WHITE OAK DANCE PROJECT
Pergolesi has a certain boastful musicality, and the fast footwork of the opening section shows off Baryshnikov’s quickness and his soft, strong feet; but what we mainly take away from the dance is the way the dancer thumbs his nose at us, playing with our expectations of a great but aging performer. Turning, Baryshnikov pretends to fall off his center or get dizzy; he continues a successful series of turns until the audience applauds, then looks at us disgustedly–he couldn’t quit, it seems, until we clapped. At other times we feel chastised for our boorish habit of applauding tricks. In one bravura section Baryshnikov greets and shepherds an invisible partner (the dance was originally performed, two years ago, by Baryshnikov and Tharp), revealing the emptiness of the ballet dancer’s deference to the woman he supposedly adores. Pergolesi isn’t really a dance–it’s a joke, a sport. It was born of the theatrical context, and it will die when Baryshnikov stops dancing.
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The second program opened with Merce Cunningham’s 1970 Signals. His work in some ways positively defines the perverse–he cuts the audience no slack at all. Nothing about Signals is easy: there’s no pretty music (no music at all, according to the jazz critic I met in the lobby, though there is a score of found sounds), no pretty dancing, no drama. I should have loved it, but I hated it (there’s perversity for you). Cunningham’s much-vaunted elegance puts me off: he’s theoretical, cerebral. His work looks to me like a desert of restraint, like classroom exercises in alignment and placement. Critic Arlene Croce wrote in 1974 that Cunningham’s choreography is best seen not in theaters but in “big, open rooms” and at close range, and perhaps that was the problem here. By the end Signals warmed up a bit, but to me it was mostly desicated and cold, like an orange sucked dry, then frozen.
