Oak concert,
and he seemed less physically agile, he also evinced
greater depth and plasticity. The concert began with
Koji Atwood playing a delicate and sinewy sonata by
Antonio Soler, followed by Shumann’s Fantasy Pieces,
opus 12, to which Baryshnikov performed Ruth Davidson
Hahn’s unseasoned work Upon a Whim. Dressed
in Issac Mizrahi’s slinky white nylon warm-up suit with
a lilac lapel against a lilac shirt, Baryshnikov at
first looked sallow as he went through Hahn’s academic
floor patterns, random semaphoring arms, and sudden
shoulder, hip and knee rotations that looked sprung
from a Pilates mat class.
What
happened next, though, was quintessential Baryshnikov.
He took seemingly inconsequential movement and through
his probing intelligence freighted Hahn’s vague arabesque
turns and dreamy saut de l’ange leaps with import. By
the time Baryshnikov was deep into the evening’s third
dance (Lucinda Childs’ Opus One to Alban Berg’s
Sonata opus 1), it became clear that Baryshnikov was
demonstrating how a shared vocabulary of angular arm
gestures, similar geometric floor patterns, and glosses
on iconic ballet steps (from Siegfried to the Prodigal
Son) are like distinct paths to the same beach.
While
it would be overstating it to say that Baryshnikov built
a conceptual art experience out of the material, he
began to stitch an intellectual through-line the instant
he took up a repeat in Upon a Whim. First,
we were hooked by recognizing the steps. Then, with
the sleight of hand that makes him among the supplest,
thinking performers alive, he changed the intention
of the repeated phrase in order to convey that the movement
might be the same and the spacing might be identical,
but the moment was different. By deepening his interior
focus and adding coloring that wasn’t there before—the
casual angel step getting dreamier, the flattened second
position arms becoming more determinedly angular—he
made it clear: you can never dance in the same river
twice.
This
is a significant part of what makes Baryshnikov still
so exciting to watch at 55. As he moves, and even as
his movement compass shrinks by virtue of the limits
age imposes even on the best of dancers, he is able
to infuse repeated patterns with an air of subtle transformation.
Change comes without moral or ideological baggage: he
neither lauds nor deplores it. He simply embodies it.
In
this modest way he establishes an artistic commitment
to nonheroic material and the poetry of change. Krassovskaya
says Baryshnikov shuns "obvious effects in favor
of poetic harmony and unity of the concert." While
Baryshnikov, in fact, knows how to use "obvious
effects" when he needs to, he does assiduously
look for ways to make dance be and speak for itself
again, rescuing it from the throes of cliches, artificiality
and pyrotechnics. This is what, to me, it concretely
means when Krassovskaya says he "embodies Nijinky’s
unrealized dream of returning to the sphere of the pure
music of dance." With an expressive capacity of
seeming limitless depth and nuance, and with his gifts
of mind channeled through his body, Baryshnikov can
make most dance speak.
But
even Baryshnikov’s dancing speaks best when the music
and choreography equal one another, as they did exquisitely
in Childs’ Opus One and Cesc Galabert’s In A Landscape,
to John Cage’s early piano work of the same name. (Both
Berg and Cage studied with Arnold Schönberg.) In
these dances, the dancer’s sublimity as an artist was
met by the imaginative and musical richness of the material.
By placing the dances on either side of the intermission,
the content of each, as Krassovskaya put it, unfolded
in complex interaction.
In
Opus One Baryshnikov dressed in snug red trunks,
revealing a boyish, chiseled body and giving him the
iconic look of a swimmer. In fact, I thought Baryshnikov
personified the resolute solitude of John Cheever’s
Neddy Merrill, the disaffected man who swims eight miles
from pool to pool one summer night in the suburbs. Childs
accomplished this feat through an accretion of quiet
movement focused on isolated releases of weight—a curve
of the torso over bent legs, a single outstretched leg
pulling the body, an athletic swinging arm—that were
then gathered back into a quiet center and eventually
repeated, mirroring a similar pattern of tension, relaxation
and transformation in the progression of the music.
Gelabert’s In A Landscape was a magical study
of the body moving around its central axis, as Cage’s
dreamy score ebbed and flowed around a still point.
The world here, as seen through the eyes of this Spanish
choreographer, was as sensually radiant as Childs’ was
beautifully stoic.
It’s
important to remember that while Baryshnikov is serious,
he’s no bore. His transformations are as apt to be lighthearted
as they are solemn. Krassovskaya never mentions the
younger dancer’s humor. Perhaps he first had to defect
to a land where everyone has the freedom to be fatuous
in order to unleash his own inner clown. Whatever it
took, his capacity for humor has given us everything
from the impish acrobat in Push Comes To Shove,
to the guy who a few years ago amplified his heartbeat,
like a troubled cardiac patient. Baryshnikov also has
enormous ability to mock himself, and implicitly, anyone
who worships him.
Tere
O’Connor’s witty minimalist/surrealist Indoor Man,
part Kafka, part Charlie Chaplin, offered the darkest
humor of the night. Set to David Jaggard’s "Elastic
Tango,"{ and Conlan Nancarrow’s "Tango?,"
Indoor Man framed Baryshnikov in what looked
like a large drawer, trapping him from the waist up.
Inside O’Connor fashioned a room replete with light
switch, twinkling candelabra lights and wallpaper, while
on the back of the box he put a fuzzy reprint of a Vermeer
woman, and along an end a Van Gogh bedroom.
After
engaging in the gestural language of early morning—swiping
the face, scouring the teeth, rootering water out the
ear—he launched a dance by tilting to the right.
It caused the visual equivalent of an earthquake, as
the entire room teetered perilously and hilariously.
When Baryshnikov freed himself from "indoors",
he entered an outside world where another "window,"
this one of light and shadow, caught him as he danced.
As
though to prepare us for the over-the-top finale by
Eliot Feld (the likes of which he probably never performed
at the Maryinsky), we got Brit Michael Clark’s glitzy
Rattle Your Jewelry. Clark offered up Baryshnikov
as the callow superstar in sexy black and tan garb,
performing an angular mechanical ballet that looked
like a Forsythe gloss in slo mo. Baryshnikov smirked
and winked as he leaped like a rock star to the Beatles’
"Back In the USSR," the lyrics blasting: "You
don’t know how lucky you are—Back in the USSR."
Everyone laughed; there were so many layers of irony
here that even the irony had irony.
But
the broadest humor was reserved for Eliot Feld’s soft-shoe
send-up, Mr. XYZ, set to the naughty-voiced
tunes of Leon Redbone. Decking Baryshnikov in pork pie
hat, suspenders, shades, and a cane, Feld managed to
make the piece both a paen and a spoof on the star,
a look back at the man who out-hoofed Broadway up at
Lincoln Center and a look forward to the geezer still
dreaming about beautiful young girls. Like the shape-changing
creature he is, Baryshnikov managed to be young and
ancient at the same time, boyishly randy and a lusty
old man remembering his youth. Finally, Feld hit us
over the head with a last joke: two young leotard-clad
women appeared to offer Myrtha’s lilies to the washed
up Albrecht.
Washed
up? Far from it. To prove it, Baryshnikov pulled the
lighting technician from her chair, danced a tender
two-step with her and drew ahhs full of envy from the
audience. Baryshnikov may never dance in the same river
twice, but he also knows that matinee idols never die.
copyright
Ann Murphy 2003
Photo:
Baryshnikov in Mr. XYZ. Photo by Thomas Giroir
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