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Flash Review 3, 6-10: Brown and Rainer Live
Stripping White Oak's Celebrity from its Integrity

By Chris Dohse
Copyright 2000 Chris Dohse

Forty years after its genesis, Trisha Brown's and Yvonne Rainer's icon-blasting realness, seen last night at BAM, still blows the cobwebs off mummified high art seriousness and still awes the bedazzled sycophants of mummified high art style with a wazoo full of ideas. Their dissimilar artifacts, separately derived from Robert Dunn's 1960-62 workshop, strip the White Oak Dance Project's celebrity from its integrity to reveal its pith within complex, lexicon-defying vocabularies.

My taxi got lost on its way to the Brooklyn Academy of Music so I missed a first solo, Mikhail Baryshnikov doing Brown. My program opened with John Jasperse Lite, "See Through Knot." All five dancers really strained their necks into it, but the vast Gilman Opera House diluted somehow Jasperse's odd, lugubrious time and stripped his signature idiosyncrasy to compositional strictures. In this particular case of taking downtown style off the street and marching it up the avenue, something got lost in translation.

The correspondences of Brown's 1979 "Glacial Decoy" are still filled with humor, subtlety and minimal cool, but the rural still life idealized in Robert Rauschenberg's slides smacks of cultural colonialism, if you bothered to look at them.

Baryshnikov in a Mark Morris solo, "Peccadillos" ... Here's the stuff that fills the seats. I bet the hoi-polloi would applaud wildly to watch either of them wipe their ass. Morris manipulates expectations predictably (toy piano, doll-like staccato) and the crowd chuckled and peed themselves. A bonus treat, Morris jumped onstage to take a bow.

Rainer's collage of previous elements/homage to the mythos of herself rations dance history in real time. If I was a Marxist I'd guess "After Many a Summer Dies the Swan" critiques commodity, smearing Have and Have Not across Y2K complacency. Rainer is not shy to reveal her own mysteries. Whatever her cast might be doing onstage, the framing device of her intellect is always the real star. Her abiding humor surprises, the sympathy with which she prods the images we call Twentieth Century icons. Rainer is insistently, disarmingly clever; she discovers previously undetected details of White Oak talents and defines their celebrity anew.

White Oak continues at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House tonight at 7:30, and tomorrow at 3 p.m. For more info, call 718-636-4100.

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