It is raining, and Mikhail Baryshnikov is standing in a courtyard in Riga, the capital of Latvia, pointing up at two corner windows of an old stucco building that was probably yellow once. With him are his companion, Lisa Rinehart, a former dancer with American Ballet Theatre, and two of his children—Peter, eight, and Aleksandra, or Shura, sixteen. He is showing them the house where he grew up. “It’s Soviet communal apartment,” he says to the children. “In one apartment, five families. Mother and Father have room at corner. See? Big window. Mother and Father sleep there, we eat there, table there. Then other little room, mostly just two beds, for half brother, Vladimir, and me. In other rooms, other people. For fifteen, sixteen people, one kitchen, one toilet, one bathroom, room with bathtub. But no hot water for bath. On Tuesday and Saturday, Vladimir and I go with Father to public bath.”
I open the front door of the building and peer into the dark hallway. “Let’s go up,” I suggest. “No,” he says. “I can’t.” It is more than a quarter century since he was here last.
After his defection to the West, in 1974, Baryshnikov said again and again that he had no wish to return to the Soviet Union, or even to the former Soviet Union. Then, late last year, he accepted an invitation to dance at the Latvian National Opera, the stage on which he first set foot as a ballet dancer. Why he changed his mind is something of a mystery. Perhaps he just felt that it was time. (He will turn fifty next week.) Perhaps he wanted to show his children what he came from. To me all he said was “I am going to visit my mother’s grave.”
Baryshnikov, actually, is not a man for sentimental journeys. He is too resistant to falseness. Nor does he like being followed around by journalists. Interviews are torture to him: “You ask me what’s happened in my life, why and how I did this and that. And I think and tell, but it’s never true story, because everything is so much more complicated, and also I can’t even remember how things happened. Whole process is boring. Also false, but mostly boring.” He politely does not point out the journalist’s role in this: how the questions are pitched, and the answers interpreted, according to already established ideas about the life in question—in this case, the life of a man who escaped from the Soviet Union at the age of twenty-six. It is hard to find an article on Baryshnikov that does not describe a look of melancholy in his eyes, supposedly the consequence of exile from his Russian homeland. This is the dominant theme of writings about him, but in his view it has nothing to do with him. He has lived in the United States for almost half his life. He is a United States citizen and regards this country as his home. He has lived with an American, Rinehart, for about ten years, and they have three children who speak no Russian.
Of course, when his return to Latvia was announced, the exile theme sounded with new force. The press in Riga was sown with sentimental formulas: the prodigal-son motif, the return-home motif, the ancestral-roots motif. He refused them all. For Russia, he says, he feels no nostalgia. Though his parents were Russian, he did not move to Russia until he was sixteen: “I was guest there, always.” As for Latvia, it was his birthplace, but his parents were “occupiers” (his word) there. “The minute plane set down, the minute I stepped again on Latvian land, I realized this was never my home. My heart didn’t even skip one beat.”
What has made Baryshnikov a paragon of late-twentieth-century dance is partly the purity of his ballet technique. In him the hidden meaning of ballet, and of classicism—that experience has order, that life can be understood—is clearer than in any other dancer on the stage today. Another part of his preëminence derives, of course, from his virtuosity, the lengths to which he was able to take ballet—the split leaps, the cyclonic pirouettes—without sacrificing purity. But what has made him an artist, and a popular artist, is the completeness of his performances: the level of concentration, the fullness of ambition, the sheer amount of detail, with the cast of the shoulder, the angle of the jaw, even the splay of the fingers, all deployed in the service of a single, pressing act of imagination. In him there is simply more to see than in most other dancers. No matter what role he is playing (and he has played some thankless ones), he always honors it completely, working every minute to make it a serious human story. In an interview prior to the Riga concerts, the Latvian theatre critic Normunds Naumanis asked him why he danced. He answered that he was not a religious person (quickly adding that his mother had been, and had had him secretly baptized) but that he thought he found onstage what people seek in religion: “some approximation to exaltation, inner purification, self-discovery.” He may hate interviews, but once he is in one he tends to pour his heart out. (This may be why he hates them.)
Though Baryshnikov directs a company, the White Oak Dance Project, he went to Riga in October alone, as a solo dancer, and next week (January 21st-25th), at the City Center, in New York, he will again perform by himself—his first solo concerts, ever, in the United States. There is something fitting in this. The things he now seeks in dance—the exaltation, the self-discovery—are easier to find if one is not lifting another dancer at the same time. Furthermore, audiences these days don’t want their view of him blocked by other people. But, basically, solo is his natural state, the condition that made him. The rootlessness of his childhood sent him into himself—made him a reader, a thinker, a mind—and the rule of force he worked under in the Soviet Union had the same effect: it made him cherish what could not be forced, his own thoughts. This became a way of dancing. It is not that when he is performing he is telling us who he is. Rather, he is telling us, as fully as he can, what truth he has found in the role, what he has thought about it. In many of his solos today, he seems to be giving us a portrait of thought itself—its bursts and hesitations, the neural firings—and this is something one must do solo.
It was as a presenter of new work, not just as a dancer, that Baryshnikov returned to Riga. Most of the solos he brought were from his White Oak repertory—works by people like Mark Morris, Twyla Tharp, and Dana Reitz. These pieces were far removed from the earnest Soviet ballets that the Latvians had last seen him in and that some of them would probably have liked to see him in again. (The Reitz piece, “Unspoken Territory,” has him, in a sarong, stalking around the stage in silence—no music—for twenty minutes.) In his mind, he was going to Riga not as he was then but as he is today.
