Joan Acocella’s 1998 Profile of Mikhail Baryshnikov, which follows the dancer and choreographer as he returns to his native Latvia to perform for the first time since his defection from the Soviet Union, in 1974. NewYorkerArchive
Baryshnikov’s “exile,” his reputed melancholy, and his high-profile romances helped make him a mass-media ballet star.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.
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” there.
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. 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 gave them to Latvian, not to Russian, journalists.
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. Soon he showed extraordinary talent.
“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.
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.
Baryshnikov was still very worried about his height. Russian ballet companies follow a strict system, called, 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 , seemed too short for the danseur-noble roles, the grave, poetic leading-man roles.
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. But London gave him more than good reviews: “You cannot know what it meant to travel.
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.
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 ; his shorter stopovers with many others.
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. Balanchine had then created in the West what, in Baryshnikov’s view, Russian ballet would have become but for the Revolution: modernist classicism.
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