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Home > People Index Page > Mikhail Baryshnikov
Published November/December 1997
Dancing Free
Two Decades After His Great Leap Westward, Mikhail Baryshnikov is Still Footloose
By Jack Bettridge
Mikhail Baryshnikov knows something about
liberty. One night in June 1974, the Russian dancer stepped from a
stage in Toronto where he was appearing as a guest star with the
Bolshoi Ballet concert group and literally ran to freedom. He stepped
outside, followed by a crowd of confused fans, and sprinted to a
waiting car that spirited him away from Soviet agents into a life of
independence in the United States. Twenty-three years after his
sensational defection, Baryshnikov still has a highly attuned sense of
what it means to be free. Sitting in Manhattan's Russian Samovar, a
restaurant in which this born-again capitalist owns a stake, he is
smoking a vintage Partagas Churchill and explaining why his modern
dance troupe eschews government grants and corporate donations:
"I realize that I cannot belong to a nonprofit organization because
when you receive grants, you have to make such great compromises with
your artistic plans and be involved with fund-raising and do a lot of
stuff, which I really don't care to do because life is really too
short." In a trademark Misha gesture that emphasizes the hawk-like
intensity in his fierce blue eyes, he turns away, neck straight and
chin held high, before turning back to describe his stint in the 1980s
as artistic director of the American Ballet Theater. "I was really
sacrificing my dance career and myself in order to go and talk to a
few people about money--going to this endowment and that endowment,
and this and that corporation.I just said," and his voice becomes at
once exhausted and exasperated, "'I can't do this anymore, I want to
do exactly what I want to do. I'd rather gamble on the box office than
beg for a grant.'"
So eight years ago, Baryshnikov effected another great defection,
leaving the confines of the conservative and self-impressed New York
dance world to strike out with a small touring troupe, the White Oak
Dance Project. Dedicated to bringing modern choreography to the
public, the company violated many conventions. For an art form that
usually depends on subsidies, the headline dancer put up his own
cash. In a discipline that celebrates youth, the company gathered a
corps of elite dancers, half of whom were over 40. Instead of
following the dance tradition of single-minded autocracy, it fostered
an atmosphere of collaboration. Then it ignored the supposed center of
the dance universe, New York City, for four years. And the influence
of the Big Apple notwithstanding, the formula worked.
"We really never struggle," Baryshnikov says of his troupe of nine
dancers who perform around the world. "Sometimes we don't have enough
money for our next project, which means I have to put my own money up
sometimes. But for me, this is not a big money-making venture; I can
choose just the projects from our point of view that are totally right
and not worry about money."
For this classically trained dancer who is a self-confessed "new-work
junky," what is "totally right" is a succession of modern pieces that
showcases both the work of some of the world's most renowned
choreographers (Twyla Tharp, Merce Cunningham, José
Limón and Mark Morris, for example) and gifted unknown artists
(such as Kevin O'Day, Kraig Patterson and Joachim Schlömer). "I
go a lot to see young people downtown in little theaters," Baryshnikov
enthuses. "It's great. If you start somebody's career, it's so
exciting."
Vitality, daring, experimentation and emotion are what attracts this
dancer who spent his salad days repeating traditional works for the
Kirov Ballet. These are also some of the concepts he tried to advance
during his nine-year stint at the American Ballet Theater. These
directions did not always mesh with the will of the New York dance
establishment, which Baryshnikov describes as a mosaic of the
interests of choreographers, the board of directors, critics and the
audiences. "Ahh, I was the wrong person probably for that," he now
sighs resignedly, "although I am very proud of the years I spent
there. The dancers are doing good. Now it is a very successful
company. Probably that is what audience and critics want. It might not
necessarily be my choices and I would definitely not take the company
in this direction. But if everybody is happy, this means maybe I was
wrong. But I kind of lost interest in the classical dance."
