Baryshnikov, from dancer to photographer
Baryshnikov photography captures his admiration for the art form’s spirit
Ballet superstar’s richly evocative travelling photo exhibit on display now in downtown Toronto,
In a performing career that spans six decades Mikhail Baryshnikov has achieved global fame as a dance superstar and versatile stage and screen actor.
It’s likely more people remember him as Carrie Bradshaw’s love interest in “Sex and the City” than ever saw him in tights as “Swan Lake’s” Prince Siegfried, but Baryshnikov the accomplished photographer? Not so much.
For local audiences that is about to change, as Toronto joins a growing list of major cities to host exhibitions of Baryshnikov’s revealingly unconventional but richly evocative dance photographs.
Toronto’s Lighthouse Immersive, which has repurposed the former Toronto Star printing plant at 1 Yonge St. into a cluster of event spaces, will initiate its intimate new Lighthouse Artspace gallery with “Looking for the Dance,” the most recent of Baryshnikov’s travelling photographic installations. The collection reflects a different aspect of the Latvian-born artist’s career-long quest to penetrate the physical and spiritual core of dance in all its varied manifestations.
“I can see the almost spiritual obsession with dance that I myself have felt, but now observe it from the outside,” Baryshnikov said by phone from his home in New York. “For me it’s like rediscovering the very essence of dance.”
“Looking for the Dance” focuses on two radically different forms, the authentic Argentinian tango to be found in the milongas, or dance halls, of Buenos Aires and the meticulously refined Odissi style of Indian classical dance aspractised in Nrityagram Village to the north of Bengaluru (Bangalore). Some works from past exhibitions are included.
You might think that one of the world’s most photographed dancers would, once possessed of a camera, choose dance as his natural subject. In fact, it took Baryshnikov many years to turn his lens toward dance and then only when he felt he’d found a way to bypass the frozen-in-time approach typical of conventional dance photography to capture the evanescent transitions of movement that give dance its magical allure.
Even as a teenage ballet student in Riga and Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad), Baryshnikov was surrounded by theatre photographers. One of them, Leonid Lubianitsky, became a friend and, like Baryshnikov, eventually settled in the United States. Around 1980, Lubianitsky gave Baryshnikov some black and white film and urged him to take his point-and-shoot Nikon on a foreign tour and photograph whatever took his fancy.
“I really enjoyed the process and something got under my skin,” Baryshnikov recalled. “It became my little hobby and my little secret, and a good way to take my mind off dance.”
He began to take photography more seriously, upgraded his equipment, but still mostly restricted his subjects to family, friends and records of his travels.
Then Baryshnikov came across the work of artists who offered just the approach he’d instinctively craved. At the centre of these was Alexey Brodovitch, the Russian-born American photographer, designer and educator who became the influential long-time art director of fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar. This led to the discovery of the experimental work of such photographers as Paul Himmel, Ilse Bing and Irving Penn.
Although a superbly trained ballet dancer, Baryshnikov is respectful of the artistry and passionate commitment to dance found beyond the professional stage.
As a ballet star through the 1970s and ’80s, and later contemporary dancer and actor, Baryshnikov often travelled to Buenos Aires where he would search out the most interesting dance halls to admire the tango.
“I became obsessed. I knew the best places to go to find the real tango, not the vulgarized Broadway version. They come to milonga halls as if to satisfy some spiritual need.”
And did Baryshnikov participate?
“I was invited but I had to apologize. Nobody seemed to believe me, but I couldn’t dance the tango like that to save my life.”
The images generated from those visits are among the most evocative in the exhibition. As you look at them you begin to hear the intoxicating music, smell the scents and feel the pulse of the movement. The deliberate blurring effects have an almost abstract, painterly quality. .
The series from Nrityagram Village is a blaze of colour. Alongside images of accomplished adult Odissi dancers there are several of young students as they absorb the complexities of eye and head movements, and symbolic hand gestures.
“On weekends, kids from all over come for lessons,” Baryshnikov said. “I have watched a good deal of Indian classical dance elsewhere, but seeing it there was such a privilege, such a spiritual exercise. It’s dance as a way of life. It’s something very extraordinary to witness.” “Looking for the Dance” is at the