 |
Russian ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov has celebrity charisma in spades, he could dance the Yellow Pages and still look good. Which more or less sums up his appearance in London last week with his own Florida-based modern dance company, The White Oak Dance Project.
Baryshnikov, one of the finest virtuoso classical dancers the world has ever seen, defected from the Kirov Ballet in 1974 becoming the showbiz darling of the world. After a blazing 15 year career both in ballet and films, Baryshnikov discovered what a dancer does when the time comes to hang up one's Princely tunic. He took up modern dance. The physical demands are a fraction of classical ballet's and well suited to the ageing physique; cheap to produce, little more than lighting dresses the stage and the artistic demands of the abstract simplicities of minimal dances are, well, minimal and especially welcome to performers of a certain age.
The evening opened with Baryshnikov, 54, alone in Lucinda Childs's Largo. In conventional black suit and white T-shirt, the great dancer walked a lot and ran a little in a self-contained reverie pondering, perhaps, where he'd left the car keys. The music, an enchanting Corelli Concerto Grosso, was as thoroughly ignored as The Chambers Brothers In the Midnight Hour in Yvonne Rainer's Trio A Pressured No 3. Partly an attempt by Baryshnikov to catch a female's eye while she continues her dance as though no-one was there (there's a message there somewhere for someone) the dancers flail in isolated rows while the rest of us revel in the music's irresistible beat.
Erik Hawkins' Early Floating
Photograph by John Ross ©
In Erick Hawkins's Early Floating we caught glimpses of the Baryshnikov legend, the fluidity and soft grace of a body born to dance and his jumps were pretty impressive, too. But it was Childs's Chacony that left a final whiff of Hans Andersen's Imperial delusion. In the final work we waited for Baryshnikov's finale and waited and waited. Just when we suspected he had left before us, Baryshnikov appeared and closed the evening alone on stage. As the curtain fell those happy to collude in the illusion screamed adoration; the rest of us hurried to catch the all too real tube train home.
|
