DANCE REVIEW : Baryshnikov--Con Brio

Midway through Mark Morris’ solo, “Ten Suggestions,” Monday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Mikhail Baryshnikov put on a hat: one something like the bowler he tossed on this same stage for the first time 15 years ago in “Push Comes to Shove.”

Then as now, a flash point occurred whenever Baryshnikov brought his speed, his virtuosity, his Imperial Russian classicism in contact with choreographers from an entirely different tradition. At 43, however, he’s left ballet to tour with his own modern-dance ensemble, the White Oak Dance Project, exploring a repertoire new to him and much of his audience.

Half the choreographers on the White Oak roster had never presented work at the Music Center before--including, scandalously, the late Martha Graham. Her 51-year-old trio “El Penitente” opened the Monday program (the start of a two-night engagement), allowing Baryshnikov to display his modern-dance credentials in an acknowledged classic.

In Graham’s evocation of a Southwestern religious pageant, Baryshnikov danced the central role of the Penitent, who re-enacts Bible stories, playing everyone from Adam to Christ. You could argue that his intensity looked overwrought next to the simpler, more conventionalized style of Rebecca Rigert as Mary. But his flagellation solo had ideal buoyancy, and the apple dance with Rigert devastating open-hearted charm.

As the third celebrant, Lane Sayles looked imposing in his Isamu Noguchi mask, and a fine chamber ensemble found great delicacy as well as drive in Louis Horst’s score.

With Harold Themmen suavely dispatching the solos, the ensemble also brought refined musicianship to the Mozart adagio underpinning the male duet from Lar Lubovitch’s “Concerto Six Twenty-Two.” Here, Baryshnikov danced opposite former American Ballet Theatre colleague John Gardner, with shared weight, exchanges of solos and a mood of lyric intimacy defining the relationship of the men.

The role proved a risky one for Baryshnikov--not because of its expressive content but because he hadn’t yet mastered its gymnastic sensitivities. The lifts seldom flowed, he never produced the movement from deep within his body, and Gardner alone yielded to the spell of the music.

Lubovitch’s new suite, “Waiting for the Sunrise,” provided Baryshnikov with another showpiece duet--this time a hip-swinging partnership with Rigert. But his solo had no ideas worth investigating and only the delirious mock-Russian “Sabre Dance” released anything in him as a performer.

Besides parody, “Waiting” tried everything from athletic exhibition-jitterbug to wry postmodernism, enlisting 13 dancers and a stack of vintage pop hits by Les Paul and Mary Ford (with additional recordings by Johnny Puelo and His Harmonica Gang). Eventually, it went on so long into the night that Lubovitch seemed to be literally waiting for the sunrise--or perhaps for Godot.

But at the very least, “Waiting” had Lubovitch veteran Rob Besserer in an outrageous twisting, slumping, undulating, show-stopping solo to “Tennessee Waltz.” Earlier, Besserer had danced Meredith Monk’s solo, “Break,” heightening its antic discontinuities with superbly judged tricks of timing and shifts of kinetic focus. Here, again, he looked born and bred to this style--doing exactly what he knows best.

Pilobolus veteran Carol Parker brought the same authority to Martha Clarke’s solo “Nocturne,” in which a decrepit ballerina hobbles grotesquely through the cliches of 19th-Century classicism.

By no small irony, that classicism was Baryshnikov’s birthright, his greatest glory and, even, his identity. Watching him diligently try on other hats Monday carried the pain of estrangement and a new kind of defection.

Happily, “Ten Suggestions” allowed Baryshnikov to dramatize this sense of artistic rootlessness by scavenging images from ballets past and present. Besides a Tharpian head piece, you could spot what might be a David Gordon chair and a Frederick Ashton ribbon among the references, but the work succeeded primarily from its inimitable musicality.

Morris culled endless movement ideas from “Bagatelles” by Alexander Tcherepnin (like the Mendelssohn music for “Nocturne,” strongly played by pianist Michael Boriskin) and Baryshnikov reveled in every sudden switch of context: every body squiggle, gestural game, technical subterfuge.

At last, this evening of dedicated and earnest professionalism showed us Baryshnikov’s genius in a way that “Push” and “Prodigal Son” and the best nights of “Giselle” had done. The triple cabrioles may be gone, but the mind-body synthesis that makes each performance an act of discovery for artist and audience still burns deep in the heart of the White Oak.

* The White Oak Dance Project is scheduled to perform at San Diego Civic Center on Friday, Redding Civic Center on Monday and at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley on Tuesday and next Wednesday.