Misha Here and Now, part 2

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.robert whitman/white oak dance project

by Janet Anderson



Partnership: Misha with a White Oak dancer. photo: Robert Whitman/White Oak Dance Project

part 1 | part 2

Under Baryshnikov, ABT dancers performed Cunningham’s Duets. He smilingly remembers: "Ballet Theatre danced beautifully in Cunningham; they looked lovely." When Baryshnikov actually faced up to the task of creating a full-evening work (the money machines of ballet) he chose to do Cinderella, and as collaborator-choreographer he brought in Peter Anastos, famous as director and star performer in Ballet Trocadero, the all-male troupe that dances in toe shoes with hairy chests sticking out of their swan tutus.

So this was an uneasy, even volatile, mix — Baryshnikov and the big ballet company. But it was a very interesting time to see ABT perform.

"It’s always the choreographer is taking a chance, and the dancers are taking a chance interpreting, and the artistic director takes a chance just to give them all a chance." He laughs happily just reciting this litany of chance, opportunity, whatever you want to call it. "That’s normal." He values storytelling in his friends and he’s not bad at it himself.

"Ballet Theater didn’t work out," he sighs. "Now when I go back to ballet I go to New York City Ballet, I feel more a part of them than I ever did ABT."

Why is that? "Because I was trying to do it my way in Ballet Theatre," his words tumble out, full of exasperation remembered and experienced, "That’s why I left." He says he doesn’t want to talk about it, then bursts out with, "ABT is set up as a commercial entity. It’s a company and that’s the way they operate now… I wanted to get some spirit behind it, but it was…"

But it was always administrators, directors, society people asking…?

"Yes," he interrupts the question, eyes flashing. "Of course. There was money-raising, dealing with strikes and lockouts, and the press, and personal problems of the dancers and the box office and touring. You have to be a very special breed of person and have very, very thick skin which protects you, and patience of a… of a… a…"

Job?

"Well, yes, Job. Because of the ups and downs. Every day in the company. there is a crisis, problems, financial situations, change of management. Boom. Boom. Boom." His hand cuts the air in emphasis. "I wanted to get some spirit and make things happen." By bringing in new work? He nods emphatically in agreement: "They were all on my case at Ballet Theatre, but now every company has a work by Twyla [Tharp], Mark [Morris] or Cunningham or Paul Taylor. They said you must be crazy. Why do we need this? It’s just in my book they were the most interesting people around, and if there would have been a young George Balanchine, a Jerry Robbins, an Antony Tudor, I would have used them.… We were on the journey to find those people… Now it’s acceptable, not ten, 15 years."

He sighs. "People resented this. And I said, ‘No, I don’t want to run a company that way — the way the board of directors, certain dancers and some dance writers also wanted it run. I could have stayed and fought for another ten, 15 years. I just didn’t have enough nerves and probably patience." As it was he stayed a decade, and although he doesn’t want to talk about it, the picture is pretty clear, and was then as well; anyone seeing ABT in those days was aware of the tension between the artistic director’s choice of new work and the company hierachy’s desire for the ballet classics.

"To run a company… It isn’t difficult. What is difficult is to make dancers dance [the very word stretches out and vibrates] and make something happen, and not just a dutiful performance but an event that people will remember for the rest of their lives, and tell their children and grandchildren that ‘I saw something extraordinary’ one day and not just another performance at the Metropolitan Opera House. That’s the difficult. But to run a company. You can learn that, you learn from your own mistakes."

The espresso coffee machine goes off like Old Faithful, but Baryshnikov pushes on through the din. "I lost ten years of my life as a dancer to the ABT years."

But there were many extraordinary, even transcendent performances from Misha himself in those ABT days. "Giselle…" I begin to say. "Oh no!" he roars. He is recoiling. And laughing. His eyes are rolling. "Not Giselle ! Oh, not Giselle !" Baryshnikov, arguably one of the finest classic dancers in history, abhors the grand old warhorses of ballet. "No," he shakes his head sadly. "Those pieces are my bread and butter. I can dance them in the middle of the night… But it’s no big deal." He goes on to talk about seeing Merce for dinner the other night and sharing two bottles of wine with him. Merce is an inspiration. But Giselle? Nah.

So if, as I have, you’ve been savoring a memory of a Baryshnikov performance in one of those classics, well — it just shows that he was extraordinary enough to make a "dutiful" performance spine-tingling.

Back in 1990, just a year after he quit as ABT artistic director, he founded a flexible little producing entity called the White Oak Dance Project (named for the South Carolina home of one of the first people to support this idea). There are no big office suites, no permanent roster of dancers, no board of directors, no fundraising campaigns. In the first year it was a joint production with modern choreographer Mark Morris. Morris made some dances for Misha and for himself, they pulled together a pick-up company of talented dancers, invited in some other modern choreographers to do all new dance, and it worked. White Oak Dance Project permanently came under the banner of Baryshnikov Productions, and Morris went back to his own company although still contributing to White Oak. Misha had found the vehicle he needed to do things in his own flexible manner and to do the innovative work that juiced him. He took every lesson from his ABT years, good and bad, and used that to guide him in creating White Oak.

"It started with Mark Morris," Baryshnikov says sweetly. "People always say, ‘Oh he is so far out, he is such a bad boy, he’s this and that’… I think he is the most old-fashioned choreographer who ever lived. He’s a traditionalist in purest sense of choreographer with huge heart and true understanding of the art, and I salute him for that." When he is excited or intent, Baryshnikov’s Russian turns of phrase come leaping out.

