Past Forward (review)

Pastforward. White Oak Dance Project. Baryshnikov Productions. Artistic Direction Mikhail Baryshnikov. Written and directed by David Gordon. Brooklyn Academy of Music, Howard Gilman Opera House, New York City. 7 June 2001.

One evening in July 2000, I waited on line for the bathroom at Princeton's McCarter Theatre. The White Oak Dance Project, including artistic director Mikhail Baryshnikov, had just concluded a work-in-progress program of PASTForward, dances first presented nearly forty years ago by the Judson Dance Theater (JDT) plus later works by Judson choreographers. The performers were still onstage, boogeying with gleeful audience members to Ike and Tina Turner's "River Deep, Mountain High."

But the women in the queue, middle-aged Russian emigrées, were angry: not only had Baryshnikov not danced (as in leapt, soared, and otherwise embodied physical virtuosity and specialness), no one had done anything that kinesthetically, dramatically, or theatrically stirred them toward transcendent spectatorship. "What was that dance?" one woman demanded, referring to David Gordon's The Matter Overture (1979). "They were just walking. It could have been anything. A funeral march, a parade, whatever."

Bingo . . . almost. While the woman's comment suggested the continuing elusiveness of experimental dance for mainstream audiences, it also articulated several elements of that dance's significance: its pedestrian movement, untrained performers, everyday attire, lack of narrative. But these dances make meaning in many and more complex ways.

This complexity was rewardingly illuminated this past June 5-9, when White Oak brought PASTForward to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, following an international tour. The production circumstances were considerably glossier than Judson's: the performing space and technical set-up were lavish, the costumes of the main ensemble coordinated and sassy, the audience more mixed and moneyed. Framing it was the presence of Baryshnikov, ironically calling the dance avant-garde—as performance, pedagogy, and history—to popular attention. As a dancer, he gamely and seriously took on unfamiliar movement idioms; as a superstar, he enraptured the media and lured ticket-buyers.

Concert-goers seeking nostalgia were reminded that you can't go home again, but you can have a blast retracing your aesthetic lineage (or someone else's) in the flesh. Reveling in their mix of everyday and high-tech movement and their origin in ideas, the dances still vividly embody the preoccupations of Judson choreographers, which are laid out in Charles Atlas's contextualizing video Prologue—largely composed of Peter Moore's archival photographs and narrated by Baryshnikov—and talking-head video-clips before the dances, individualizing and thematically joining the works. The dances, reconstructions and later works, are vibrant, and not only as historical artifacts. Their age registers, but, remarkably, they don't look dated.

From 1962-1964, the JDT presented fifteen concerts of what came to be known as postmodern dance at Judson Memorial Church in New York City's Greenwich Village. Briefly stated, its project was the rethinking of choreography and dance: What made a dance a dance? What was dance's connection to other arts? How might dance's formal properties—materials, compositional practices, (re)presentational standards—be disassembled, defied, or jettisoned?

The JDT, which began as a workshop guided by musician Robert Ellis Dunn, probed these questions. Choreographers' movement vocabularies and aesthetic alliances were diverse, as were interactions with other avant-gardes: visual artists were especially involved, theatre practitioners less participatory but part of a dynamic social/collegial network. Their work remains unusually instrumental in how we understand dance's movement core and its stagings of age, gender, sexuality, and the body.

Arguably, the period's choreographic linchpin was Yvonne Rainer's 1966 Trio A. A section of The Mind is a Muscle, Trio A was a kind of manifesto-in-motion, an encyclopedic demonstration in four-and-one-half minutes of how a dance could manipulate and undermine the conventions of composition and presentation. It was composed of a chain of uninflected unrepeated actions, their relative importance flattened by the elimination of identifiable phrases and the maintenance of a single...