White Oak to Chairs: Shall We Dance?

Even more than its opening UCLA program on Wednesday, the final “PASTForward” mixed bill by Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project in Royce Hall on Saturday amounted to an apotheosis of the metal folding chair: a symbol of mundane reality transformed by postmodern art-making strategies.

In work after work, chair after chair served as an essential component of choreographic design, starting with David Gordon’s new solo for Baryshnikov: the whimsical “Chair Intro 2000,” preceding Gordon’s duet “Chair/two times” from 1975. The solo proved jauntier, the duet more exhaustive, but both explored the chair’s fullest potential as a dancing platform, enclosure and partner.

Baryshnikov also appeared in a new edition of Trisha Brown’s “Homemade” (1965), dancing through a number of quick-change mental states while wearing a movie projector on his back--one that showed an earlier performance of the same piece. Two kinds of projection (mental and filmic) unified the result.

Along with nine works seen Wednesday, the program also included Deborah Hay’s new, antic ensemble workout, “Whizz.” But her 1995 ensemble walking piece “Exit” proved the most indelible new creation in the “PASTForward” rep, harnessing classic postmodern methodology to a profound theme: people in transition to an uncertain future, pausing to look back.

Ultimately, however, three approaches to Yvonne Rainer’s postmodern artifact “Trio A” (1966) arguably represented the central experience of this last White Oak night. Danced backward in silence by Rosalynde LeBlanc and Emmanuele Phuon, it then turned up as a kind of silent, whirlwind face-off with Raquel Aedo and Michael Lomeka; finally it ran forward, to “The Midnight Hour,” using all these artists plus colleagues Emily Coates and Tadej Brdnik.

A 4 1/2-minute movement sequence that can undergo many permutations, it ultimately exists as a utilitarian implement--something to be used, like a folding chair. But if dance ever really becomes a part of everyday American life, “Trio A” will be seen as our Magna Carta. Until then, it points the way admirably.