ABT NOVELTY: ‘MURDER,’ HE DANCED

Wearing a filmy, low-cut, floor-length nightgown, shoulder-length blonde ringlets pinned with white camellias and an expression of high-Romantic yearning, Mikhail Baryshnikov coughs tragically and swoons into the arms of Clark Tippet. Death is nigh--and so is an itinerant band of pallbearers.

With the help of his T-shirted and sneakered partner, Baryshnikov manages to rise daintily on half-toe for a poignant farewell and then sinks gracefully into the depths of a waiting coffin, hands sweetly wreathing one another as the lid is closed.

You can’t keep a good man down, however, and a moment later this laddie of the camellias makes a desperate escape, madly jete ing away from his casket, only to be captured, dragged back and dumped inside.

As the the funeral cortege marches gloomily through American Ballet Theatre Studio 5, framed against the windows overlooking 19th and Broadway, new fatal attachments quickly form in the dance-drama, inviting other florid guises--and deaths--for Baryshnikov, and prompting more entries for those appallingly overzealous pallbearers. The ballet isn’t called “Murder” for nothing.

Supervising this last New York rehearsal before “Murder” hits the road with Ballet Theatre--for a premiere in San Francisco (last week) and performances in Los Angeles on Wednesday and March 11 in Shrine Auditorium--is David Gordon: tall, bearded, graying and rather big-bellied for someone who still performs with his own postmodern ensemble, the Pick-up Company.

At 50, Gordon is generally acknowledged as a major creative force in avant-garde dance--but he has always refused to call himself a choreographer. Thus, Gordon is credited with the “construction” of “Murder” in the same way that he constructed “Field, Chair and Mountain” for Ballet Theatre last year.

But there are differences beyond terminology. Despite its unorthodox elements (including metal folding chairs used as platforms for pointe work), “Field, Chair and Mountain” did reflect a unified dance conception, a choreographic vision.

In contrast, “Murder” is indeed a construction: a 25-minute mosaic of familiar stories, characters and images from opera, ballet, books, movies and history that attempts to make a statement about the absurdity, and power, of Romantic excess. In a Ballet Theatre season that offers a surfeit of star-crossed lovers, vengeful Wilis and suffering swan queens, “Murder” also can be taken as a comment on the company’s lust for the past, not to mention the multiple roles assumed by its artistic director. And it is big news in the dance world, if only for luring Baryshnikov from “White Nights” to white nighties.

Gordon has long been celebrated for the ironic humor in his work, but, as Baryshnikov himself insists in a post-rehearsal interview, “Murder” is far different than a Ballets Trockadero drag lampoon.

“It’s not a slapstick, laugh-for-a-laugh comedy ,” he declares. “It will produce certain laughs, but it’s very subtle, attached to an idea--always an intellectual idea.”

Baryshnikov points out that the music for “Murder”--the first movement of Berlioz’ “Grande symphonie funebre et triomphale”--is “so colossal, so powerful, so pompous, any attempt at campiness just doesn’t go anywhere.

“By this music, David is trying to put all these vignettes together--’Camille,’ ‘Mata Hari,’ ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ mixed with ‘Frankenstein’--and in this way it may be the most logical ballet he has ever done in his life.”

“When I first asked him, ‘What do you want to do?’ he said, ‘a character ballet.’ From his point of view, this is a story ballet, something less abstract than his work for his own company. It is a very different work for him, almost a step to the side.”

And not only for Gordon. “Murder,” after all, represents Baryshnikov’s maiden venture in a ballerina role and comes at a time when a persistent knee injury has forced the 38-year-old ballet star to consider precisely when and how he intends to retire from dancing. However, he laughs off the idea of possibly ending his career in a dress.

“This is only one ballet in the (Ballet Theatre) season,” he says with a conspiratorial smile. “If I was dancing the last ballet in my life, maybe I wouldn’t choose this one. Maybe I would finish nicely with ‘Giselle.’ But I’m moving pretty well now and I’d like to work with a few people that I never worked with before. One of them is David.

“He is extremely theatrical, extremely disciplined and extremely non-compromising as a worker. For a classically oriented company, he’s an outsider, but a lot of (classical) choreographers could use his knowledge and his attitude toward the theater.

“The way he talks, the way he explains what he needs in terms of the acting, delivery, simplicity, attitude to space, projection--that’s exactly what the young dancers in Ballet Theatre need. I’m taking his art very seriously.”

The gray metal door to the five-story commercial building on Broadway in the SoHo area may be spray-painted with the word “Nark,” but the nameplates establish this site as something of a postmodern Hall of Fame: Besides David Gordon and his wife and dance partner, Valda Setterfield, the lofts on various floors here house the likes of Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs. All of them participated in the celebrated break with modern dance tradition at nearby Judson Church in the 1960s.

