DANCE REVIEW : White Oak Project Preview a Triumph

“It was nice that he wasn’t classical,” a dancegoer at Wang Center for the Performing Arts remarked in a surprised tone to her companion as Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project adjourned for intermission.

In fact, Wednesday evening’s preview performance, in effect the debut of Baryshnikov’s elite mini-troupe of 10 dancers, was extravagantly nice and classically unclassical. Harnessing Baryshnikov’s handpicked team to Mark Morris’s ingenious creations turned out, not unexpectedly, to be a master stroke, and it was rewarded with a roaring, standing ovation.

As Baryshnikov has said he wishes, White Oak is an egalitarian band of prime movers, most of them veterans from ballet and modern dance. Beginning with “Going Away Party,” whose music--by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys--cannot obscure its smart stepping, White Oak’s dancers were individually as well as collectively compelling.

Baryshnikov, of course, is more equal than the others; even though he is standing in the back of the group as they wave a howdy in “Going Away Party,” he manages to capture attention.

Here, he cuts a mean diagonal as a lovelorn cowboy figure, a perfectly tumbling tumbleweed. With his hair slicked back, wearing denim and fringe and white boots, Baryshnikov is the odd man out as the good ol’ boys and girls recapture a bygone spirit of innocent lechery on the plains.

What’s equally fun is Morris’s lighthanded evocation of other dances. As couples join hands and shuffle-step, they’re outlining a Texas two-step. Morris makes a square dance’s Grand Right and Left by having two people switch places, making us see, in that quote, a whole, turning circle.

The voluptuous--no kidding--Morris and the slender Baryshnikov were a tangy contrast in the charming, flicker-footed “Pas de Poisson,” set to Satie’s “Entr’acte Symphonique de Relache,” with Kate Johnson.

Baryshnikov again played babe-in-the-wood, acting bemused by the intricacies of performance, responding gamely to the moment of the actual pass of the poisson. Here they’re rubber and the trio passes them into the wings. Then he wilts, sinking eloquently into the floor, eyes wide in panic, as Johnson and Morris leave him standing out there alone.

But Baryshnikov’s panicked pose was just that. His solo “10 Suggestions,” set to Alexander Tcherepnin’s “Bagatelles,” which Morris himself had danced last year, this time offered a glimpse of a brilliant dancer creating movement rather than a brilliant choreographer dancing. As Baryshnikov worked with the props, from a hoop to a pith helmet, they seemed not as funny as they had when Morris used them; now they were things that made us see how a dancer uses space.

“Motorcade,” a new work for the group, set to Saint-Saens Septet, and performed by eight dancers costumed in dark-hued velvet pants, was the most classically oriented of all the pieces. It offered Promethean poses, glimpses of dancers Rob Besserer and Peggy Baker in ravishing turns, and moments when Besserer and Baryshnikov were borne aloft like statues on a feast day.

Couples raced across the floor as if on wings; quartets reached toward each other as they filled the stage on the diagonal. In its moments of light and darkness, “Motorcade” magnificently captured the dynamic of the human spirit in the way that always sets Morris’ work apart.