When Age Is an Asset

Watching the 59-year old Mikhail Baryshnikov perform with his Hell's Kitchen Dance company offers all of us a bit of false hope: for those minutes, age and change can't scare us. It isn't that Mr. Baryshnikov shows no signs of the passing years; it's simply that his precision and grace refuse decay in ways that athleticism and flexibility do not. Maturity, for several moments, seems the better bargain.

As preparation for their tour, Mr. Baryshnikov and his small company performed two of their three traveling works for a four day run to a minuscule audience. Choreographers Donna Uchizono and Aszure Barton grappled with their lead's celebrity — one brilliantly, one not.

Ms. Uchizono explains her title "Leap to Tall" as a reference to Baryshnikov-as-Superman, a testimony to the many single bounds that make up his career. But "Leap to Tall" never lets its dancers more than a few inches off the ground. It's a sidling, sly piece, with assists rather than lifts, glides and sudden drops rather than obvious, effortmaking jumps.

On the miniature stage, with one dimly seen figure in the dark foreground, two women sidle in as demurely as geishas. Arms stretched to the side, they clap only the tips of their fingers, beating the audience to their applause. Dancers Hristoula Harakas and Jodi Melnick proceed sweetly along, leaving their partner — Mr. Baryshnikov — in shadow.

Throughout this charming, flirtatious piece, the women continue to eclipse Mr. Baryshnikov's body, treating his charismatic gravity with utter disregard. They treat him as a third partner — neither as the lone male nor as the star — lifting him, obscuring him, even shooing him offstage. For his part, Ms. Uchizono's odd, semaphoring gestures (one looks like the modern dance equivalent of a bitch-snap) palpably delight him.

Ms. Uchizono wants to make us aware of seams — Mr. Baryshnikov's costume has a grey circle biting into his black top; Michael Floyd and Iva Bittová's musical hodgepodge jerks with start-and-stop transitions. Even the set, a white horizon line that gradually eats its way up the black backdrop, draws our attention to borders and the places where things end. As any work starring Mr. Baryshnikov must do, it winds up addressing his gigantic reputation. But its points are lightly made, cutting out the lionizing pap and laughing, instead, at his limits.

Ms. Melnick makes a charming foil, dressed in floating green and black, taking everything with a shrugging ease. But Ms. Harakas does the impossible: She out-divas the star. Sullen and coy, she bosses her way to the front of each row, forcing our attention to her slinking hips rather than to the superstar 10 feet from our noses. In a piece about lines, Ms. Harakas winds up being the point.

But where Ms. Uchizono waltzes with the elephant in the living room, the young choreographer Ms. Barton gets trampled by it. In a clogged, image-drunk work about memory, she treats Mr. Baryshnikov as a romantic hero, even giving him a big galloping run that mimics that of Gene Kelly in "Singin' in the Rain." The gloppy mini-narrative plays into his (and her own) worst dramatic tendencies. The 13-person company, which includes Ms. Barton, parts respectfully before him, or sits behind him in rows of black folding chairs. They do everything short of setting up pews.

This thin gloss on loss, with Kevin Freeman's amateurish videos of New England farms, is not putting forward Ms. Barton's best foot. Her work, seen recently in the Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal season at the Joyce, prides itself on taking the personalities of her dancers into account, and there it enjoyed a messy, rambunctious tenor. Here, perhaps choreographing for a less adventurous audience (Baryshnikov fans aren't always steeped in modern dance), she vastly overcompensates and it pulls her under. As Vladimir Martynov's "Come In" swoons endlessly on, she cracks the door open for sentiment but suffocates under the inrushing flood of sap.