DANCE REVIEW : Baryshnikov’s Star Quality Stands Out in White Oak

Among its other achievements, the musical “A Chorus Line” dramatized the difficulty of turning a star dancer into a team player, a component in an ensemble. The same lesson emerged from a four-part program by Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance project Tuesday, in the spacious new Charles E. Probst Center for the Performing Arts in Thousand Oaks.

At 47, Baryshnikov still looked like one of the great dancers of the century in the tailor-made Jerome Robbins solo “A Suite of Dances.” However, the corps sections of Joachim Schlomer’s exciting if inconclusive “Blue Heron” found him unable to blend in. Not because of star mannerisms or charisma, mind you: No, Baryshnikov remained restrained here to a degree approaching catatonia.

But his deepest instincts and lifelong experience as a dancer kept betraying him, imposing an individual attack--of timing, shape, response to the music--that separated him from the other fine dancers in his 5-year-old company. In this assignment, he wasn’t necessarily better than everyone else, just different. And it mattered.

Set to Alfred Schnittke’s “Suite in Olden Style” for violin and piano, “Blue Heron” developed from a quicksilver, mime-dominated solo for the powerful Jamie Bishton into surging group passages that often terminated in sculptural images of pain and alienation. Schlomer danced with Mark Morris’ company in Brussels and reflections of Morris arose in the spatial deployment of the nine-member cast and the movement vocabulary as well.

Periodically caught by Bishton in mid-jump and then cradled protectively, Baryshnikov heightened the sense of group suffering in a solo (watched by Bishton) full of desperate attempts at reaching out. But Schlomer failed to develop their roles or relationship in the last third of the piece, concentrating instead on contrasts between dynamic male dancing and ghostly processions of women veiled in white. Nothing explained or replaced the loss of Bishton as a dominating force, so the work ultimately seemed unresolved dramatically.

“A Suite of Dances” used four movements from Bach’s cello suites to accompany a summary of Baryshnikov’s current strength and sophistication as a classical virtuoso. Wearing a cherry-red pullover (sleeves rolled up) and loose orange pants, the Kirov’s last great gift to American ballet gave a demonstration of sustained technical brilliance in which all the fast, intricate steps gleamed like small, perfectly matched gemstones closely set in formal patterns.

No energy bursts. No strain. Just a sense of limitless control with nothing to prove.

Each section of the solo defined a distinctive architectural shape and usually offered a moment of throwaway gestural Americana. Initially, Robbins used cycles of movement: increasingly complex, buoyant and even courtly footwork emerging from the simplest everyday actions. Later came playful gymnastic accents and an endearing vaudeville-style joke: Baryshnikov slumping to the floor and grabbing himself by the neck to pull himself up.

A meditative third section emphasized fluid arms and expressive hands while the finale packed jig steps into march cadences and added sudden shifts of port de bras (slo-mo arms one minute, stiff robotic gesticulation the next) in a buildup of technical fireworks. Spatially, this section concentrated on a narrow front-and-back trajectory, but eventually allowed Baryshnikov to break out with circuits of effortless high-speed turns followed by a mock-dismissive gesture (“enough of that ,”) leading to the sunniest, most nonchalant all-American cartwheel you could imagine. Forty-seven going on 25. . . .

The Misha-less half of the program featured works familiar from 1993 White Oak performances in Los Angeles and Costa Mesa. Hanya Holm’s “Jocose” (to Ravel’s “Sonata for Violin and Piano”) cleverly integrated three stately, lyrical women (Kate Johnson, Patricia Lent, Ruthlyn Salomons) with two energetic, irreverent men (Keith Sabado, Vernon Scott). But beyond the engaging movement confrontations (sometimes involving the use of upstage scenic panels), Holm affirmed archetypes of male and female identity.

Morris’ “Mosaic and United” once more imposed inventive if arbitrary movement motifs on two Henry Cowell string quartets, adding another variant through the frequent changes into and out of colored silken tops designed by Isaac Mizrahi.

Bishton, Johnson, Lent, Sabado and Scott all danced with spectacular refinement--far above the level of Morris’ own company on its most recent tour. And at just about the point where the piece started to grow insufferably studied in its effects, Morris allowed the dancing to become personal and even natural in a rich, expressive solo shared, in turn, by everyone.

Unfortunately, “Mosaic and United” and the Tuesday program as a whole remained obsessed with conventional music visualization--as if that were all Euro-American theater-dance at the end of our century could be expected to do. However, the music-making itself proved exemplary, with Larry Shapiro, Margaret Jones Dugdale, David J. Bursack and Wendy Sutter playing Cowell so feelingly that they made some of Morris’ choreography appear coldly insufficient.

White Oak music director Michael Boriskin lent his piano artistry to “Jocose” (with Shapiro) and “Blue Heron” (with Dugdale), while Sutter joined Baryshnikov onstage for the interplay between Bach and Robbins in “A Suite of Dances.”