Ballet legend Baryshnikov still stepping up
Famed Russian dancer stars in NYC drama
It was 38 years ago, give or take just a couple of days, when Mikhail Baryshnikov — newest Soviet defector and instant global superstar — made his American debut in Giselle at the Metropolitan Opera House. I remember staring at his face during the hysterical curtain calls. It was dead white, his eyes like charred holes in a mask that plastered morose nobility on the looks of a boy from an Andy Hardy movie.
What could he have been thinking, this 26-yearold whiz kid, who, weeks earlier had bolted the protected but stifling Leningrad Kirov Ballet to find headlines calling him the greatest Russian dancer to leave his country since Nijinsky in 1911? Mostly he just looked scared.
Whatever he was thinking then is less the point than what he has accomplished since. Baryshnikov — whom friends and fans call Misha — has had a career as unpredictable and selfchallenging as his legendary triple turns used to be.
As he told me in an interview before his first TV special in 1980, “Once you walk along a wire between two Eiffel towers, you have to find another wire. That’s the only way life makes sense to me.”
The high-wire image still works: At the Lincoln Center Festival Wednesday through Sunday, he will star in In Paris, a play — not a dance — about two Russian immigrants in the French capital in the 1930s. Based on a 1940 romantic story by Ivan Bunin, the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize in literature, the production is staged by Dmitry Krymov, a painter and set designer who runs an experimental theatre in Moscow.
Last month in Miami, Baryshnikov opened an exhibit of photographs he took of dancers. And in February at the Hartford Stage in Connecticut, he will star in the world premiere of another drama, Man in a Case, this one based on a Chekhov short story.
Meanwhile, on an increasingly hip stretch of West 37th Street in Hell’s Kitchen thrives a different side of the restless artist altogether: Misha as impresario. Since 2005, he has been the artistic director of the Baryshnikov Arts Center, a sleek three-theatre building that presents provocative work of all kinds, offers a home to such worthies as the Wooster Group and the St. Luke’s Orchestra, and has a multidisciplinary residency program that supports up to 30 emerging and established artists a year.
He still dances occasionally, but gave up ballet for modern and experimental dance in 1990. “People who saw me in the ’70s and ’80s in white tights dancing classical repertoire, they don’t exist anymore,” he told LA Times before the opening of In Paris there last spring. “I’m in my 60s, which means they have to be my age or older. I have a new audience when I perform. They’ve never seen me in classical repertoire. In this sense, I’m not worried.”
As soon as his feet hit our soil, he went zipping through Western culture with an insatiable kidin-a-candy-store delight. His technique changed the rules for male dancers forever. He stretched the boundaries of classical technique into the radically different but all-American styles of Twyla Tharp and Cunningham. In 1978, he left the star pinnacle, $5,000-a-performance showcase at American Ballet Theatre to get $800 a week studying at George Balanchine’s no-star New York City Ballet. From 1980 to 1990, he ran Ballet Theatre for $1 a year. He choreographed the classics.
He starred in movies, usually playing characters more or less like himself, and got an Oscar nomination for The Turning Point (1977). He talked to TV alien Alf. He made Baryshnikov on Broadway and Baryshnikov in Hollywood TV specials. For a big swath of America, he will always be the self-obsessed Russian artist who got dumped by Carrie for Big in the final season of Sex and the City.
Through the years, his puppy quality has turned more elegant and his eyes are a clear but warier blue. Significantly, he has saved his most intellectual, least American-pop side for the theatre — for the most part, modern physical theatre with minimal speech.
In 1989, he made his Broadway debut in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, as the poor salesman who wakes up one morning as a bug. For the 2004 Lincoln Center Festival, he played a sailor whose woman is wooed away by a man with a car in an odd piece, Forbidden Christmas, or The Doctor and the Patient, by a celebrated Russian puppeteer. And in 2007, he exposed a private lifetime of thoughtful darkness in a quartet of short Beckett plays.
The headline on In Paris is that Baryshnikov, for the first time, will speak here in Russian (with English surtitles). The Latvian-born adventurer, who learned English from American commercials and old James Cagney movies on latenight TV, will play a former general of the White Army who fled the Bolsheviks.
Krymov says his performance “is about loneliness. Of course, it is about love, too and about emigration, but first of all about loneliness . . . this person has already died, but doesn’t know it yet, and he is making the last, feverish attempts to live and love.”
Baryshnikov now lives with Lisa Rinehart, a former ABT dancer, with whom he has three children, ages 18 to 23. He is also close to the daughter he had in 1988 with Jessica Lange.
During Metamorphosis tryouts at Duke University, the students made up the word “Mishamorphosis.” That’s good enough to steal.