For Baryshnikov, this is nothing new. He says it was one of the
driving forces behind his departure from the Soviet Union. "I was very
much interested in the modern choreography, because I didn't want to
continue to do the same stuff. And it was no way over there I could
have done what I have done here. I wanted to experience in my skin the
contact with choreographers and different styles."
Asked what would have become of him had he not defected, Baryshnikov
grimaces. "That's scary thought, that's really scary thought. Who
knows? I probably would've been like a lot of them. I don't want to
even think about it."
He relates that the defection wasn't something he put a lot of thought
into at the time. "Two hours. I never planned it. A few hours over the
night. It's a long story, but I got in touch with some of my friends
and I said, 'I think I'm ready. I just can't go back.'"
As Baryshnikov describes it, he didn't have much of a home to go back
to. Born in Riga, Latvia, in 1948, he grew up the son of a stern
Stalinist colonel in what was essentially an occupying army. The
dancer remembers the region as having a great tradition in the arts,
music and crafts, as well as lively theater that gave him great
momentum, but he didn't consider it home. "We were uninvited guests
there," he says. "I was born there; it was a geographic accident."
He lived in a strained household, with much tension between his
parents. Both had been previously married. His mother, a beautiful
blonde peasant woman, brought a son to the union and his father, a
daughter. His half sister, much older, lived in Leningrad when Misha
was a boy.
Like many Russian youths, he became involved in sports, playing
soccer, fencing and trying his hand at gymnastics. While he would one
day be famous for his prodigious vertical leaps, at a mature height of
five feet, seven inches, he now laughs off the idea that he might have
tried basketball. Later, the dance became his obsession and he studied
it exclusively, winning acceptance to the prestigious school of
choreography in Riga.
When he was 11, his mother, with whom he was closest, committed
suicide. His father soon remarried and Baryshnikov plunged himself
into his studies. By the time he was 16, he was accepted into the
Vaganova School, in Leningrad, and was taken under the wing of
Alexander Pushkin, who had been Rudolf Nureyev's mentor until Nureyev
defected in 1961. By the time Baryshnikov was 19, he had entered the
world-renowned Kirov Ballet as a soloist, never having toiled in the
corps de ballet. Despite his lack of height, it wasn't long before he
was dancing romantic leads in classics such as Sleeping Beauty, Don
Quixote, and his early signature role in Giselle.
With notoriety came a privileged existence by Soviet standards. There
was good pay, an apartment next to the Hermitage and trips abroad. "Of
course, when you are 17, 18, 19 and you have enough money to play, you
are very eager to be the bachelor," he says. "It's fun. But it was
always secondary. The first was my career. Not even a career. There
was always a certain level I wanted to achieve. I knew that I was
almost there. My teacher was still alive at that time. I was totally
devoted to him. I always wanted him to see me in the best of shape."
Pushkin died in 1970, the year that Baryshnikov made a trip to
London. At 22, he would gain personal acclaim and get a taste of the
free world, Simon and Garfunkel records and modern dance. He also met
Nureyev in the dancer's luxurious apartment. Nevertheless, Baryshnikov
didn't consider leaving Russia. "I never thought it, never. Because I
was so involved with what I was doing in the theater, the idea to
appendix myself out was beyond my wildest imagination, although there
were a thousand examples in front of me."
For Baryshnikov, the most obvious was Natalia Makarova, a dancer with
whom he has been romantically linked. She defected on the same
trip. "I thought--and it was stupid of me--I thought that she would
get lost [in the West]. Seriously, I thought that she had done
something wrong. Not wrong ethically, but for her. I knew somehow even
at that time that life is not that easy here; even for people with
choices, with money. I felt she was out of her mind. That's how stupid
I was."
Yet, four years later, at age 26, the dancer vaulted into a new life
that would reward him not only with artistic freedom, but personal and
financial liberties he had never considered.
"I had to make decisions about finances," he now recalls. "You have
to deal with the lawyers. But for me, the most difficult
decisions--because I had so many opportunities--were to choose the
right ones, with whom to work, where to dance. It was exciting, but
also scary. Because I made a lot of mistakes, of course."