To the Riga press, however, it was what he was then—the man who had been one of them and had left—that was important. Also, as usual in the Soviet Union, former or otherwise, politics came to greet him. There is considerable tension between Riga’s Latvian and Russian populations. (Though Russians outnumber Latvians in the capital, Latvian independence has made the Russians the underdogs now: Russians must pass a Latvian-language test to get a job in the government.) The Russians wanted to know why Baryshnikov had come to Latvia, not to Russia, and why, if he gave only three interviews concerning his visit (he wanted no press, no questions), he gave them to Latvian, not to Russian, journalists.
To such problems Baryshnikov applied his usual remedy: work. The happiest I ever saw him in Riga was in a studio in his old school, rehearsing works for the upcoming program. Perched on a folding chair, watching him, was the director of the school, Haralds Ritenbergs, who had been the leading danseur noble of the Latvian state ballet company when Baryshnikov was a child. (“To us he was like Rock Hudson,” Baryshnikov says.) Next to Ritenbergs sat Juris Kapralis, a handsome, bighearted Latvian whom Baryshnikov had as his ballet teacher from age twelve to sixteen. What must these men have felt? Here was the dear, small, hardworking boy they had known, now almost fifty years old and the most famous dancer in the world, rehearsing before them steps such as they had never seen. There should have been some shock, some acknowledgment of the break in history—of all the years when so many things had happened to him, and to them, to make their lives so different. But there was none of that. What I saw was just three old pros working together. Baryshnikov would perform the steps. Then he and the two older men would huddle together and, in the hand language that dancers use, discuss the choreography. Yes, Baryshnikov said, this piece, no music. Yes, here I do arms this way, and he demonstrated a stiff, right-angled arm, the opposite of what ballet dancers are taught. I looked for raised eyebrows. There were none. The older men nodded, watched, asked questions. To them, it seemed, he was still their hardworking boy, and his business was their business, dancing. Baryshnikov showed them his shoes—jazz shoes, Western shoes—and Ritenbergs and Kapralis unlaced them, peered into them, poked the instep, flexed the sole. They were like two veteran wine makers inspecting a new kind of cork. Whatever feelings passed among the three men, they were all subsumed into work. Now, as had not happened when Baryshnikov showed me his old house or the hospital where he was born, time vanished. He had returned home at last, but the home wasn’t Riga; it was ballet.
Mikhail Nikolaievich Baryshnikov was born in Riga eight years after Latvia, in the midst of the Second World War, was forcibly annexed to the Soviet Union. Once the war was over, Russian workers streamed into this tiny Baltic country, the size of Vermont. Among them was Baryshnikov’s father, Nikolai, a high-ranking military officer who was sent to Riga to teach military topography in the Air Force academy. With him came his new wife, Aleksandra, who had lost her first husband in the war, and Vladimir, her son by that first marriage. By Nikolai, she had Mikhail, eight years younger than Vladimir, in 1948. The parents’ marriage was not happy. The father seems to have been a curt, cold man. The mother, Aleksandra, was another matter, Baryshnikov says—“softer, interesting.” She had had very little education but was a passionate theatregoer. She went to drama, opera, and ballet, and she took Misha with her.
Misha was one of those children who cannot sit still. Erika Vitina, a friend of the family, says that when he ate at their house you could see his legs dancing around under the glass-topped dinner table. He himself remembers movement as an outlet for emotion. “One time I recall is when my mother first took me to visit my grandmother, on the Volga River,” he told me. “Volga, it’s a long way up from Latvia. We took a train through Moscow, and Moscow to Gorky, plus then you drive another seventy miles. We took taxi, or some car delivered us. It was very early morning when we arrived—little village, and very simple house, and there was my grandmother. And I was in such anticipation, because I was like five or so, maybe six. My mother said to me, ‘Mikhail, hug your grandmother.’ But I was so overwhelmed that I couldn’t run to her and hug her. So I just start to jump and jump, jump like crazy, around and around. It was embarrassing, but same time totally what I needed to do. Mother and Grandmother stood and looked until it was over.”
When he was about nine, his mother became friends with a woman who had danced with the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow and who now gave ballet lessons in Riga. “Mother was very excited by this friendship,” Baryshnikov says. She enrolled him in her friend’s class. When he was eleven, he moved over to the Riga School of Choreography, the state ballet academy. (One of his classmates there was Alexander Godunov, who would also defect, and dance at American Ballet Theatre under Baryshnikov’s directorship.) Soon he showed extraordinary talent. Erika Vitina stresses the mother’s involvement in Misha’s ballet studies: “The father had no interest whatsoever in the ballet school. The mother brought him to the ballet school, put him there. All this happened physically, hand to hand.”
“I was mama’s boy in a way,” Baryshnikov says. He remembers how beautiful she was. (In fact, in the one photograph I have seen of her she looks uncannily like him. It could be Baryshnikov with a wig on.) “My mother was a country girl from the Volga River,” he said in a 1986 interview with Roman Polanski. “She spoke with a strong Volga accent. Very beautiful, very Russian—a one-hundred-per-cent pure Russian bride. But to tell the whole story of my mother, it’s a long story.” The end of the story is that during the summer when he was twelve she took him to the Volga to stay with her mother and then went back to Riga and hanged herself in the bathroom of the communal apartment. Vladimir found her. Baryshnikov never knew why she did it. “Father did not want to talk about it,” he told me. Soon afterward,Vladimir left for the Army, and the father told Misha that now they would live together, just the two of them. The following year, Nikolai went away on a business trip and returned with a new wife, a new life. “I understood that I am not wanted,” Baryshnikov said.
