Mikhail Baryshnikov strolls across the hotel lobby this sunny Saturday morning looking as if he just rolled out of bed: beltless, hair uncombed, his famous boyish features blurred by sleep.
“I need some coffee,” he says and leads the way into the hotel’s restaurant, its solid glass wall a picture window facing out on a glistening lake. Coffee and a bagel aren’t much of an order, but a tuxedoed maitre d’hotel, two waiters and a busboy all take turns tending to their famous guest.
At 46, on the road much of the time, often in small locales like Madison, head of a company of a mere nine dancers, Baryshnikov still draws stares and hushed awe wherever he goes. And he still attracts curiosity seekers eager to pour coffee for a living legend.
Twenty years have passed since he fled the Soviet Union and hit the West like a hurricane. Three knee operations, not to mention the ordinary ravages of time, have diminished the athletic splendor that once defied gravity and astonished the most jaded of dance enthusiasts.
But he is still, without question, the greatest dancer of our age, still a superstar, still simply “Misha” to much of the world, despite his jealously guarded privacy. “What can I say?” sighs Dulcie Gilmore, executive director of the Auditorium Theatre, which will host Baryshnikov’s White Oak Project this week for its first visit to the area in more than three years. “What can anybody say? He’s one of the greats, and he still, in the eyes of many, epitomizes the best that dance can be or can accomplish.”
In an art form used to losing its greats in their 30s, Baryshnikov may well be at a kind of pinnacle of his career. Certainly he has reason to see it that way. After years of struggling within giant, conservative institutions, mostly American Ballet Theatre in New York, after years of fighting to insinuate new works, new choreographers and daring experimentation into the stodgiest of art forms-classical ballet-Baryshnikov these days is getting his way all the time.
“Do you think,” he asks, with a sly grin and in his thick Russian accent, “I’d do it for four years to be unhappy? I did think, in the beginning, `Well, we’ll try this out, maybe it will last a season or two.’ ” That was four years ago. “Now they book us a year ahead of time. So who knows?”
For the most part, White Oak is comfortably paying its way. Box office proceeds keep it afloat, so there’s no need for benefits or drawn-out fund-raising anymore. More importantly, Baryshnikov and his colleagues-he claims every decision in White Oak is a communal one-enjoy the freedom to dance only what they want to dance.
Since its creation as a showcase for the works of Mark Morris, the Project, named for the White Oak Wildlife Preserve in Florida, where the group sometimes rehearses, has become a true orchard, nurturing an impressive variety of dances by contemporary choreographers both established and new. Programs include works by Jerome Robbins, Merce Cunningham and Twyla Tharp, as well as by less familiar names such as Morris, Joachim Schlomer and Kevin O’Day, the charismatic Tharp dancer now doing double duty as performer and dancemaker for White Oak.
“Working with a variety of choreographers was always our intention,” Baryshnikov says. “Mark helped us to establish a profile. He was our first creative force in that sense. But in my mind and everybody else’s, we knew one day Mark would bring his own company back to the U.S. (after years headquartered in Brussels). So we immediately opened the doors to other choreographers-sometimes revivals, but mostly we do new creations.”
American Ballet Theatre, his longtime home, is a distant memory now. After he left ABT in 1989, taking his versions of “Cinderella” and “Swan Lake” with him in a huff, that renowned company almost folded. It’s now in better shape, run by its second head since he left, Kevin McKenzie. Baryshnikov says he hasn’t seen the company since he departed and has spoken with McKenzie “only once or twice.”
White Oak, meanwhile, now seems to represent a chamber version of Baryshnikov’s dreams. Ever since his work with Tharp in the mid-’70s, he has been angling to work with the finest choreographic minds to be found. Even his brief stay with George Balanchine and the New York City Ballet indicated a passion for the living choreographer as artist, over the preservation of 19th Century classics.
“I have nothing against ballet, but the more interesting choreographers today are working in modern dance,” Baryshnikov says. “I need that. To go through life without it doesn’t give me enough push to make it worth it. No matter how much money you paid me. The only thing that drags me through it is the new work-the excitement. Otherwise, it becomes an awful job.
“For dancing is a job-one that happens to be very interesting.”
Tharp remains a special influence. One spectacular solo in the current repertory is “Pergolesi,” which Tharp refined from a duet she created for Baryshnikov and herself for a program they shared in Columbus, Ohio, a couple of years ago and then toured briefly. In that original, she served as onstage choreographer, fashioning moves for Baryshnikov as the piece progressed-a see-through work about their collaboration.