"You know we [White Oak] are doing it in our way. Maybe there is something better to do, but I don’t know what it is," he emphasizes. "We are responsible for what we are doing; we don’t go around raising money or begging for money, we are just putting our butts on stage. And counting on box office so we can try and take this chance. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose." He shrugs.

PASTforward, the program opening here next week, is a product of Baryshnikov’s voracious appetite to know, see and do experimental dance. He was in Russia during the Judson years. By the time he got to know the main experimenters, many of these people were no longer performing at all, while some like Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs had gone on to found companies of their own. But he found those people, the ones still performing, the ones now retired. If nothing else he wanted their stories, and if possible he wanted to do their work. The idea of doing some celebration of Judson had been on his mind.

Then the idea took off a couple of years ago when White Oak did a piece by Judson choreographer Yvonne Rainer, and Baryshnikov started talking with her about, as he says, "our idea to kind of pull off a look back and a look forward into the people who were working with Judson, and involved in the process. And it turned out she said it would be nice. She had a dream list and asked why didn’t I call all those people and see if they’d be interested. And I made the calls… Nobody really said, ‘Oh yes, it would be a great idea.’ They said it would be difficult because of this or that. Some people were a bit skeptical but if you pull it off they said, it will be quite extraordinary. So I took the challenge and asked David Gordon if he will help me coordinate the project." (David Gordon, who serves as director and writer, says, "Mikhail Baryshnikov is always asking me to do something I have no idea how to do." And in response to this Misha laughs, "Well that is putting a challenge in front of me the same way. I demand for people the same.") He asked Charles Atlas, the distinguished documentary filmmaker, to introduce the project by making a short film about the Judson era. "The whole idea," Baryshnikov explains, "is that the choreographers are actually introducing their own work to the audience, and trying to channel the attention of the audience to the right places and right motives of their process."

Someone recently quoted Baryshnikov as saying that if he’d found modern dance first, he’d never have been a ballet dancer at all. He rolls his eyes. "What I said was, ‘Who knows?’ There is a point when I was growing up where I thought maybe I would one day be a character dancer because I was not tall, and I had doubts I could be classical soloist because I was very, very small. But then," his face relaxes in a smile, "I just stretched enough to partner a small female dancer. If I had been a couple inches shorter that would have been the end of my career, of course. It would have been comical for me to dance so very small. And I was committed [to ballet], so I thought, well I will see. But I just wanted to be a dancer who could do anything… It would have maybe changed my life if I would get to this [modern experimentation] earlier and in a different way, but life is what you get.

"We [White Oak] never go back," he emphasizes, "because it’s not a repertory company. Even with the most successful pieces we are kind of putting them to sleep after a couple sessions. Because life is too short to spend time on revivals. For a great piece it is actually better to spend time as a work in progress and fail, than to spend time reviving a very successful piece from the past. Because we learn something more from the failure and we learn nothing from the revival."

How does this very American Soviet defector of Latvian birth feel about the fact that he’s being hailed as a great conservator, perhaps even a sort of savior of American modern dance? "That’s nonsense!" he sputters. "Modern dance doesn’t need any saviors. It will be as vital as always. It’s nothing to do with me. I’m just interested in it so that in the last instance" — he pauses to smile sweetly to himself — "it will be my pleasure. Dance will always survive, especially modern dance in United States. This is still the mecca."

Once this historic PASTforward project is put to sleep, you can be sure Baryshnikov will be out looking at dance, watching choreographers, dreaming of another challenge, some new way of moving. And he’ll be doing it Downtown.

"I go see everything that happens in the modern dance world, or post-modern or whatever, everything downtown is what I go to see. I rarely see performances uptown." He smiles impishly. "Well, I go to see City Ballet which is kind of my home, you know. But downtown dance is more interesting. Those uptown companies have an occasional interesting piece, oddly enough, usually done by modern dance choreographers." He’s amused at the incongruity of it all — after all, this is a battle he fought long ago, and in an odd way won. Let them do modern. Great. He’ll go see it if they do. Just don’t expect him at Giselle.

And yet for all of this devotion to new choreography, the dancer that he’s said for many years is his personal favorite is — Fred Astaire. "Of course," Baryshnikov’s voice purrs as he affirms that for him Astaire is still the greatest dancer of them all. "Fred Astaire is something untouchable, so unique in so many different ways. He had impeccable taste, always working. His life is such an example of a quest for perfection." (He could, of course, be describing himself.)

We start gathering up our belongings and papers, and giving over dirty dishes to the waitress. Will he dance indefinitely? "I don’t know. Life is unpredictable," he says, clearly having no intention of exploring this question. "There are occurrences in life," he adds obliquely, "and I have children." Now he looks serious and preoccupied, like a parent. There don’t appear to be any dancers among his four children (a daughter who lives with mother actress Jessica Lange, and three children, a son and two daughters, who live with him and their mother, dancer Lisa Rinehart), and he adds, "They have their own interests, college, athletics." He doesn’t elaborate, and the managing director has returned. And it is seriously time to go.

But as a parting shot, and in the general category of really wanting to know the answer, one last question is hurled at him. "Is there any kind of dancing you are not interested in?’

He pauses and looks thoughtful. I press on, "How about folk dance?"

"Ah," he pauses looking really interested. "Actually more and more…" he begins, but the managing director takes him firmly.

"I know you tap dance," I persist.

"No," he protests, "I don’t know how to tap dance."

"Well, what were you doing with Gregory Hines?"

"I was just faking," he chuckles, and whisks along to his next appointment. He doesn’t have to go far — it’s right here in the dim unfashionable espresso café. As I leave, he’s already back to work, hunched over sheets of paper unrolled and held down with salt and pepper shakers.

part 1 | part 2