Sitting on a metal folding chair in his airy, largely empty dance studio, Gordon recalls “Random Breakfast,” a 1963 Judson piece for Setterfield and himself that, like “Murder,” included satiric references to the movies, ballet and other media, as well as a drag number (Gordon in a red wig, strapless lace dress and mantilla). “It was very theatrical, a kind of spectacle and I think I’ve never not done that,” he emphasizes softly. “I think the most clear characteristic in my work is that it has always been theatrical.”

“Murder” is also like early Gordon in that its references are double-edged--ridiculing and celebrating their subjects at the same time.

“I don’t mean to sound naive,” he begins, “but I am not unaffected to this day by the 89th viewing of Elsa Lanchester rising up as the bride of Frankenstein. I think it is very silly and also astonishingly gorgeous. So, there is a fondness for these images that I include in my work. As my tongue moves into my cheek, my hand also moves to my heart.”

Like Paul Taylor in “Le Sacre du Printemps: The Rehearsal,” Gordon’s “Murder” springs from an approach to the score that balances the composer’s intentions against the responses of an irreverent contemporary listener.

“Berlioz wrote the music for a public performance commemorating the revolution in France,” Gordon explains. “That seems like a strong, patriotic and sincere event. And yet, this many years later, the music sounds excessive and melodramatic.”

“I like that it is rather heartfelt music that time and changes in taste and style have given an added ingredient. I wouldn’t have been interested if it was comic music.”

What Gordon finds especially curious is the way that Berlioz keeps switching between lyric episodes and ominous or mournful passages. In one of these sequences of Ping-Pong mood shifts, he has Baryshnikov drink a potion and then--while dancing a sweetly innocent pas de deux with Amy Rose--suddenly change into a horrific B-movie creature.

“I’m not a person for whom music frequently conjures up images,” Gordon says. “In most of my so-called career I haven’t used it and when I do, I deal with it as sound. But this music began conjuring up images almost from the beginning.”

In the past, Gordon often had speech accompany his dances and, in response to Baryshnikov’s request for verbal material, “Murder” features a detective-story prologue written by Gordon and narrated (on tape) by Setterfield. Gordon describes this sequence of pell-mell intrigue and violent death involving 16 characters (all named Smith, Smythe, Smittie, Smithie or Schmidt) as “a Feydeau situation in which you don’t wind up in bed, you wind up in a coffin.”

He confesses to being initially “very nervous” about the prologue seeming too corny but has now come to trust what he calls “the mechanics of the piece--the way things pass into and out of the space, the way episodes overtake one another, the way the wheels are oiled. The silliness is now a sort of sheltered ingredient in this mass movement of people and objects. I feel good about that.”

And he pays eloquent tribute to the dedication of his star. “Misha is very amazing,” he exclaims, adding, “it’s very amazing even to say ‘Misha.’ It took me weeks not to stutter or say ‘him.’ Isn’t it astonishing that this man, like Buster Keaton--as opposed to Milton Berle--is dealing with those scenes with such seriousness of intention and content, and that the discussions we’ve had have all been about the reality of this situation and not about the jokes?”

Ultimately, this expressive content is what makes “Murder” seem to Gordon “a peculiar piece” in his body of work. Not so long ago, he permitted only direct action and rigorously excluded “reactive material,” attitudes about the action. But in a rehearsal one day, he recalls, “somebody in my company moved away from some place and looked back over her shoulder as if something had just happened to her. And I looked at her and said ‘I’m going to have to stop that .’

“But then I asked myself ‘Why? What is it I’m avoiding here and what will that do to this work?’

“So I let that happen, opened this tiny crack, and somebody else in the company said, ‘Aha! We can have reaction now.’ And so reaction appeared in the work, and I began to monitor how much.

“Now I make a piece called ‘Murder’ and the element of reaction is bigger, a (formal) convention in fact. Would ‘Murder’ have been made five years ago? No, I don’t think I could have made it back then.”

Reluctant to be defined or classified as a dance constructor, Gordon at length agrees, somewhat wearily, to offer a generalized self-appraisal. “I’ve been involved in the so-called dance world for 25 years or more,” he says. “And somewhere within the last six or seven years I have begun to learn about dancing --the traditions and conventions of dancing--and how they relate to the kind of movement that I, in my ignorance and arrogance, put together for the first 18 or 19 years.”

“I think my (earlier) work was interesting but it was remarkably and persistently primitive.”

A very slow smile. “When you get to be old, like me,” he almost whispers, “when your dancing is no longer made on your own body, it’s amazing how another whole set of alternatives begins to appear . . .”