Thursday's opening extravaganza, 100 give or take Portland citizens in a movement choir singing songs about the Migration of Birds composed by San Francisco's Rinde Eckert, was pleasant enough, but scarcely worth sitting on the hard bricks of Pioneer Courthouse Square for close to an hour. It was a lovely September evening and the city looked its best, but the music was close to inaudible and while the movement–flapping to remind us of birds for example–was fun, it wasn't something I'd bother to see or hear again.
Certainly "Map Me," seen on Friday night, the contribution of Belgian-born couple Charlotte Vanden Eynde and Kurt Vandendriessche, performed nude, is time based. For one thing, Vanden Eynde is pregnant–slender nevertheless–so the shape of her body will not last. It takes a kind of raw courage or perhaps total self-absorption to stand naked before a room full of strangers, even if you're using your body as a screen for projections, which may account for the nearly clinical detachment with which this pair performed. Still, the work is intensely visual and in some respects rooted in art history: at one point they look as if they'd been sculpted in marble by Phidias; at another, they resemble paintings by Lucas Cranach, minus alas those wonderful hats.In the end, I found that while I was impressed by the craft, and repelled by some aspects of this duet in the buff–a segment in which the couple attached strings to genitals and breasts in order to, as a Sesame Street style label card read, "Join Me" was one; another in which the sound of power tools and projections of what appeared to be sheet metal workers accomplished "Fix Me" for Vandendriessche was another–"Map Me" ended up being curiously dehumanizing, and its cutting edge decidedly dull.
But on Saturday night, in Portland's most elegant theater, the teal upholstered, cherry-paneled Newmark in the Performing Arts Center, Baryshnikov danced in the beautiful work of Donna Uchizono, and the art became timeless.
"Leap to Tall, " with music by Michael Floyd and Iva Bittova and lighting design by the masterful Robert Wierzel, was commissioned by the Baryshnikov Arts Center and premiered last year at Bard College. The trio is certainly a vehicle for Baryshnikov, capitalizing on his classical training and skewing it to be about him as a dancer of rare talent and intelligence, one with a truly intellectual bent. At 59, he can no longer do the exuberant grand jetes and multiple (and my God precise) pirouettes that made him a superstar when he left what was then the Soviet Union for the artistic freedom of the West. Nor does he wish to. In this thoughtful, considered work, he "leaps to tall" indeed with the flex of a wrist, angular arms, a rapid, perfectly controlled series of bourrees into the wings, and a small, perfectly timed jump into the waiting arms of Hristoula Harakas and Jodi Melnick, lovely dancers both of them.
There are no fireworks here; just centered lightness and wit, a modest offering that knocks your socks off. Working with Twyla Tharp and Mark Morris, as Baryshnikov has done for many years, has paid off–there are no other ballet stars who have ever been able to make the shift from classicism to contemporary work as he has; dancing as brilliantly in their work and now Uchizono's as he did in such war horses as Don Quixote. His body may be time based; his artistry is timeless.
"State of Heads," which opened the program, is arguably more innovative choreography than that of "Leap to Tall," beginning with an explosive crashing sound and a man in a white suit standing motionless stage rear center, bathed in white light Soon he is joined by two women, also dressed in white, moving extremely slowly from each wing. As they join him, they look up, heads tilted, their arms moving stridently, making you wonder what they're reacting to. The piece would seem to be about our uneasy place in the world and our vulnerability to the decisions of our heads of state. Much of the movement for Levi Gonzalez, Carla Rudiger, and Rebecca Serrell is awkward, off kilter, occasionally downright gawky. And some of it, because of composer James Lo's score, no doubt–Uchizono's musicality puts her to some degree into mainstream modernism–has a latino flavor. The dynamics of this rather mysterious trio make the viewer stay alert, you don't want to miss what comes next, and it needs to be seen more than once. Which makes it not so time based.
–Martha Ullman West
Photo: Charlotte Vanden Eynde & Kurt Vandendriessche, from http://www.pica.org/tba/tba07/default.aspx
