Mikhail Baryshnikov

Mikhail Baryshnikov: The Defector Who Rebuilt the Male Dancer

On 29 June 1974, at a banquet in Toronto, the ballet critic John Fraser distracted a KGB minder while a twenty-six-year-old Soviet star read phone numbers off a slip of paper hidden under Fraser's wedding ring. Mikhail Baryshnikov ran that night. He was arguably the finest classical dancer alive — Clive Barnes had already called him "the most perfect dancer I have ever seen" — and he was walking away from the only institution on earth that could guarantee him the great roles.

Riga

Mikhail Nikolayevich Baryshnikov was born on 27 January 1948 in Riga, in the Latvian SSR, to ethnic Russian parents: Alexandra, a dressmaker who took him to theatre, opera and ballet, and Nikolay, an engineer remembered as a strict, nationalist military man. His mother died by suicide when he was twelve. That same year, 1960, he began studying ballet in Riga. Fifty-seven years later, applying for Latvian citizenship, he wrote that his first sixteen years there had made him: "It was there that my exposure to the arts led me to discover my future destiny as a performer. Riga still serves as a place where I find artistic inspiration."

The Kirov, and the Ceiling

In 1964 he entered the Vaganova School in Leningrad. He won the junior division at the Varna International Ballet Competition in 1966, took gold at Moscow in 1969, and won the Paris Academy of Dance's Nijinsky Prize the same year for Leonid Jakobson's *Vestris*. He joined the Kirov Ballet in 1967 dancing the Peasant pas de deux in *Giselle*, and was good enough to skip the corps de ballet entirely. Vinogradov, Sergeyev, Tchernichov and Jakobson all made ballets on him; his Albrecht in *Giselle* became a signature of unusual emotional intensity.

He was also stuck. At five foot five or six he could not tower over a ballerina on pointe and was pushed toward secondary parts. More decisively, the Soviet dance world held close to nineteenth-century tradition and deliberately avoided Western choreographers — the very people whose work fascinated him.

Toronto, and the Long Way Round

After defecting he requested asylum in Canada, and then did something unexpected: instead of heading straight for New York, he joined the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, starting his North American career away from the spotlight. There he danced the *Don Quixote* pas de deux with Gelsey Kirkland to standing ovations, and announced he would not return to the USSR.

Thirteen Choreographers in Two Years

He joined American Ballet Theatre as a principal in 1974 and spent his first two years dancing for thirteen different choreographers — among them Jerome Robbins, Glen Tetley, Alvin Ailey and Twyla Tharp — precisely the education the Kirov had withheld. He told the *New York Times* critic Anna Kisselgoff in 1976: "It doesn't matter if every ballet is a success or not. The new experience gives me a lot." Roles began to be built on him: Robbins's *Opus 19/The Dreamer* (1979), Frederick Ashton's *Rhapsody* (1980), Robbins's *Other Dances* with Natalia Makarova.

Balanchine, Briefly

In 1978 he left ABT for New York City Ballet, where George Balanchine rarely admitted guest artists. Balanchine never made a new work for him, but coached him in the style, and Baryshnikov triumphed in *Apollo*, *The Prodigal Son* and *Rubies*. He debuted as Franz in *Coppélia* at Saratoga Springs on 8 July 1978 and gave his last NYCB performance, the Poet in *La Sonnambula*, at the Kennedy Center on 12 October 1979. Tendonitis and injury closed the experiment after eighteen months.

Director, and the Company for Older Dancers

He returned to ABT in September 1980, this time as artistic director, holding the post until 1989 while continuing to perform. From 1990 to 2002 he ran the White Oak Dance Project, a touring company he co-founded with Mark Morris expressly to develop original work for older dancers — a quietly radical premise in a form organised around twenty-two-year-olds. In 2005 he opened the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York, touring the following summer with Hell's Kitchen Dance and choreography by its residents Aszure Barton and Benjamin Millepied.

The Second Career

He built an acting career on top of the dancing one. *The Turning Point* (1977) brought Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actor. *White Nights* (1985), choreographed by Twyla Tharp, paired him with Gregory Hines. CBS's 1977 *Nutcracker* with Kirkland earned an Emmy nomination, and he appeared in two Emmy-winning specials. In 1989 he played Gregor Samsa in *Metamorphosis* on Broadway and was nominated for a Tony. Later came Beckett, then Chekhov — "I grew up reading Chekhov's stories and plays. I have wanted to explore a Chekhov story for the stage for some time" — and in 2015 *Brodsky/Baryshnikov*, in which he read the poet's work in Russian. He had met Joseph Brodsky in 1974, just after Soviet authorities forced him from his homeland; they were friends until Brodsky's death in 1996. A generation that never saw him dance knows him as Aleksandr Petrovsky from the last season of *Sex and the City*.

Why Mikhail Is Called a Genius

The gift here is physical, and it deserves to be described as such rather than inflated into something cerebral. Baryshnikov's technique was famous for elevation, clean multiple turns and landings so quiet they looked edited — achieved by a man shorter than nearly every rival, which in classical ballet means less line to work with and less margin for error. What separated him from other virtuosos is that he refused to treat virtuosity as the point. "It doesn't matter how high you lift your leg," he said. "The technique is about transparency, simplicity and making an earnest attempt." That sentence is the entire argument: technique as a way of removing the performer from between the audience and the movement.

The second, less visible faculty is appetite. Thirteen choreographers in twenty-four months, then Balanchine, then modern dance, then Kafka, Beckett and Brodsky — a career-long refusal to repeat himself that few dancers of his stature have risked. Rudolf Nureyev, who knew what he was looking at, described him as "an unusual man in all respects, instinctive, intelligence, constant curiosity, and extraordinary discipline."

The honest limits: he choreographed almost nothing of lasting consequence, and his nine years directing ABT are not what he is remembered for. He was an interpreter and a magnet for other people's invention. Barnes's "most perfect dancer I have ever seen" is a verdict on execution, not creation — and it was written before Baryshnikov had done any of the work he seems proudest of.

Legacy

He became an American citizen on 3 July 1986 and a Latvian one on 27 April 2017, granted for extraordinary merit. Asked where he belonged, he answered: "I like to think like I'm a man of the world... if somebody would ask me to choose either Paris or New York, I would choose New York. But spiritually, somehow, I love Europe." The honours accumulated — a Kennedy Center Honor and the National Medal of Arts in 2000, the Prix Benois de la Danse in 2003, the Vilcek Prize in 2012. In March 2022 he co-founded the True Russia foundation to support victims of the war in Ukraine, condemning the invasion and writing an open letter to Vladimir Putin about his "world of fear"; it raised more than 1.2 million euros within weeks. Half a century after Toronto, he is still choosing what he will not go back to.