DANCE REVIEW : White Oak Ventures Into Parody

It’s Wednesday night and Mikhail Baryshnikov stands onstage in Thousand Oaks using traditional ballet-pantomime to warn the people in the Probst Center that they’re all going to prick their fingers on a spindle and die once they reach their 16th birthday.

He’s kidding, of course: quoting a central mime-passage from “The Sleeping Beauty” for comic effect during Twyla Tharp’s “Pergolesi” solo. Under all the movement jokes, however, lies one of the basic tenets of postmodernism: Anything can be dance. Certainly ironic outtakes from the top 10 story ballets can be dance, but so can pretending to lose your balance in a turn. Or adjusting your trousers. Or taking a bogus curtain call midway through a work.

“Pergolesi” began life as a Baryshnikov-Tharp duet and now has a section in which he dances with an imaginary or dream-Twyla. Besides showcasing his phenomenal speed, precision, stamina and slyness, the solo sets the seal on a program by his White Oak Dance Project that emphasizes irony, gesture and the overturning of normal expectations in dance.

In its world premiere, Tere O’Connor’s “Greta in the Ditch” opens a new chapter in the “victim-art” debate by parodying many hallmarks of the genre. Set to very somber music by Grazyna Bacewicz, it begins with the full company (plus O’Connor himself) reeling back in deliberately overplayed horror at the sight of a fallen comrade--presumably someone named Greta but danced by former Paul Taylor paragon Kate Johnson.

Greta refuses to stay fallen, however. And who can blame her, when she can inspire mass hand-to-brow grieving, multicultural hula parties and plenty of imitators just by collapsing over and over? As she grows ever more glamorous, O’Connor piles up antic gesticulation, intriguing structural playoffs for his 10-member cast and delirious little pitter-pat steps that somehow make everyone look like trained seals. At the end, Greta’s not only, um, still here, she’s a role model, a celebrity, a star.

*

Obviously, O’Connor’s brash study of overkill lies worlds away from the cool movement experiments of modern dance icon Merce Cunningham. But the White Oak staging of Cunningham’s “Signals (1970)” (with a new taped score by David Tudor, Takehisa Kosugi, John D. S. Adams and D’Arcy Philip Gray) conveys its own wit and daring.

A duet with Jamie Bishton and Patricia Lent explores unorthodox partnering gambits and remains resolutely deadpan even when it reaches improbable gymnastic extremes. Starting here, the technical demands of “Signals (1970)” stay highly exposed, with constant repeats and unison statements of bold tests of balance--especially turning balances in extension--that leave no place to hide.

Bishton, Lent, Johnson, Keith Sabado, Ruthlyn Salomons and Raquel Aedo dance with great security, but one of the unexpected pleasures of White Oak’s Cunningham is the difference in temperature from performances by Cunningham’s own company: the feeling of a more intense physicality.

“Blue Heron” (previously reviewed) completes the program with, again, the five-member White Oak Chamber Ensemble setting an imposing standard of dance accompaniment.