With responsibility came freedom. "The biggest shock was that I had
travel documents. I could travel without even asking. I go to the
embassy, they give me visa and I go. Nobody asks me, 'Can you go to
this country?' That was the most amazing sensation for me."
Of course, leaving his homeland meant sacrifices as well. "I left very
close friends and that was the toughest part. Because, you see, the
Russian people get so insanely close to each other as friends. Their
friendships are very demanding, their lives are interrelated so much
on an everyday basis. Here, people pay a lot of money to go to a
shrink. In Russia, you visit your friend at three o'clock in the
morning and talk to him. People can call at six o'clock in the morning
and say, 'I'm coming,' and this is a must, there is no way out. And I
had a few friends like that, but now they are all sort of more or less
here. And then I met a couple of wonderful people here."
Even as he was leaving old acquaintances behind, Baryshnikov was
gaining instant celebrity status. He accepted invitations to dance as
a guest with the top companies around the world and finally settled
with the American Ballet Theater. In 1976, he got his wish to explore
modern material when Twyla Tharp created Push Comes to Shove for
him. He found his classic technical ability meshed well with her
contemporary ideas, and a long-standing relationship developed with
the choreographer, whom one critic would call "Baryshnikov's inspired
biographer," because the pieces she created for him seemed to mirror
what was going on in his life. They would later collaborate in a 1985
television special, "Baryshnikov by Tharp," which garnered two Emmys,
and he would work with her during his tenure as artistic director at
the American Ballet Theater as well as commission a work from her for
White Oak.
In 1977, he made his first feature film, getting an Oscar nomination
for his performance in the ballet-themed The Turning Point, alongside
Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft. The following year, he joined the
New York City Ballet under the artistic leadership of George
Balanchine, the venerable master of American dance, as a principal
dancer. While critics have faulted the alliance for not living up to
its potential, Baryshnikov has maintained that for him the mere
experience of working with Balanchine helped to shape his art and his
overall approach to the medium.
While the dancer was enjoying triumphs on stage, he was also gaining a
certain celebrity in the gossip columns as a young man left to his own
devices in New York. "Of course, I was sometimes in the Studio 54
crowd," he remembers with a wry smile, "and, you know, here and there,
because it was always parties. Martha Graham and Vladimir Horowitz
were there and Yves St. Laurent and a few others. It was just a sign
of the times. And it was fun. But it was not fun when you get out at
four in the morning and you have a 10 o'clock class. That's not fun at
all. You have to perform next day. And so you do this to yourself." He
stops and slaps his own wrist. "And then if you do go out sometimes,
you go out when you don't work."
Nevertheless, the thought of the greatest dancer of our time doing the
funky chicken on a disco floor is an amusing picture. "I rarely did
it," he quickly protests. "I'm not good at that kind of dancing. But I
like to watch people dance."
People also liked to watch him, and soon Baryshnikov, who has famously
claimed, "I am not the first straight dancer or the last," was being
matched in the press with some of the day's most stunning
women--sometimes rightfully, sometimes not. One might assume that the
press's fascination with his love life is in part to blame for his
reluctance to do interviews (for this article, questions about his
family were off-limits). "It was almost fun for a while," he
recalls. "I'm coming out of the movie theater and I am with this girl
or that girl, who cares? I was surprised that there was a lot of
speculation that was not true. But they'd say, 'You did not give them
straight answer, they will try to create story then.' Well, I say, 'I
don't give a flying fuck what kind of story.' I was kind of amused,
sometimes annoyed. Then I just learned to go inand out of places
through the back door or not to talk to certain people about certain
things."
He's also changed his peripatetic ways somewhat. A relationship with
Jessica Lange, which produced a daughter (now a teenager), ended when
she left him for playwright Sam Shepard after conflicting careers
strained their situation. Baryshnikov has since settled down with
former dancer Lisa Rinehart, with whom he has three children and
shares a house in upstate New York. Although he has never married, his
devotion to family life can be surmised from the way he has set up his
dance company. "We don't work in December, we don't work on certain
holidays. We always spend holidays home with our families or lovers,
brothers, sisters, husbands."