He looked for other families. He spent most summers with the family of Erika Vitina, and he stayed with them at other times as well. “Quite often,” Vitina says, “he would ring our doorbell late at night, saying that he had run away. But a week later I would receive a call from the ballet school”—she, too, had a child enrolled there—“and would be told that unless I sent Misha home they would have to call the police. We spent two years in this manner. From time to time, he’d come to stay with me, and then his father would take him away again.” Insofar as Baryshnikov has lived a life of exile, it had begun.
Erika Vitina recalls that his nights were often hard. Because he worried that he was too short to be a ballet dancer, he slept on a wooden plank—he had been told that this would help him grow faster (less traction)—and the blankets wouldn’t stay tucked in. Before going to bed herself, Vitina would look in and cover him up again. Often, he would be calling out in his sleep, caught in a nightmare. But during the day, she says, he was “a happy, sunny boy.” Now, looking back on those years, Baryshnikov is quick to dispel any atmosphere of pathos: “Children being left, it’s not always like books of Charles Dickens. When you lose your parents in childhood, it’s a fact of life, and, you know, human beings are extraordinary powerful survivors. My mother commit suicide. I was lucky it was not in front of me, O.K.? Which is truth, and Father was confused, and we never had any relationship, serious relationship. I never knew my father, in a way. But what? It’s made me different? No. I mean, I blame for every fuckups in my life my parents? No.”
“I got lucky,” he adds. “I fell in love with dance.” Every ounce of energy he had was now channelled into ballet. According to Juris Kapralis, who became his ballet teacher two months after his mother’s death, he was a child workaholic: “Very serious boy. Perfectionist. Even in free time, go in corner and practice over and over again. Other boys playing, Misha studying. And not just steps, but artistic, as actor. He is thinking all the time what this role must be. I remember, once, ‘Nutcracker.’ He was thirteen, perhaps. I was prince, and he was toy soldier. After Mouse King dies, Misha relax his body. No longer stiff, like wooden soldier. Soft. Our ballet director ask him, ‘Who say you should do this?’ And he answer, ‘When Mouse King dies, toys become human. Toys become boys. Movements must change.’ He devise that himself. Small boy, but thinking.”
I asked Baryshnikov recently whether, after his mother’s death, ballet might have been a way for him to return to her. He paused for a long time and then said, “In Russia, dancing is part of happiness in groups. Groups at parties, people dancing in circle, and they push child to center, to dance. Child soon works up little routine. Can do a little this”—hand at the back of the neck—“a little this”—arms joined horizontally across the chest—“and soon make up some special steps, and learn to save them for end, to make big finale. This way, child gets attention from adults.”
In the case of a child artist, and particularly one who has suffered a terrible loss, it is tempting to read artistic decisions as psychological decisions, because we assume that a child cannot really be an artist. But, as many people have said, children are probably more artistic than adults, bolder in imagination, more unashamedly fascinated with shape, line, detail. In Baryshnikov’s case, the mother’s devotion and then the loss of her can help to explain one thing: the work he put into ballet. For the rest—the physical gift, the fusion of steps with fantasy, the interest in making something true and complete (“Toys become boys”), all of which are as much a part of him today as they were when he was twelve—we must look to him alone.
In 1964, the Latvian state ballet went on tour to Leningrad with a ballet in which Baryshnikov, now sixteen, had a small role, and a member of the company took him to Alexander Pushkin, a revered teacher at the Kirov Ballet’s school, the Vaganova Choreographic Institute. Pushkin immediately asked the director of the school to admit the boy. By September, Baryshnikov had moved to Leningrad and was installed at the barre in Pushkin’s class. Thereafter, he rarely went back to Riga.
Next to his mother, Pushkin was probably the most important person in Baryshnikov’s early life. Pushkin had begun his own ballet training in the studio of Nikolai Legat, who had helped train Nijinsky. Later, he studied with other famous teachers. When Baryshnikov joined his class, Pushkin was fifty-seven, and past dancing, but he had performed with the Kirov for almost thirty years, mostly in secondary roles. “Pas de deux, pas de trois,” Baryshnikov says. “Sometimes substitute for a principal, but he was not principal type. Not very handsome—big nose, long legs, short body—and not very expressive. But classical, classical. Old-school, traditional, square. Academician. Usually, it’s those kind of people, people who dance twenty-five years the same parts, who know more about technique than people who are advancing and trying out other sort of areas. Twenty-five years you come back after summer vacation and tune your body into same routine, you figure out timing, you figure out method.”
Pushkin had begun teaching early, at the age of twenty-five, and he soon specialized in men. His classroom manner was famously laconic. He rarely offered corrections, and when he did they were of the most elementary sort. (It was said at the school that he had two: “Don’t fall” and “Get up.”) Rather, as Baryshnikov explains it, what made Pushkin so effective was the logic of the step combinations he taught—the fact that they were true not just to classical ballet but also to human musculature. They seemed right to the body, and so you did them right. And the more you did them the more you became a classical dancer. Another thing about Pushkin, his students say, is that he was a developer of individuality. He steered the students toward themselves, helped them find out what kinds of dancers they were. “Plus,” Baryshnikov says, “he was extraordinary patient and extraordinary kind person. Really, really kind.” If there is a point in classical art where aesthetics meet morals—where beauty, by appearing plain and natural, gives us hope that we, too, can be beautiful—Pushkin seems to have stood at that point, and held out a hand to his pupils. In any case, he was a specialist in calming down teen-age boys, getting them to work, and making them take themselves seriously. Out of his classroom in the fifties and sixties came the Kirov’s finest male dancers—notably Nikita Dolgushin, Yuri Soloviev, and Rudolf Nureyev.
