CROSS-POLLINATION.(The Talk of the Town)(Baryshnikov Arts Center)

The Baryshnikov Arts Center, where the great Russo-American dancer, who is now fifty-seven, hopes to make life better for performing artists, didn't open officially until this month. But the center, housed in a new building on West Thirty-seventh Street, actually got going earlier this year, when it inaugurated fellowships for young artists, who are given studio space, technological support (light, sound, video), and some money to get their shows together. They are also assigned mentors, of their choosing. The playwright Edwin Sanchez worked with Anton Dudley, a recent graduate of the theatre program at N.Y.U.'s Tisch School. Tere O'Connor, the veteran downtown choreographer, helped Jamie Allen, a multimedia artist, and Beliz Demircioglu, a choreographer--they, too, are Tisch alumni--put together a complicated dance-cum-video production. Also in operation is a program that offers residencies to midcareer artists, allowing them to work, at no cost, in big, clean, airy studios.

More than anything, though, Mikhail Baryshnikov intends the center as a meeting place. "I wanted to bring people together in an informal way," he says. "So many collaborations in the theatre, it's just some producer thinks, Well, this guy had a nomination for Emmy, so, O.K., let's have him. But it doesn't have to be well-known choreographer. Could be fair chance given to a young person. I think better collaborative juices grow when people meet on free turf. You're a poet; I'm a filmmaker. You're a choreographer; I'm a playwright. People see each other's work and exchange telephone numbers, and that's how it starts." It has started already. Dancers working with Aszure Barton, who had a residency in the summer, invited the cast from "Hurlyburly," which was playing at a theatre downstairs from the center, to their rehearsals. Scott Elliott, the director of "Hurlyburly," came, too, ...