Without any prompting, Baryshnikov is soon violating his own
pre-interview condition, gleefully describing his children (ages 3, 5
and 8). "They play together and then suddenly they are fighting like
cats, and then a few minutes later they kiss each other." Just as
quickly he becomes wistful remembering his own not-so-full family life
as a youth.
Speaking to Baryshnikov, there is a sense of a mercurial artist who
darts from one mood to the next, using his mastery of body language to
telegraph each emotion with an economical point of the chin or turn of
the wrist as he cradles his cigar. And always there is the perfect
posture that lends him stature despite his lack of height and makes
you self-consciously sit up in your chair rather than feel like a
slouch.
A couple of waiters are engaged in a spirited argument nearby as they
set up for the dinner shift, and Baryshnikov sternly chastises them,
"Guys, guys, guys, guys, guys," then turns back, grinning. "Russian
disagreements are never on a level of," he pushes down at the air with
both hands, "just like that. There is always volume involved. Our idea
of persuasion is sometimes more an increase of the volume instead of
logic."
The Russian Samovar, which in an earlier incarnation served as a
hangout for Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack when it was called
Jilly's in the 1950s, has now become a sort of club to the
Russian intelligentsia, although Baryshnikov downplays his own
involvement with the growing Russian-American community. "It is
not a piece of nostalgia for the Russians, it is a new life for
all of us," he says, explaining the direction of the restaurant,
which has just added a cigar bar on its second floor, using
appointments that both reflect and reinterpret his Russian
heritage. "I have some Russian friends. But probably only 10
percent. I don't hang out usually in the big Russian communities
in Brooklyn and New Jersey."
Nor is he close to the developments in his former homeland. "I
wonder. I look. I care. But I do not ever get involved in any
political sides. Nor in any cultural events. I am very much
different person now and I don't understand a lot of things that
have happened, the very sort of bitter lessons of democratic
reforms," he says. "It is a very difficult period for Russians
economically, morally, mentally, ethically. The Soviet system
destroyed any true understanding inside the human being of human
rights issues. It is almost a genetic zero to really feel free
and understand the price of freedom and the responsibility of
being a free man. That's, I think, a very important demand of
democracy in the free world; it obliges the person not to look
up to any sort of political system and ask what I should do
next. You have to decide. And it's a scary thought for a person
who has lived their whole life under a totalitarian regime. He'd
rather be under some general or a tsar or a politburo. At least
he knows that he will get his little pension and he knows he
will get his bottle of vodka. And he'll say: 'OK, I'll shut
up. I don't need this freedom of speech.'"
It is hard to imagine Baryshnikov himself playing that role. He has
such an air of self-assurance tempered with an ability for cold
self-assessment. He has obstinately guided his career from ballet to
modern dance, making excursions into the movies, on Broadway, but
never overstaying his welcome.
"It's the natural time clock in me," he says matter-of-factly. "I know
when it gets to certain point when it's already above the normal." But
in the same breath that he admits that some dance pieces are now
behind him physically, he bluntly states that he is now a better
dancer than he has ever been. "I am in situation where I can sort of
deliver right now. All my life experience, stage experience, work with
choreographers, all aspects of my life, contribute to certain elements
of stage presence, and that's what dance is about."
At one point in the 1985 film White Nights, in which he plays a ballet
dancer who has defected and been recaptured by the Soviets,
Baryshnikov watches film footage of himself as a young man making the
heroic leaps in which he seemed to defy gravity, suspended for moments
in midair. To be called upon to act while peering into a mirror of
one's own lost youth would seem eerie for any actor, especially
considering the knee problems that have robbed him of some of that
ability. Not for Baryshnikov. "It happens all the time. It's even
weirder when you travel through France and you see pieces of
choreography that were done for you 15 or 20 years ago and now they
are being done by another dance company. And it's," he affects a whiny
voice, " 'Oh my piece, they are dancing it.' It's like: 'They are
wearing my shirt.' It's a more interesting perspective on how time
flies."