Pushkin took certain of his students very directly under his wing. The best-known example is Nureyev, who was ten years older than Baryshnikov. Nureyev had started studying ballet extremely late. “It was not until he was sixteen or seventeen that he came to Leningrad and put his leg in first position professionally,” Baryshnikov says. “And he took this opportunity very—*errgghh—*like a tank. Very aggressive in terms of the education, in terms of the catch-up. And short temper. Sometimes in rehearsal, if he couldn’t do certain steps he would just run out, crying, run home. Then, ten o’clock in the evening, he is back in studio working on the step till he will get it. People think he is oddball. And already his ambivalent sexuality was obvious, which in that conservative atmosphere was big problem. People were teasing him.” So Pushkin and his wife, Xenia Jurgensen, another former Kirov dancer, took Nureyev into their home. He lived with them for a long time, not just while he was in school but also during his early years at the Kirov. The fact that Nureyev defected in 1961—that he was accomplished enough and brave enough to go—was probably due in large measure to them, though it broke their hearts. (When Baryshnikov first went to their house, he saw Nureyev’s electric train, installed as a kind of relic, in their living room.) Sacred vessel of the Russian tradition, Pushkin bred dancers so good, so serious and ambitious, that they could not survive in Russia. Yuri Soloviev killed himself. Nikita Dolgushin was banished to the provinces. Nureyev and Baryshnikov defected.
Pushkin and Jurgensen took Baryshnikov in as they had taken in Nureyev. “I spent weeks, sometimes months, staying with them,” he says. He also ate at their house almost every night. Jurgensen was a good cook. “Very upper-class Russian food,” Baryshnikov says. “Winter food—veal, cream.” Then Pushkin and his pupil would work together, sometimes for hours, often on arms: “Find my way of moving arms, coördination. Young dancers don’t think about this, only think about feet.” Then, very often, it was too late for Baryshnikov to return to the dormitory, so he slept on the Pushkins’ couch.
Baryshnikov was still very worried about his height. Russian ballet companies follow a strict system, called emploi, whereby dancers are sorted by type into certain kinds of roles and remain there for the rest of their careers. Baryshnikov, though he was still growing (he eventually reached five feet seven), seemed too short for the danseur-noble roles, the grave, poetic leading-man roles. Not just his height but also his stage presence—he was boyish, vivacious, a personality—seemed to be pushing him toward demi-caractère roles, the quick, often comic supporting-actor roles. As he put it in his interview with Polanski, “I thought I would end up as a Joker or a Harlequin somewhere,” and this was not what he wanted. But Pushkin believed that his pupil would be a danseur noble, and he got him just to go on working. In 1967, Baryshnikov graduated from the Vaganova school. At his graduation performance, in the “Corsaire” pas de deux, “the scene was unimaginable,” his biographer Gennady Smakov writes. The crowd howled; the chandeliers shook. Baryshnikov was taken into the Kirov Ballet as a soloist, skipping the normal starting position in the corps de ballet, and now his troubles really began.
“I joined the company when it was falling apart,” Baryshnikov told Smakov. In the late sixties and the seventies, the Kirov went through a period of repression from which it has never fully recovered. In part, this was due to a society-wide tightening up after the Khrushchev “thaw.” But in the ballet world there was redoubled anxiety, the result of Nureyev’s defection. Konstantin Sergeyev, the director of the Kirov, turned the company into a mini police state. The repertory consisted either of nineteenth-century classics, restaged by Sergeyev, or of socialist flag-wavers. (Sergeyev himself, in 1963, made a ballet, “The Distant Planet,” inspired by Yuri Gagarin’s spaceflight.) Any newly commissioned ballets were vetted to make sure they threatened neither government policy nor Sergeyev’s primacy as company choreographer. The dancers were watched vigilantly for signs of insubordination. If they looked like defection risks—indeed, if they failed to attend company meetings or had the wrong friends—they were often barred from foreign tours, which were their only means of supplementing their tiny incomes. Typically, the list of who would be going on a tour was not posted until the day of departure. Shortly beforehand, meetings would be held at which the dancers were encouraged to denounce their colleagues, so that their own names, rather than their colleagues’, would be on the list. Many coöperated. Coöperate or not, the dancers were brought to their knees. Righteous suffering can ruin you almost as fast as shame. Other privileges at the Kirov—roles, choice of partners, time onstage—were also awarded less on the basis of merit than according to one’s history of coöperation. The careers of what were reportedly superb artists, people who were one in a thousand, and in whom ten years’ training had been invested, were destroyed in this way.
Such were the circumstances in which Baryshnikov, nineteen years old and hungry to dance, found himself in 1967. He had to fight just to get onstage—at that time, even leading Kirov dancers performed only three to four times a month—and also to get the partners he wanted. Above all, he had to struggle over his casting. He was given danseur-noble roles eventually, but only eventually. (He waited six years to dance Albrecht in “Giselle,” a part he desperately wanted.) Worse was the problem of getting a chance to perform in something other than the standard repertory. Baryshnikov wanted to dance new ballets, modern ballets, and some were being created at the Kirov, with excellent roles for him. But again and again such ballets were vetoed by the company’s artsoviet, or artistic committee, and dropped after one or two performances. Baryshnikov was sent back to dancing “Don Quixote.”
