Let Young Waste Youth; Baryshnikov Doesn’t Need It

<First published online in the New York Times, June 25, 2007>

In 2004 I was lucky enough to see Judi Dench and Mikhail Baryshnikov perform live on consecutive nights. At one level the aesthetic experiences they provided were one and the same: both had become the quintessence of their art forms, achieved with sovereign economy, utter concentration and transporting naturalness.

Until this weekend I had not seen Mr. Baryshnikov dance again. What’s curious about the double bill his Hell’s Kitchen Dance has just presented (and with which he has been touring America) is that in the second work, “Come In,” he powerfully calls to mind the extraordinarily ardent emphasis that Ms. Dench, in that 2003-4 Royal Shakespeare Company production of “All’s Well That Ends Well,” gave to the passing line “To be young again, if we could.”

“Come In” is an ensemble piece in which Mr. Baryshnikov is now one of several, now alone, amid a changing structure that suggests, in the ways he pauses to watch others, that he may be remembering his younger self. And there are brief solos in which he knocks off single pirouettes and air turns (even doubles) with a speed and a casual fluency that make him seem to cry out, “To be young again” in the same bright way Ms. Dench did. But then, without seeming to change gear, he shows agitation (the fluttering of one hand and the opposite foot, the slow movement of the opposite hand toward his brow) as if to add, “If we could.”

“Come In” is by the Canadian choreographer Aszure Barton, who dances here alongside Mr. Baryshnikov and 11 other dancers. She gives several of her colleagues brief solo or duet opportunities, but she sets her own role apart in other ways. As she watches the others, it seems that she occasionally, like Mr. Baryshnikov often, is set apart by memory, age or character.

Too bad the actual dance material she gives everyone other than Mr. Baryshnikov is agreeably unremarkable, and that she stages it all against sections of film (a Russian-looking landscape, the flowing blond hair of one of the female dancers, Mr. Baryshnikov at work) that add no serious meanings to the dance.

But it’s still an eloquent work. It takes its title from Vladimir Martynov’s all-string score, played here in a Kremerata Baltica recording led by the solo violins of Gidon Kremer and Tatjana Grindenko. You keep thinking this music will prove too sweetly elegiac, but no: it proves multilayered enough to sustain itself and the dance.

Ms. Barton helps all the stage performers to be likably lyrical and attractive. And she gives Mr. Baryshnikov just the right opportunities to show his beautifully enduring refinement in ballet as well as his singular eloquence in isolated gesture, focus and stance. In his late 50s, Mr. Baryshnikov never forces a single movement, and his dancing is at its most beautiful in moments of rapid delicacy, circling an extended leg as if quivering a wingtip.

In the program’s opening work, “Leap to Tall,” he, Hristoula Harakas and Jodi Melnick work valiantly, but to what end? At the start, as Ms. Harakas and Ms. Melnick sidle onto the stage in unison, backs to the audience, lighted from the side, pelvises tilting to the music, along the back of the stage, and as we sense that Mr. Baryshnikov is standing alone and still in the shadowed stage foreground, there’s a marvelous feeling of contrast and potential drama. But nothing grows out of that.

The choreography is an array of solo, duet and trio material, some of it briefly agreeable, but adding up to triviality. Sure, we get to see the two women partner and lift Mr. Baryshnikov. Sure, we get to see that same pelvic ripple from a different angle later on. But it’s all just so much doodling.

Ms. Harakas and Ms. Melnick are good dancers, but it takes a Baryshnikov to rise above such material, and even he showed a little strain in doing so: not in terms of physical pressure, but in a slightly-too-charming performance manner and occasionally a fraction ahead of his musical cues, betraying a lack of the spontaneity he generally achieves. But it is still marvelous to watch him. (Trivial footnote: At no point in his career have I known him not to have the most beautifully cut hair.) He has never been slimmer. And the light authority with which he stands, leans, tilts, gestures: even as your brain tells you that you’ve seen this kind of movement a million times, he makes you see it as if never before.

@New York Times, 2007