Out of His Shadow

The first piece on the White Oak Dance Project’s program at the Yale Repertory Theater this May evening is the premiere of “Vessel,” by Amy O’Brien. It is danced by three of the company’s five women, and it displays them with loving clarity in a set of translucent and enigmatic character studies. Raquel Aedo is a boyish, spritely looking dancer with short, dark hair and a cool inner stillness. Emmanuele Phuon, who has a wide, grave face and wide hips, dances with a limpid gravity, and pale, red-haired Emily Coates has a comically edged sensuality.

When the work ends, the audience responds warmly, particularly considering that it is unlikely that any of them has ever heard of these dancers before tonight. (At intermission, O’Brien literally weeps with joy at how well the women danced. “They were just so beautiful,” she sputters, leaning against a wall.)

But when the curtain goes up for the next piece, the audience’s temperature rises with it. Applause bursts out before the dancer, Mikhail Baryshnikov, can even start to move. The work, another premiere, is a solo by Neil Greenberg: “MacGuffin, or How Meanings Get Lost (Revisited),” and in it, Baryshnikov delivers a tour de force rendition of character and articulate expression. At one point the rest of the company--Aedo, Phuon and Coates, along with intense Ruthlyn Salomons and brightly athletic Susan Shields--rush onstage and swirl briefly around him, before ceding the stage again.

Afterward, the respectful applause that followed “Vessel” turns into a roar, and Baryshnikov must take several bows, smiling and dipping his head in polite acknowledgment.

However much the audience enjoyed the first piece, it is he they have come to see.

*

For the last 10 years, White Oak Dance Project has undoubtedly been one of the best modern dance gigs anywhere. In a notoriously obscure art form, this company gets widespread, serious attention. In a field renowned for low pay and disappearing venues, White Oak keeps its dancers decently remunerated and working all over the world. And when it comes to aesthetic risk-taking and quality, it is rarely equaled. The New Yorker calls it “classy”; the Wall Street Journal praises White Oak’s “moving . . . fidelity to the day-to-day life of modern dance.”

But there is the matter of that roaring crowd. White Oak’s posters may list all its dancers’ names alphabetically, but most people only see the one that begins with B.

Founded in 1990 by Baryshnikov (with choreographer Mark Morris, now more a friend of the company than an active participant), White Oak has included more than 50 dancers over the years, some of whom were already renowned in other companies, some of whom made their reputations here and a few who have gone on to become choreographers and head their own ensembles. From the beginning, Baryshnikov has given up the lead role onstage almost as often as he has taken it, and increasingly, he has made new choreographers and their experiments the company’s real emphasis.

Still, in the public mind, White Oak is Baryshnikov, and it is his fame that brings the widespread attention, the remuneration and the stability, the opportunity to dance and dance well.

For the dancers, it’s a given.

“The attention [paid to the company] was nice, even though, when you were bowing, no one was looking at you,” remembers Rob Besserer, a much-admired veteran of Morris’ and Lar Lubovitch’s companies and an original member of White Oak. “There could be 3,000 people [in the audience], and to the man, they were looking at one person. But that was OK. I had solos to do, and they looked at me then.”

“It’s delightful that there’s so much attention, and it’s glamorous once in a while,” agrees Shields, a member of White Oak since the spring of 1998. “But I’m not kidding myself either. I know who it’s for. My part is to complement it. But I don’t mind that, I really don’t.”

*

Almost everyone in the 1999 White Oak lineup has a story about the slightly surreal moment when they were contacted, often out of the blue, by the most famous dancer in America.

Aedo, 28, comes from a large Cuban American family in Miami. She had gotten her first job with a small modern company in New York and was taking a Merce Cunningham class. As she prepared to do a sequence, she saw Baryshnikov watching, and promptly fumbled her steps. Afterward, there was a note for her on the bulletin board to call White Oak.

Shields was a teenage ballerina who went on to dance with Lubovitch for eight years and then quit in her late 20s, until a friend let her know that Baryshnikov was interested. She was sitting at her computer one night when the phone rang.

“I think I was wearing my robe and fuzzy slippers,” she says, shaking her head. “You pick up and hear that voice, ‘Hi, it’s Misha,’ and you just go, ‘Huuuuh?’ I mean, you grow up with him as the poster on your wall.”

Salomons, 35, who was born in Aruba and raised by a single mother in New York, danced first with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and with Donald Byrd’s company. She had been thinking of quitting dancing when a member of White Oak called to tell her Baryshnikov had seen her in class and wanted her to come to a rehearsal.

“I think I was in shock and couldn’t even react,” she remembers.

For Salomons and Shields, their astonishment at having attracted Baryshnikov’s attention was compounded by the fact that White Oak offered them an opportunity to continue dancing just when they had decided, for money and security reasons, to quit.

Phuon, who was raised in Cambodia and Thailand, and went on to dance with Elisa Monte and several other troupes, had already stopped. She was waitressing when Salomons brought her to one of White Oak’s rare auditions.

“I had always been scared about [my] future as a dancer,” Phuon, 32, says. “But I was miserable not dancing.”

For Coates, 25, White Oak was a different kind of godsend. She had spent six years in New York City Ballet, often dancing solo and principal roles, but working with a contemporary choreographer was a revelation.

“We were treated like adults. It wasn’t demeaning: ‘Get in line,’ ” she says. “After that, it was really hard to dance ballet, because I kept thinking there’s this other very rich experience out there.”