In 1970, midway into his seven-year career in Russia, things got a great deal worse, for in that year Natalia Makarova, the Kirov’s rising young ballerina, defected while the company was performing in London. Baryshnikov was on this tour, and it was to him, not to Makarova, that the authorities devoted their special attention. As he sees it, they did not take Makarova seriously as a potential defector, because she was a woman: “They wouldn’t think a woman would have guts to defect.” Baryshnikov, on the other hand, sometimes had as many as three K.G.B. agents tailing him as he walked down the streets of London. He says that at that time he had no thoughts of defection. If he was closely confined at the Kirov, that was because he was greatly valued there. He was one of the company’s leading dancers. “Also,” he says, “the Kirov was a home to me, and I had unfinished business. I wanted to do this dance, with these people.” Indeed, when he got the news about Makarova, who was a friend and also a former girlfriend of his, he was terribly worried for her: “I thought it will be difficult for her to survive in the West, that people will get advantage of her, that she will be sorry. Can you believe how stupid?”
But the events that led to his own defection were already accumulating. Four months before the London tour, Pushkin had died—of a heart attack, on a sidewalk—at the age of sixty-two. At that point, Baryshnikov later told an interviewer, “I realized that I was totally on my own.” A second important development was the London tour itself. The audience and the critics went crazy over him. (If he thought it would be hard for a Soviet dancer to survive in the West, his London reviews may have given him reason to rethink that conclusion later.) But London gave him more than good reviews: “You cannot know what it meant to travel. Just to see how other people react to you, and to measure your ability as an artist, as a dancer. And to see what’s supposed to be your life—that your life is not just in cocoon, that other people in other countries do have same emotions.” He met Western dancers. He became friends with Margot Fonteyn. He attended rehearsals at the Royal Ballet. He went to modern-dance classes. He saw American Ballet Theatre, which was performing in London at the same time.
He also met Nureyev, who was now living in London and dancing with the Royal Ballet. Nureyev went to see the Kirov performances and managed to get a message to Baryshnikov. “A man we both knew came to me and said, ‘Rudolf want to see you if you want to.’ ” So the next morning Baryshnikov gave the K.G.B. the slip and spent a whole day in Nureyev’s big house, overlooking Richmond Park. They talked about ballet, he says: “Russian exercises, French exercises, teachers, class, how long barre—all technique, Rudolf’s obsession.” At lunch, Nureyev drank a whole bottle of wine by himself. (Baryshnikov couldn’t drink. He was performing that night.) Then they went out and lay on the grass and talked about technique some more. “When I left, he gave me a couple of books—one with beautiful Michelangelo drawings—and some scarf he gave me. I was very touched by him.” The two men remained friends until Nureyev’s death, in 1993.
With Makarova’s defection, the panic at the Kirov was even worse than it had been with Nureyev’s. Sergeyev was removed from his post; a number of brief, fumbling directorships followed. Baryshnikov was watched more and more carefully. If Western dancers came to Leningrad and he went out to dinner with them, this was noted in his file, and the K.G.B. came to talk to him about it. When Western choreographers got in touch with the Kirov to see if he could work with them, they were told he was sick. He was also under pressure to go to political rallies, and privileges in the theatre were made contingent on his attendance: “They’d say, if not this, then not this. Blackmail, you know?”
In 1974, Baryshnikov staged what was called a Creative Evening—a favor sometimes accorded leading dancers. The dancer would commission an evening’s worth of short works, often from young choreographers. (Whatever nonconformist ballets made it onto the Kirov stage were usually part of a Creative Evening.) The dancer would also choose the casts, assemble the sets and costumes, and star in the program. Then, after this display of open-mindedness, the administration would normally shelve the ballets. For his Creative Evening, Baryshnikov hired two experimental (and therefore extra-Leningrad) choreographers—Georgi Alexidze, based in Tbilisi, and Mai Murdmaa, an Estonian. There followed several months of anguish as, faced with harassment from the administration and apathy from the demoralized dancers, Baryshnikov tried to get the new ballets onstage. Cast members dropped out; costume designs were argued over (too revealing). Shortly before the première, Baryshnikov was pulled out of rehearsals to go to Moscow for another political rally. After the first preview, he met with the artsoviet, and they told him how bad they thought the show was. It was allowed a few performances anyway—all the tickets were already sold—but afterward, at a cast banquet, Baryshnikov burst into tears while he was trying to make a speech to the dancers. “He was talking and crying,” Nina Alovert reports in her 1984 book, “Baryshnikov in Russia.” “Some people listened to him . . . while others continued to eat, scraping their plates with their forks.”
The disappointments apart, Baryshnikov remembers Leningrad as a place of immense tedium: “The most interesting objects were people, saying what they would have done, if they could have. Which is what they talked about if they drank a little. But they didn’t drink a little. They drank a lot.” In a 1986 interview, Arlene Croce asked Baryshnikov’s close friend Joseph Brodsky what would have become of the dancer if he had remained in Russia. “He’d be a ruin by now,” Brodsky answered, “both physically and mentally. Physically because of the bottle. . . . Mentally because of that mixture of impotence and cynicism that corrodes everyone there—the stronger you are the worse it is.”
Finally, he refused that fate. A few months after the Creative Evening, a group of dancers from the Bolshoi Ballet were leaving for a tour of Canada. The two Bolshoi veterans leading the tour, Raissa Struchkova and her husband, Alexander Lapauri, asked the Kirov if Baryshnikov and his frequent partner Irina Kolpakova could join them, to add heft to the roster. The Kirov refused; at this point, the K.G.B. was barely letting Baryshnikov out of its sight. But Kolpakova intervened, and she was a well-placed person—not just the Kirov’s leading ballerina but a former administrator of the company and a member of the Party, with excellent connections. She apparently guaranteed Baryshnikov’s safe return, and therefore they were allowed to go. That was the tour from which Baryshnikov did not return. Kolpakova somehow survived as the leading ballerina at the Kirov, but Struchkova and Lapauri were forbidden ever to leave the Soviet Union again. The following year, Lapauri got drunk one night, drove his car into a lamppost, and died. By that time, Baryshnikov was the new sensation of Western ballet, and if, with his fame, he also had a sad look in his eyes the cause was probably not nostalgia for the Soviet Union.
