Baryshnikov Works Magic With Imaginative Audience

People perplexed or intimidated by the austerity of modern dance quickly learned to relax and realize how critical their perceptions were to its meaning in the first of two new works danced by Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project on Saturday at Royce Hall, UCLA.

Although Neil Greenberg’s “MacGuffin or How Meanings Get Lost (Revisited)” began in silence with Baryshnikov executing expressive but enigmatic movements and gestures, soon Greenberg’s text projected onto a screen behind the dancer began giving helpful hints: “The following sequence may be seen as . . . a flower blooming . . . an expression of joy . . . [or] a failure to communicate . . . a submission to fate . . . an ugly man looking to be loved . . . “

Different titles, but the same movements. Suddenly we “knew” what a movement meant or could mean. Or did we?

After a while, the text petered out and we were left only with movement itself, recapitulated in the final minutes by the five other White Oak dancers--Raquel Aedo, Emily Coates, Emmanuele Phuon, Ruthlyn Salomons and Susan Shields.

Far from being lost, meaning multiplied, and we could joyfully pick or choose or ignore or invent our own. We were sanctioned, encouraged to do so, becoming partners in the creation of the dance.

In this sense, we reversed the title, which came from a term Alfred Hitchcock coined for a plot device he used in his films to get the action going. The word referred to something that meant a great deal to the characters (maybe a missing letter or a secret formula) but which in itself meant nothing to the audience.

Like a Hitchcock character, Baryshnikov was fully, selflessly, deeply engaged in the movement or the gesture, ignoring or ignorant of the ironies prompted by the titles which often elicited laughs from the audience. But we could not be indifferent. We were happily seduced into becoming co-creators.

Greenberg had reworked his 1987 piece, previously danced in silence, to be mostly a solo for Baryshnikov done in silence or to selections from Bernard Herrmann’s eerie, moody “Psycho--A Narrative for String Orchestra,” which also colored our responses to anything we saw.

The audience was critical, too, for Amy O’Brien’s “Vessel,” danced by Aedo, Coates and Phuon to five Chopin pieces played sensitively by pianist Nicolas Reveles.

Here, we were not simply an audience--we were the mirror before which the dancers triumphantly practiced their virtuosic balletic moves, also revealing their indecision, falterings, fatigue and self-doubts.

And if we hadn’t fallen in love with them before, we did so now.

The other two works on the program--Lucy Guerin’s “Soft Center” and Mark Morris’ “The Argument”--were previously reviewed.