“We talked of refashioning it for another dancer, even one of the men of White Oak, but Twyla thought about it and decided she’d make it a solo,” he says. In Madison, Baryshnikov entered the stage to begin the piece-his first of the evening-to polite but tepid applause. Then ensued a breathtaking dance showing off Tharp’s ability to echo ballet in modern moves and comically review many of Baryshnikov’s greatest balletic roles. By its end, after more than a half-hour of what was part Charlie Chaplin, part Marcel Marceau and altogether an amazing acrobatic display, the crowd went wild. He still has the knack to excite like no other dancer alive.
“There are more steps in the `Pergolesi’ than in all of `Giselle’ or `Swan Lake,’ ” he says, responding, perhaps, to suggestions that he left ballet for modern dance because it’s easier. “It is very, very difficult.”
But Baryshnikov’s affinity for Tharp is only part of the White Oak phenomenon. An ingenious revival of the last piece by the late, neglected Hanya Holm, who died in 1992 at age 99, is another gem in the current lineup.
“For years, her name came up time and again in talks with friends,” says Baryshnikov, who hired choreographer Dan Redlich to reconstruct Holm’s early ’80s “Jocose” just before she died. “She was very pleased, I’m told, that we had revived her work.” Her career had been groundbreaking in the ’30s and ’40s, though she’s best remembered today for her later work on Broadway in “My Fair Lady” and “Camelot.”
The seven works and two separate programs that now make up White Oak’s repertoire include Morris’ “Mosaic and United,” the Robbins’ solo “A Suite of Dances,” Cunningham’s 1970 “Signals” and Schlomer’s “Blue Heron.” The German-born Schlomer is especially interesting, a protege of Pina Bausch, the dynamic theatrical European choreographer whose work has been seen all too rarely in this country.
Schlomer’s is yet another new choreographic vision for White Oak: His piece is a dreamlike fantasy mixing veiled women and a Sisyphean duet for Baryshnikov and towering Rob Besserer, a veteran of Lar Lubovitch’s troupe.
The dancers, almost all from top modern troupes, are as eclectic as the repertoire. Besides Besserer and former Tharp dancer O’Day, whose “Quartet for IV” makes him the company’s first “in-house” choreographer, there is Patricia Lent from Cunningham’s company, Keith Sabado from Morris’ troupe, Ruthlyn Salomons and Nancy Colahan from Alvin Ailey and John Gardner, formerly of ABT.
O’Day’s development as a budding choreographer underscores Baryshnikov’s nurturing approach in White Oak.
“When you work with Twyla as long as he did, you witness creation on a daily basis,” Baryshnikov says. “He came to me and expressed an interest and I encouraged him. Frankly, there’s a tendency everywhere to encourage dancers to choreograph because of the lack of choreographers.” Even White Oak, he says, can’t pick up the phone and order on demand. “You can’t just call up Jerome Robbins and ask for a piece. Everybody is booked years ahead.”
But there is no disputing that the company has lined up many of the great names around. And audiences are responding. Even White Oak’s belated New York engagement sold out within days of its announcement. That has been true of most of the 90 cities worldwide where White Oak has played so far. (Chicago sales are brisk, though seats remain for the Thursday through Sunday engagement.)
“I don’t want to pat myself on the back,” says Baryshnikov, and then he literally does that, with a gentle tap of the hand.
Many believe dancers should retire in their 30s. “I might retire myself,” he says. “If something ever happened to this, I’m not sure I’d do something else.”
So what if he retired? What a life he’s had. Two decades ago, he figured not just as a superstar dancer, but as a young Manhattan partygoer hanging out with the likes of Andy Warhol, Halston and all the rest at Studio 54.
“You know, Martha Graham first took me there. It was just a place to go and chat and meet people, part of the world of performance. Believe me, I was not there every day.”
Warhol, Studio 54, Graham and Halston are gone-Baryshnikov endures, still unmarried, though accompanied in Madison by his 13-year-old daughter with actress Jessica Lange. Even the Iron Curtain that sent him to the West in the first place is a memory now.
On that subject, his guard drops and his cool demeanor turns misty and serious.
“I have no plans to go back,” he says. “My country is a very happy place now, in some ways, but a very pained one as well. I can’t commit myself seriously to a return at the moment. I’m very much at home in the states.”
Breakfast is over and he asks for the check. “Oh, there’s no charge, Mr. Baryshnikov,” he’s told. He answers, wide awake now, sporting a wry regality characteristic of this particular legend: “Your generosity is overwhelming.”
