May 3–10, 2001

cover story

Misha Here and Now

Mikhail Baryshnikov — in town this week with his White Oak Dance Project — talks about his amazing career, from Giselle (which he hates) to tap (which he fakes) to the new work he has dared to champion.

by Janet Anderson

Misha Accomplished: Baryshnikov at a White Oak Dance Project rehearsal, NYC, 1999. photo: Robert Whitman/White Oak Dance Project

part 1 | part 2

In a hole-in-the-wall café across from Lincoln Center, an espresso bar that serves breakfast all day, Mikhail Baryshnikov is hunched over the table, talking rapidly, laughing, making funny faces, furiously eating eggs and bacon, toast with lots of jam and tossing down pots of hot tea. No one in the cafe pays the slightest attention to our conversation. The only interruption is the espresso machine, which punctuates his talk throughout with eruptions of sighs and squeals.

The waitress does try, but just once. "Aren’t you that famous ballet dancer?" she asks, leaning into his space. He has no interest in playing the celebrity, simply drops his head and shakes it slightly, looking through the menu and waiting her out. She gets the idea. "Well, I think that’s a very nice thing to be," she mutters, giving up. "What would you like?" Now a nice smile from him when he tells her he prefers his eggs sunny side up.

There really isn’t anything of the celebrity, the oversized personality of the zillion fantastic poster images radiating from the man who slipped into the booth at the back of the café. He shoves under the table a huge bag crammed with towels and paraphernalia that looks like one of those woven plastic baskets you take to the beach. No Louis Vuitton accessories for him. No entourage, only the managing director of Baryshnikov Productions, Christina Sterner, who drifts away without another word after introductions are made.

His hair is tousled and sandy-colored, he’s slight and not tall, and on this very hot day in New York he’s casually dressed in a short-sleeved green cotton shirt and khaki slacks. The face is familiar,and, at age 53, he looks just a little older than the young man who burst into international fame at the time of his 1974 defection from the then Soviet Union. He’s here to eat and talk, and he does both very energetically. In fact it quickly becomes apparent that far from being a moody superstar, he is verbal, and quick, and funny. He listens. He says "May I?" He beams when he gets a laugh, which is often. And he laughs, too. He’s dangerously close to being what you suspect he wishes most to be considered — an ordinary man going about his everyday business.

But nothing in his life has been ordinary. There has been stardom at New York’s top ballet companies, a controversial stint as American Ballet Theatre’s artistic director, movie roles (including 1977’s The Turning Point and 1985’s White Nights with Gregory Hines), and since 1990, his own unique dancemaking entity, the White Oak Dance Project, which has allowed him to continue exploring the modern and post-modern experimentation he loves most. Next Wednesday, Philadelphia sees the fruits of White Oak’s latest exploration: PASTForward, a showcase of work by major experimental choreographers of the 1960s and ’70s who came to be known as the Judson Movement (after their main venue, Judson Church in Greenwich Village). Though aspects of the Judsons’ aesthetic — performances in alternative sites, contact improvisation, investigations of movement for movement’s sake — have now become commonplace, their work can still be challenging to dance audiences, and is nothing like the crowd-pleasing ballet warhorses some Baryshnikov fans might prefer.

But that’s of no account to Misha (yes, that’s what all his friends call him). Articulate and amusing even in the completely artificial setting of an interview in a coffeeshop, he unabashedly dismisses those hoary past triumphs and, with as much vigor as he’s digging into his bacon and eggs, launches into the subject that continues to fascinate him: finding new ways to move.

When Mikhail Baryshnikov fled the safety of then-Leningrad’s Kirov Ballet, it was back in the bad old days, when defection from the USSR was still a perilous and dramatic thing to do. Why did he risk it? Because he "was always interested in non-traditional classical dance." He made no secret of this, even back then, putting on an evening of new experimental ballets while still in the Soviet Union. For his Soviet audience, he showcased local experimenters who had him tumbling on the floor. "It was the first time I sort of had a chance to organize an evening from A to Z," he observes. "That was interesting to me, and I wanted to continue. And especially to work with the choreographers in the West."

West he came, defecting in 1974. At first caught in an explosion of excitement shared by the Western dance world and Baryshnikov himself, he found it hard to settle. He did guest stints with American Ballet Theatre, long a showcase for important foreign ballet stars. He briefly joined George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. While he remembers this as his best experience in ballet — and still thinks of New York City Ballet as a kind of home — this was after the great experimental days of the 20th-century choreographic genius. Balanchine created no new works for the ballet’s wunderkind, so he left looking for the geniuses who would.

And he found them Downtown, the New York code word for the whole scene of experimental art, performances in dance lofts and in church basements, for great talents like Merce Cunningham, and itty-bitty ones who flame for a minute in time then flicker out.

He wasn’t interested in socializing at galas or polishing up the astonishing leaps that sent him flying across stages back then. He wanted to hang out with artists, creators, restless spirits like himself. A lot of those people became friends. David Gordon, one of the original experimenters of the Judson Movement, led him into contact improv. He loved the stacked-up invention of Twyla Tharp, and of course her Push Comes to Shove became a signature for both. He got to know Cunningham and Martha Graham. He wanted to do work with these people; "Please use me," he volunteered. Astonished, they did. He wasn’t haunting the Metropolitan Opera House, he preferred being down at the Kitchen, St. Mark’s Church, or outside at a site-specific piece watching a dancer shimmy down a fire escape.

	Dancer in the Dark: Baryshnikov in Trisha Brown’s Homemade. photo: Stephanie Berger

He accepted the position of artistic director of ABT in 1980. It looked like it might be a good landing place for him.

But he was the same Misha, and he invited some of his more experimental friends to do work for the ballet company. He astounded everyone, including David Gordon, by asking him to create a dance for ABT; this became Field, Chair and Mountain. ("David has this thing for chairs," Baryshnikov chuckles.) The former Judson experimenter’s dance got good notices but a few bad ones, too. Gordon felt terrible; he said to Misha, "I am so sorry I screwed this up for you. Please forgive me." And Baryshnikov simply replied, "Don’t be silly. When are you going to start the next ballet? I want to be in the next one." And that became the ballet called Murder. And Baryshnikov was in it.

part 1 | part 2