White Oak Dance Project was a dance company founded in 1990 by Mikhail Baryshnikov and Mark Morris.
The company took the name of the animal preservation and land plantation owned by philanthropist and Baryshnikov friend Howard Gillman. Gilman built a beautiful dance studio on his White Oak Plantation near Jacksonville, Florida for the company to create its first tour. White Oak became a premier location to workshop works being created by many of the world’s leading choreographers.
The company continued to tour until 2002 allowing the Foundation to concentrate on the 2004 opening of the Baryshnikov Arts Center in Manhattan. The company featured alumni of major dance companies and commissioned new pieces from Morris, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, Jerome Robbins, David Gordon and others.
It is too much to list Baryshinkov's many accomplishments which are already well documented, so I won't list them all here.
Misha is a consummate professional, well-disciplined and hard working. People have always ask me what was it like to work with him, I always answer, “He is a Russian.” Meaning that by growing up in the system of dance discipline of the Russian School of Ballet so much gets decided for them, it keeps them as children much longer, when they have already matured as adults. This makes an interesting mix when they gain their own freedom. They arrive with already established fame and therefore are in great] great demand. To sign on with this company was like being kidnapped into service on a pirate ship. When I joined I hardly ever got home, touring all over America, Europe, Middle-East, Far-East, Australia, New Zealand, South America, even Misha’s homeland in Riga, Latvia, and when not touring, we were rehearsing at White Oak Plantation. When I first joined we traveled with a chamber orchestra and dancers, then pared down to recorded sound only, finally ending with Misha as soloist, with a masseuse, a wardrobe person and technical personnel. It was a great experience and gave me much more insight to what it is to be a celebrity and the demands and toll it takes. I was part of the White Oak Project from 1996-2000.