Baryshnikov’s career as a ballet dancer in the seventies and eighties has by now been the subject of hundreds of articles, and of half a dozen books as well. It had three stages: four years as the star of American Ballet Theatre (from 1974 to 1978), one year at George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet (from 1978 to 1979), then nine years as the director of American Ballet Theatre (from 1980 to 1989). What he did during this time, above all, was acquire new repertory—the thing he had most wanted to do. In just his first two years in the West, he learned twenty-six new roles, more than he would have been given in a lifetime in the Soviet Union. And the process of working with new choreographers nudged his style in new directions.
Most important was his collaboration with Twyla Tharp. In the nineteen-seventies, Tharp was undergoing a transition from modern dance to ballet. Baryshnikov was also in transition, so he made a perfect subject for her. Starting with the hugely popular “Push Comes to Shove,” in 1976, she created for him a series of ballets that seemed to be about the project facing them both: how to marry the Old World dance to the new—in particular, how to join ballet, so outward and perfect, to the inwardness, the ruminations, of jazz. In Tharp’s works, Baryshnikov’s dancing became more shaded, with more hitches and grace notes, more little thoughts, tucked in between one step and the next. And it was these—the transitions, the secret places between the steps—that seemed to give the dancing its meaning. The big ballet moves were still there, but they were thrown off casually, like something taken for granted. Suddenly, out of some low-down noodling, Baryshnikov would rise up into an utterly perfect leap, and then land and noodle some more. This was surprising, witty, but it also seemed philosophical: a meditation on history, a memory of innocence in a mind past innocence. Appropriately, Tharp had Baryshnikov do this kind of dancing alone. It influenced all his future work, affecting not just him but the choreographers who worked with him after Tharp. The more he became that kind of dancer—inward, alone—the more they made that kind of dance for him.
At the same time, what Tharp made of Baryshnikov was in him already. He was a transplant, and alone, and he combined an exquisitely schooled classical technique with what seemed, even before Tharp, an increasingly ruminative quality, a deep sort of cool. He danced that way not only in Tharp’s ballets but also in “Giselle,” and this gave him a special glamour. Soon he was more than an acclaimed ballet dancer: he was a celebrity, a dreamboat. Crucial to this development was the fact that in his hunger for new outlets he looked beyond live theatre. He made movies (“The Turning Point,” in 1977; “White Nights,” in 1985; “Dancers,” in 1987), and television specials, too, and he turned out to be extremely filmable. Now you didn’t have to live in New York to be a Baryshnikov fan, any more than you had to live in Hollywood to be a Sylvester Stallone fan. He was an electronic-media ballet star, the first one in history.
The movies, of course, made use not only of his dancing but of his sex appeal. In all three of his Hollywood films, he was cast as a roué, a heartbreaker. The newspapers, meanwhile, were doing what they could to cover his love life: his rocky affair with Gelsey Kirkland, the ballerina who had left New York City Ballet to become his partner at A.B.T.; his long liaison with Jessica Lange (which produced his first child, Aleksandra, named after his mother); his shorter stopovers with many others. “He goes through everybody, he doesn’t miss anyone,” the post-Baryshnikov Kirkland told a reporter. “I should have been so lucky,” Baryshnikov says. But in a male ballet dancer even medium-level skirt-chasing makes good copy. Combined with all the other factors—his “exile,” his famous melancholy, his tendency to flee interviewers, his hunger for new projects—it gave him a sort of Byronic profile, as a haunted man, a man of unfulfillable desires, unassuageable griefs. He did not fashion the image, but he fitted it, and nothing could have been more attractive. Posters of him hung in dorm rooms.
In 1979, only a year after he had made the switch from American Ballet Theatre to New York City Ballet, A.B.T. asked him to come back, this time as the head of the company, and he accepted. The story of Baryshnikov’s nine-year directorship of A.B.T. is a long, messy, fascinating tale that has never been fully told. Briefly, he tried to modernize the company. He junked the star system and began promoting from within the ranks. He regalvanized the company’s notoriously feckless corps de ballet. He brought in new repertory, including modern-dance pieces, plus crossover ballets by the most interesting American choreographers of the moment—people such as Tharp, David Gordon, and Mark Morris. Suddenly, the air began to circulate again at A.B.T. The corps moved with beauty and pride. The young soloists danced like demons. The new works were talked about, argued about. Before, what was interesting at A.B.T. was merely this or that performance, usually by a foreign star. Now, for the first time since the nineteen-fifties, the company itself was a serious subject, an art-producing organization.
Not all of Baryshnikov’s reforms were successful, and when they did succeed they weren’t necessarily popular. Stars left in huffs. Critics deplored many of the new works. People accused Baryshnikov of trying to turn A.B.T. into New York City Ballet, or into a modern-dance company, or, in any case, into something other than the plump, old-style, stars-and-classics institution that it had been, and which they still loved. The company’s deficit swelled. The dancers went out on strike. There was constant friction between Baryshnikov and the board. He had ostensibly been hired as the company’s artistic director, but the board also expected him to be its leading dancer and its No. 1 fund-raiser—roles that he declined. (He had repeated injuries; he could not dance as much. As for fund-raising, he loathed it. At parties for patrons, he was often the first person out the door.) And by insisting on a salary of a dollar a year as director—which, given his performance fees, he could afford—he felt he had given himself that right. But the wear on him was severe. In 1989, he gave notice that he would leave in 1990. A few months later, the administration went over his head and fired his second-in-command, Charles France. Baryshnikov resigned in a fury.
