Dance: The Mark and Misha Show

Sounds in the summer air:

"The songbird yearned to sing a love song . . ."

"Do you need a beverage or a minuet?"

"We are all sexless, like a line of alphabet letters in a classroom."

Welcome to White Oak Plantation, an outpost of paradise that slipped the Lord's notice when he expunged the rest of Eden. Gazelles and antelope play here. Tigers roam. In the streams black-necked swans bob through the absurdities of their mating ritual. Perhaps even Terpsichore darts about in * the shadows, inspiring a menagerie of humans who have come to the plantation to prepare an innovative evening of dance.

White Oak is a 7,500-acre estate along the St. Marys River, which separates part of Georgia and Florida. Presided over by Howard Gilman, who owns the Gilman Paper Co., this preserve -- part breeding farm for endangered animals, part Thoroughbred stables -- could be described as either utopian or feudal. Through the years Gilman has nurtured the wildlife program, which includes 26 species of mammals and 30 varieties of birds, like a latter-day Sun King. Gilman has also been an enthusiastic patron of dance, and when his friend Mikhail Baryshnikov was looking for a good spot to prepare a tour of new works by his friend, choreographer Mark Morris, Gilman decided to pitch in. Within three weeks he had an air-conditioned studio flung up, with a nice springy floor and sophisticated lighting -- for dancers, Shangri-La.

The Baryshnikov-Morris tour, scheduled for 17 U.S. cities in October and November, would seem about as likely a partnership as the owl and the pussycat. Baryshnikov, 42, the pre-eminent male dancer of the 1970s and '80s, defined the great classical ballet roles. Morris, 34, is a brilliant and somewhat unruly postmodern choreographer. Baryshnikov dances "up," every graceful move a dismissal of gravity. Morris, a marvelous performer as well, is blunt and emphatic. Where the one leaps high, the other stamps down, like the folk dancer he was as a teenager.

After resigning as artistic director of American Ballet Theater a year ago, Baryshnikov thought of quitting dancing too. But despite chronic knee problems, he admits, "it's neither easy nor pleasant to leave the stage. I never thought I'd spend my last years as a modern dancer, but it's important now to work with someone I admire." He had danced Morris' work earlier and spotted him as someone who saw dance the way he did, musically. "Mark decodes a composer's thought," Baryshnikov says. "He uses dance like an extra instrument." As for Morris, he seized on "Misha's" special lyricism at once: "He's a fabulous phraser, and I really do think he is that strange poet in Les Sylphides."

In the studio Morris is the galvanizing leader. Tossing his long black curls, he tears into every move, often with a soda can in hand and a cigarette dangling from his lips. "Shall we start with the frustrating part or the even more frustrating part just ahead of it?" he asks his eight dancers, speaking of a passage in a rather classical-looking piece he is setting to a showy swatch of Saint-Saens. When people start tiring, he is reluctant to lose momentum, but when he offers a choice of beverages or minuets in mock airline- ese, the choice is soft drinks. The ensemble work looks odd at first because Morris rarely distinguishes between men and women. Boy may lift girl, or another boy. The dancers love it.