She quit NYCB in August, and in the fall a contact there put her in touch with Baryshnikov. “I made this crazy move, and now I’ve got this wonderful thing,” Coates says. “It’s challenging and fun. You’re learning, and the guy in charge is dancing with us. It’s very democratic in a lot of ways.”

*

White Oak could not exist--or thrive--without Baryshnikov. But neither could Baryshnikov have what is turning out to be a significant second chapter in his career without the intelligent, self-sufficient dancers that surround him.

As the five women give themselves a warmup class in a shabby basement studio in the afternoon before their Yale performance, they demonstrate the confidence and independence that seem to be White Oak prerequisites. Silent and concentrated at the start, they make their way through the meticulous, repetitious routine of plie, releve, tendu. Aedo yawns. Then Shields starts to click her tongue, and soon they’re all clicking and humming rhythmically, giggling intermittently. By the time they’re moving vigorously across the floor, they’re laughing and singing, electrifying the basement studio.

Salomons, who had been nominally leading, cedes her position, and they all start making up combinations.

“Go, Susan! Go, Susan!” they cheer, as Shields tries out a sequence.

“I know a fun one!” says Coates, doing a delicately stylized series of ballet jumps.

“No way,” groans Aedo. They turn it into a version of the Pony instead.

To some degree, their sure and exuberant sense of themselves as dancers comes from being chosen and valued by Baryshnikov.

During her first tour, in 1993, Salomons remembers coming off stage and hearing someone say, “Good job.”

“I turned around and it was Misha,” she says. “I thought, ‘OK, it’s all right. I’m doing good work.’ After that there was no doubt.”

“I see him watching us, and I see how much he enjoys it,” says Aedo. “I think he sees something [different] in each of us. I think he admires each of us.”

“If I wasn’t interested [in them as dancers], I wouldn’t be there and we wouldn’t be doing what we are doing,” Baryshnikov says. “And it would be such a crime and a stupidity to waste your life like that.”

They all stress that White Oak is a group endeavor. If the usual model is a ballet company with an all-powerful artistic director, or a modern dance company created by a single-vision choreographer, White Oak is more like a collective, or a company of siblings with Baryshnikov as a benign older brother.

“He doesn’t consider himself a boss,” says Salomons. “Of course he is, it’s his company, but he really considers himself one of the dancers. We all do what we need to do to take care of our responsibilities, and we’re all taking part, which makes it a really different atmosphere than being in a situation where you have a leader who insists on things being done a certain way.”

Dancers tend to share a lot of casual physical contact, but this group seems particularly close with one another. In rehearsal, as Baryshnikov passes Aedo, he strokes her head, and she reaches back to clasp his hand without even turning around. At dinner at a Spanish tapas restaurant after the Yale show, they all banter with and tease one another.

“What are you saying over there?” he calls to Aedo, Shields and Salomons, sitting a table away. “I get nervous when I can’t hear you.” They giggle.

“[This] was only way I start this company,” Baryshnikov explains, in his still strongly accented English. “[A] group of people that from the first is so much fun and so close. The priorities were so clear--this way or nothing at all. It’s hard enough to go onstage every night. In bigger groups, you could say, I don’t care what this person thinks about me or I think about him or her, I can still work with them. In a smaller group, this cannot happen.”

In the end, they say, it’s the work itself that demands both the high level of intimacy and the high devotion of individuals. In White Oak’s early days, much of the choreography was collected from other companies, like Cunningham’s or Morris’. Now, it puts a stronger emphasis on breaking new ground, which means the White Oak dancers must initiate the choreographers’ vision, they can’t rely on what has happened before.

“We’re all adults, and for the most part the choreographers work with us at our level, they respect us,” says Aedo. “We really have to be on top of ourselves. Everyone takes part and gives and takes constructive criticism.”

“We have to be completely confident in each other and each other’s eye,” says Phuon. “Whoever says something, no matter who, we’ll take their notes and work on it. There’s no other way to do it.”

“Of course, it’s an emotional investment,” says Baryshnikov. “You don’t just go along, you have to be actively involved and responsible. But there are certain other luxuries in return. I think, feeling more fulfilled. And making your own decisions. [The dancers] have a lot to say, how they want to work, how rehearsal situations can be, how certain areas can be more productive and easier. If it works, it’s their achievement.”

*

At the run-through for the Yale program, the dancers mill about onstage, immersed in mini-rehearsals of their own set of steps, their own set of challenges. Baryshnikov seems like just another member of the ensemble, wearing baggy practice clothes and rubbing his knee. But at one point, he takes charge. “OK--what’s happening here?” he says impatiently, sending the others into immediate focus, heading for their marks.

As relaxed as they seem with him, White Oak’s dancers have a deep respect for Baryshnikov. He’s clearly the role model.

“It makes you want to do your best when you see someone who’s a master working so hard,” says Aedo.

“Knowing that this man is still taking risks and challenges, still looking for new ways to explore his own body--I completely admire that,” says Shields.

And then there’s the fact that what motivates Baryshnikov as a dancer fosters dance as well.

“And,” Shields continues, “I respect what he’s doing, which is bringing modern dance to people who wouldn’t see it otherwise. So I can go the distance.”

“He made the world stand up and pay attention, and I think he’ll continue to make it pay attention,” says Salomons. “He’s brought quite an audience to these styles and choreographers, and he’s opened up quite an audience for talent. He draws quite a crowd. And regardless if it’s people who love dance or just love him, he’s constantly investigating and playing, and that’s important because it keeps dance very much alive.”*

*

White Oak Dance Project 1999, Royce Hall, UCLA. Wednesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; next Sunday, 2 p.m. $35-$75. (310) 825-2101.