Why had he taken the job in the first place? He is not a natural leader. He can’t press the flesh, give the interviews, settle the quarrels, or not willingly. Yet at the time when it came, the offer of the A.B.T. directorship was something he could not refuse. Having seen at the Kirov how badly a ballet company could be directed, he was, of course, tempted to find out if he could run one well. At the same time, there was another factor—his year at New York City Ballet. It has often been claimed that Baryshnikov’s experience there was a bitter disappointment to him because by the time he arrived Balanchine was already ill (he died within five years) and could not make new ballets for him. “That’s nonsense, absolute nonsense,” Baryshnikov says. “That one year was most interesting time in my American career.” Part of the pleasure, again, was new repertory. In fifteen months at N.Y.C.B., he learned twenty-odd roles, and though he had trouble fitting into some of them—and not enough time—there were others, particularly Balanchine’s “Apollo” and “Prodigal Son,” that seemed to have been waiting all those years just for him. He was tremendous, utterly wrenching, as the Prodigal, and he was probably the best Apollo ever to inhabit that role. All the qualities needed to represent Balanchine’s boy-god—childlikeness, aloneness, dignity, a sense of high mission—were already in him. He filled the ballet to its skin.
But Baryshnikov says that what was most important to him at N.Y.C.B. was his sense that he had found a home. Balanchine had gone to the same school and made his professional début at the same theatre that Baryshnikov had, and, like him, had decided that to be an artist he must leave Russia. (Baryshnikov defected fifty years, almost to the day, after Balanchine left.) Balanchine had then created in the West what, in Baryshnikov’s view, Russian ballet would have become but for the Revolution: modernist classicism. “I am entering the ideal future of the Maryinsky Ballet,” he told reporters when he announced his switch to N.Y.C.B. (The Maryinsky was the Kirov’s pre-Revolutionary name.) Also, Balanchine seems to have treated him like a son: “He told me, ‘I wish I could be a little younger, a little healthier, that we could work more on new pieces, but let’s not waste time. Let’s do “Harlequinade,” let’s do “Prodigal,” let’s do this, let’s do that, and think—whatever you want to do.’ He cared what I will do.”
The story is terrible. The homeless boy found a home, the sonless master found a son, but it was very late. Then came the invitation from A.B.T. Curiously, it was in part because of the gifts Baryshnikov was given at N.Y.C.B. that he decided to leave. For one thing, Balanchine told him he could always come back. “I went to him and we talked for a long time,” he recalls. “We talked for an hour one day, and he said, ‘Come back tomorrow.’ And he was very, sort of—not encouraging me, but said, ‘If you can see what you want to do and can deal with people on the board and you have a clear vision, I think you should do it, take this chance.’ He said, ‘If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. You can come back, anytime. This is your home.’ ”
But it wasn’t just the N.Y.C.B. safety net that emboldened Baryshnikov to go to A.B.T. It was also what he saw as the moral lesson of N.Y.C.B., as taught to him by Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, the company’s second ballet master. “Working with Balanchine and Jerry every day—just to see their dedication to the institution, the company, the school. Their seriousness, the seriousness of the whole setup, everything about it. Very different from the world which I come from, government-supported company, or commercially set up company like Ballet Theatre. I learn so much. Something about dance ethics, about being a dancer, and the quality of the work. I learn how and why to respect choreographic vision and morale of theatre. And that was most important experience. On the surface I was just one of them, and that was fine. But deep inside I experienced extraordinary transformation, and I understand a lot of things, for my future work.” Clearly, that was a major reason for his going to A.B.T. He felt he had learned something tremendous, and he wanted to use it. Those who accused him of trying to turn A.B.T. into N.Y.C.B. were partly right.
Nearly ten years after Baryshnikov’s departure from A.B.T., with the current administration trying desperately to restore the old stars-and-classics order, the company still reflects the changes he made: the corps still shows the verve he instilled in it, and the young soloist-level dancers still seem to dance with a sort of wild hope, as if they might actually be promoted. But these are things you can’t discuss with Baryshnikov at present. The bitterness of the A.B.T. years is still too keen. What he sees now as the “future work” to which he tried to carry the spirit of New York City Ballet is his present project: directing a modern-dance company. This troupe, the White Oak Dance Project, is a great curiosity. What is a Russian-trained ballet dancer doing directing an American modern-dance company? And why is a man who during the A.B.T. years repeatedly said that he wanted to retire from the stage—that he had had it, that his knee was killing him (it has now been operated on five times)—still performing intensively: an activity that requires him to undergo two hours of physical therapy every day, and, on days when he is performing, four additional hours of warmups and rehearsal, not to speak of the travelling and the room-service dinners? “Well,” he said to me in 1990, at the time of White Oak’s founding, “I thought there is maybe a couple of years left, for fun.” The late philanthropist Howard Gilman, a friend of his, offered to build him a rehearsal studio at the Gilman Foundation’s White Oak Plantation, in Florida—in gratitude, Baryshnikov named the troupe after the plantation—and operations were set up in such a way that, unlike A.B.T., the company would not be a noose around his neck. He hired seasoned dancers—people who would not develop eating disorders—and he engaged them on a tour-by-tour basis. The company was not a company; it was a “project.” It could vanish at any time. It had no board, no grants, no deficit. Either it paid for itself or Baryshnikov wrote a check. In other words, he set up the least institutional institution he could possibly create—one in which, for the first time, he could present and perform dance without the thousand circumstances that in his experience had compromised those activities.
