Mikhail Baryshnikov

born 1948
Russian-born American dancer/choreographer, one of the most charismatic and spectacular dancers of his generation

" Working is living to me,'' Mikhail ('Misha') Baryshnikov once said. He has worked hard and lived to the fullest. His name is synonymous with dance throughout the world. His dancing is a sublime vision at the dawn of a new century.

Mikhail Nikolaevitch Baryshnikov was born in Riga in 1948 and began his ballet studies there in 1960. In 1964, he entered the Vaganova School in what was then called Leningrad, studying with the legendary Aleksander Pushkin and soon winning the top prize in the junior division of the International Varna Competition. Word began spreading of this extraordinary young dancer of precious classical purity and exquisite presence. Clive Barnes gave notice of what was to come after observing the student Baryshnikov in Pushkin's class, describing him as "the most perfect dancer I have ever seen.'' After training at the Vaganova ballet school, he commenced his dancing career at the relatively late age of fifteen.

Because of the extraordinary strength of his leg muscles, Baryshnikov was permitted to join Leningrad's Kirov Ballet in 1967. He made his debut at the Maryinsky Theatre that same year, dancing the “Peasant” pas de deux in Giselle. In just a few years (and despite being only 5'7") he had become a soloist, and was a Soviet celebrity by his early twenties. Choreographers recognized in Baryshnikov a unique instrument for new dance, and soon Oleg Vinogradov, Konstantin Sergeyev, Igor Tchernichov, and Leonid Jakobson created ballets for him. Jakobson's 1969 Vestris, a feast of virtuosity and wit, became Baryshnikov's signature role and, along with his intensely emotional Albrecht in Giselle, his calling card to his new home.

During the Kirov's 1974 Canadian tour, he disappeared for several days, and turned up again petitioning for and gaining political asylum from the Canadian Government. His decision to defect had as much to do with aesthetics as ideology; in Russia, even a ballet star could go only so far socially and financially. Soon after his defection, he began a series of highly-successful appearances before North American audiences.

Baryshnikov made his debut with the American Ballet Theatre in 1974, dancing Giselle with Natalia Makarova. He stayed with ABT for the next four years, voraciously learning and defining new roles, expanding his horizons as well as those of male dancing. Memorably, he also staged ABT's productions of The Nutcracker, Don Quixote and Cinderella. Baryshnikov became a naturalized American citizen.

In 1978, Baryshnikov left ABT for New York City Ballet, where he could work with George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. The reason was simple: Balanchine had strong links to musical comedy, and Baryshnikov was a lifelong fan of such American musicals as Oklahoma, West Side Story, and even Where's Charley? - a devotion that would later be manifested in his well-received 1980 ABC television special, "Baryshnikov on Broadway". In 1980, he returned to the ABT as the company's artistic director (until 1989), and choreographed two major ballets for the company: The Nutcracker - which aired on television - and Pas d'Esclave.

Noted for his technical prowess and engaging stage personality, he performed in many ballets, including Swan Lake, Medea, and Push Comes to Shove, created for him by Twyla Tharp, with ABT, and in world premieres of Jerome Robbins' The Four Seasons, Opus 19 - The Dreamer, and Other Dances with the New York City Ballet. Baryshnikov's explorations of artistic frontiers became one of the most dazzling spectacles of the age: dances by Merce Cunningham and Erick Hawkins, the play Metamorphosis on Broadway, Emmy Award-winning television specials with Twyla Tharp and Liza Minnelli, glittering galas for Martha Graham and Paul Taylor.

In 1977, Baryshnikov made his film debut in the Academy Award-nominated The Turning Point, the most successful ballet-themed film since 1948's The Red Shoes. Directed by Herbert Ross (who won Best Director for the film), and co-starring with Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft (both of whom shared Best Actress for their portrayals of two has-been rival ballerinas), the movie was a success from top to bottom, and the Soviet émigré received the Academy's Best Supporting Actor nomination for his down-to-earth acting as much as for his unquestioned, peerless dancing ability.

By the very nature of his reputation, Baryshnikov does not lend himself to being cast in "normal" film roles. He also appeared (with Helen Mirren, Isabella Rossellini, and Gregory Hines) in 1985's White Knights, which told the story of a ballet star who had defected to the U.S., only to be accidentally returned to the Soviet Union where he is held under a kind of house arrest until helped to escape by another dancer who happens to be an American defector to the Soviet Union (I couldn't possibly be making this up). The film's highest point (and it is very lofty indeed) is Baryshnikov's performance of Roland Petit's "Le jeune homme et la mort (to a song by Mussorgsky growled by the inimitable Vladimir Visotsky); almost as amazing are his duo dance sequences with Gregory Hines; together, these are worth the price of the video rental (you can fast-forward through the rest).

He starred in another ballet screen drama, the embarrassing Dancers (1987), in the entertaining if somewhat fluffy comedic spy thriller Company Business, with Gene Hackman (1991), and in the hilariously twisted (and silent!) The Cabinet of Dr. Ramirez (1991). Baryshnikov's acting talents were also critically acclaimed in the 1989 Broadway production of Steven Berkoff's Metamorphosis (adapted from Kafka's novel).

Baryshnikov remained irrepressible as a dancer and choreographer, not sparing himself in his work as he grew older; magazines frequently featured close-up photos of his battered knees and ankles. After retiring from ballet, he became lead dancer for the White Oak Dance Project, which he co-founded with modern dance scion Mark Morris (who choreographed Three Preludes for Baryshnikov).

Baryshnikov intermingled with ease with the glitterati, and Liza Minelli, Candy Clark, Janine Turner are only some of the famous actresses with whom his name was romantically linked. With Jessica Lange he fathered a daughter. Though Lange eventually left him for playwright-actor Sam Shepard, Baryshnikov's recent productions have been closer to home - he has fathered three children with his most enduring significant other, former ABT ballerina Lisa Rinehart.

In 1990, he teamed up with Mark Morris and founded the White Oak Project, a unique dance company that reflects Baryshnikov's passion for modern dance and embodies the extraordinary transformation of a paragon of Russian ballet into the very model of perfection in American modern dance.

Not long after coming to the United States, Baryshnikov looked both back and ahead at the immense possibilities of a dancer's lifetime. "I have been very lucky to work in so many new ballets, but that is what a dancer's work is,'' he wrote in the 1978 Baryshnikov At Work. He likened the challenge of dancing different choreographies and styles to learning new languages, confessing that "there are never enough.'' He added that "every ballet, whether or not successful artistically or with the public, has given me something important. Everything that I've done has given me more freedom.''

Has anyone in the field of dance ever made so much of that freedom? The generosity of Baryshnikov's spirit embraces the world. He has danced to Adam and Tchaikovsky, but also to Dmitri Shostakovich and Philip Glass, to Duke Ellington and Frank Sinatra. He has danced to silence, and he has danced to his own heartbeat. He has been the ideal Albrecht and Prince Siegfried, but he has also stepped out in style as a paragon of jazz dancing, as a living emblem of modern and post-modern sensibilities, as a choreographer and teacher, as a company director.

He has been, and continues to be, a surprise. He embodies so many different and impossibly beautiful things to so many people that it is next to impossible to define him save to say this: Mikhail Baryshnikov is a dancer.

Main photograph: Baryshnikov with Gelsey Kirkland, American Ballet Theatre