In the same film, he takes an unexpected turn, dancing a melange of
styles with co-star Gregory Hines, a tap dancer. "It was a fake, of
course," he says in a not-uncommon moment of detached
self-criticism. "I cannot tap to save my life. I cannot do buffalo
step and keep the rhythm. It's too difficult. Those guys are awesome,
you know. Gregory and Savion Glover, and the old guys too, Fred
Astaire. They are cool cats."
Despite his success, he says, "I never was serious about a career as a
film actor. I did adequate job but not more than that. I thought it
might have led to something if there were some more interesting
scripts around, some light dramatic comedies with dancing. But it was
probably in the late '80s, early '90s and there was nobody seriously
interested in a film with dance. Now that's coming back."
For now, his passion is for modern dance and White Oak. He claims his
other financial interests, including a perfume marketed as "Misha" and
a line of stylish bodywear, exist solely as a way to support his
family and dance projects.
Beyond the unusual financial structure of White Oak, which is named
for a plantation owned by one of its founders, George Gilman (who
donated the space that the troupe uses), the company is unusual for
its democratic structure, especially given that Baryshnikov is so
extra-luminary next to some of the troupe's unknowns. "We don't have
Mister Whip," he says. "We don't have any dance captain or
something. We have assigned people to take care of things on a
voluntary basis. We have an office of two people."
The company also has a communal structure for making decisions. "If we
need a dancer, everybody has suggestions, everybody brings a couple of
people who they think are great and who might fit in. We work together
for a few weeks and decide which one fits. For example, there is one
girl who is trying out for next year. One of our dancers brought her
in. She called me and said, 'This is wonderful dancer, you should see
her, she would be a neat person for next year.'"
While he has no specific plans for the future, it is clear Baryshnikov
knows that change is inevitable. "The biggest transition would be to
stop dancing. When it will happen I don't know. It might happen very
soon. It might happen not for a few years, because I am probably now
in better shape than I was a few years ago, physically. My knee's
doing great and I'm doing some really interesting stuff and
choreographers want to do work for me."
He rattles off a number of projects that might interest him: solo work
under the White Oak umbrella, something with the spoken word, maybe
experimental theater, a return to Broadway where he was well received
in Metamorphosis. "The night is young," his eyes light up. "One never
knows." *
CIGAR DOSSIER
Name MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV
Born RIGA, LATVIA
Occupation DANCER
First Cigar "Milos Foreman gave me a really good cigar and explained how to smoke it. I think it was a Château Margaux, the Cuban Davidoff, one of the short ones, those little robustos, a wonderful cigar. And it was like oysters or caviar. It was a good introduction."
Favorite Cigar "A few years ago a friend of mine gave me an extraordinary present. A Dunhill collection of Cuban cigars from the late '50s, pre-Revolutionary cigars, 40 years old. I have like 20, 30 left, and maybe once a year I'll get one. But I don't stick to one brand. I like to test a few. Of course, if there's a nice Cuban cigar that somebody has..."
Least Favorite Flavored cigars. "I want the leaf and nothing but the leaf."
Cigar Anecdote "When we were little kids, the Cubans use to send boxes and boxes to Russia. Of course, they were all dry because they sent them over on slow boats. But for Russians to smoke something without inhaling, it is like to gargle with vodka and then spit it out. It didn't work out."
Smoking Frequency "If I don't have a cigar on me, I don't miss a cigar. I stopped smoking cigarettes over 15 years ago. That's an addiction, a sick addiction. But the weeks can go by and if I don't have a good cigar, I'm OK."
Favorite Cigar Moment While golfing. "At home if I don't have a cigar I'm fine, but if I'm on the golf course, ohhh."
Effect on His Art None. "If it doesn't affect Wayne Gretzky's run on ice, then I think I am in ballet shape."
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