White Oak has now been in existence for seven years. It is small, usually eight to twelve dancers. It is classy. (It travels with its own five-piece chamber orchestra. No taped music.) It tours for about four months a year, and it has been all around the world. For its first three or four years, the repertory was mostly by “name” choreographers: Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, David Gordon, Twyla Tharp, Mark Morris. (Morris helped Baryshnikov set up the company.) But in the last few years White Oak has begun dangling from the treetops, offering works by avant-gardists almost unknown outside New York and also by beginners—people who are making only their second or third pieces but whom Baryshnikov finds interesting. Still, the concerts regularly sell out, because he is performing in them. Two years ago, I sat in the Kravis Center, in West Palm Beach, Florida, with two thousand Republicans as they watched a big, ambitious, confusing piece called “What a Beauty!,” created by Kraig Patterson, a fledgling choreographer who is also a dancer with the Mark Morris Dance Group. The audience looked puzzled. But on this program there was also a solo for Baryshnikov; that is, the audience got to see, for perhaps twelve minutes, the most interesting dancer in the world today performing alone, and therefore they got their money’s worth. In a sense, the situation is an artificial one. Baryshnikov probably knows this, but it doesn’t seem to bother him. He is having an adventure, presenting new choreography. He is at last putting on his Creative Evening—night after night, with no artsoviet to tell him what they think—and if his fame can induce people to come and see it that is fine by him. Recently, I asked him the big question: In the West, had he got what he wanted? Had he found what he came for? “Oh, more than that, more than that,” he said. “I never dreamt that I would work with so many extraordinary people.” That was all he wanted, just to work with interesting people.
In return for taking only a nominal fee in Riga, Baryshnikov had arranged for the state opera’s general-admission prices to be lowered for his performances, but the tickets were still beyond the means of most of Riga’s ballet people. (The average salary in Riga is five hundred dollars a month.) So he opened his first dress rehearsal to the staff and pensioners of the opera house and the ballet school, and before the rehearsal began he came out in front of the curtain and addressed them. It was a strange moment—packed with history, like the session in the studio—and in parts of the audience there was probably some resentment against the local boy who made good. The people in that auditorium represented an old tradition, the one that had bred him and from which he had fled. Now they would see the new kind of dancing that he had preferred to theirs. But as he spoke, it was to their world, not his, that he addressed himself. He told them how this solo concert was dedicated to the memory of his mother; how happy he was, after so many years, to perform again on the stage where he had first danced; how pleased he was to present these dances to his theatre colleagues. And he choked up—the first time I ever saw him do so—and had to stop and pause repeatedly before speaking again.
Later, he said to me, “All those people who were sitting there, they were veterans of this society, this space. All these people that I saw when I was young, they were some very good dancers or not that good dancers, some of them good actors, or some of them just beautiful women, or some of them were great character dancers, or some very enthusiastic performers. I knew them by name, I knew their history. Half of those people are dead already, but the other half, in their sixties or their eighties, are sitting in that audience. And they’re all of them in me, in my body, in my brain. You know, you learn to dance when you’re very young. And in subconsciousness you take pieces from every person. Even worst dancers have two moves, one move, and you say, ‘What was that? How did he do that?’ And already it’s in you. That’s why I—that’s why it was very moving—because, you know, I owe them.” So again he did have a family, but it was dancers. In his second concert, he shared the program with the Latvian state ballet and its school—he did two solos, they did various dances, including some that he had appeared in as a boy (the Garland Waltz from “The Sleeping Beauty,” the “Corsaire” pas de deux)—and he donated the proceeds to his old school.
Both shows were a great success, but nothing was quite like the piece that Baryshnikov closed with on the last night. This was Tharp’s “Pergolesi”—a smart choice, since, like the other pieces Tharp has made for Baryshnikov, it includes ballet, and so Baryshnikov was able to show the audience his old fireworks. Actually, though, “Pergolesi” includes just about everything: folk dance, eighteenth-century dance, quotes from famous ballets (“Le Spectre de la Rose,” “La Sylphide,” “Swan Lake”), shimmies, bugaloo, golf swings. He got a chance to do every kind of dance he knew—not just what he had learned in the West but also what he had been taught at the Riga School of Choreography. And I don’t know what happened—maybe it was the bringing together of the two halves of his history, or maybe it was relief that this heavily freighted trip was nearly over, or maybe now, at the end, he just wanted to give these people everything he had—but he exploded. I have never seen him so happy onstage, or so wild. (“He’s showing off!” said Lisa Rinehart, who was sitting next to me.) He gave them the double barrel turns, he gave them the triple pirouettes in attitude (and then he switched to the other leg and did two more). He rose like a piston; he landed like a lark. He took off like Jerry Lee Lewis; he finished like Jane Austen. From ledge to ledge of the dance he leapt, surefooted, unmindful, a man in love. The audience knew what they were seeing. The air in the theatre thickened almost visibly. Even the members of the orchestra, though their backs were to him, seemed to understand that something unusual was happening. Out of the pit, the beautiful introduction to Pergolesi’s “Adriano in Siria” rose like a wave, and he rode it to the finish. By that time, we actually wanted him to stop, so that we could figure out what had happened to us. Latvians, I was told by the locals, almost never give standing ovations. And they never yell “Bravo!” in the theatre; they consider that vulgar. But they yelled “Bravo!” for him, and everyone stood, including the President of the Republic.
Baryshnikov took his curtain calls with the members of the Latvian National Opera Ballet, they in their dirndls and harem pants, he in his Isaac Mizrahi jerseys—messengers of the two worlds created when Europe broke in half. It will never wholly mend, any more than Baryshnikov, child of that break, was ever able to find an artistic home. But it is hard to regret his fate. Homelessness turned him inward, gave him to himself. Then dance, the substitute home, turned him outward, gave him to us. ♦
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