He is alone on stage, moving to a series of eerie, pulsating sounds.
In “HeartBeat: mb,” Mikhail Baryshnikov dances to the percussion of his own heart.
Wearing a wireless device attached to his chest, Baryshnikov, or his body rhythms, serve as the score, shifting the focus from dance to improvised medical checkup.
Here is a dancer taking stock of the state of his art–and his health.
And small wonder: The greatest dancer of our time turned 50 in January.
“It’s quite disturbing, an exploration of your body and at the same time not just a reaction to a mechanical pump,” he says. “It’s more poetic and a dance, a bit about mortality and about being a human being.”
First performed in the U.S. in January, scheduled as part of the programs Baryshnikov and his White Oak Project bring to the Auditorium Theatre Wednesday through Sunday, “HeartBeat” has inspired numerous questions about Misha’s frame of mind, his attitude toward aging and the presumed focus on his own mortality that the piece suggests.
The idea for “HeartBeat” came from choreographer Sara Rudner, who worked in conjunction with audio artist Christopher Janney on the piece. But Baryshnikov, who improvises nightly, is co-choreographer as well.
But does he link the selection to his own state of life? “What milestone?” he says of turning 50. “I never celebrate any birthdays, they’re just an old nuisance. If you think you’re 50, and you decided you can’t make love anymore or drink wine anymore, then you won’t. Actually, the process of dying begins years earlier. Life is a chain of little disappointments and little victories. If you are an entertainer, then you are stupid enough to share those feelings with the audience.”
Of retirement, he adds, “The time will come when I’ll say it’s not worth it, and then I’ll stop.”
For the dancer, the dilemma is old and universal. What age is too soon? And what age too late? “It’s too bad the instrument is so important in dance,” sighs venerable Chicago dance critic Ann Barzel. “Because the instrument wears out so quickly.”
The answer to the question of when to hang up the slippers and toe shoes varies from male to female, from classical performer to modern dancer and finally from individual to individual.
“It strictly depends on the person,” says Barzel.
Daniel Duell, who retired as principal dancer with the New York City Ballet at 35, agrees. “It partly depends on what you want to do with your life energies,” says Duell, now artistic director of Ballet Chicago. “I left performing earlier than I needed to physically because I wanted to go into directing and teaching. After moving here, I tried to do it all. But I found I couldn’t run a company and dance at the same time.”
Traditionally, male dancers fade more quickly than women. “Men usually retire earlier because their vocabulary includes jumping, and they lose that early,” says Barzel. Practically, it doesn’t always work out that way, however. Baryshnikov is still going at 50. Maria Tallchief, one of the great ballerinas of the 20th Century, left at 40. In her case, motherhood intervened.
“I had my daughter at age 33,” says Tallchief, who lives in the Chicago area and ran the Chicago City Ballet here for many years. “Before she turned 7, I took her with me everywhere. But at that age she needed to go to school. To be a classical ballerina is to have tunnel vision. Your whole life has to be toward the pursuit of that elusive perfection. But here was my daughter, who was more important to me even than dance. People said to me later, `Oh, you stopped so early.’ For me it wasn’t a choice. It was what I wanted to do.”
Some would argue Tallchief made the wiser choice, that Rudolf Nureyev, Alexandra Danilova and Margot Fonteyn — who all danced in their 50s — overstayed their welcome. Ballet is a rigorous discipline with strict, rigidly defined moves, often difficult to maintain with any grace by middle age.
Nureyev was still performing classical roles in his early 50s. (He died of AIDS at 54). “I was a great admirer, and I’ll never forget the inspiration he gave me as a young dancer,” says Duell. “But in his later years I think Nureyev pushed his dream at the expense of the audience.”
“I think he danced maybe 10 years more than he should have,” says Tallchief. “I think he simply didn’t know what else to do.”
But ballet dancers aren’t the only ones to eye early retirement. “I think the main reason people retire early is injury or physical pain,” says Claire Bataille, who retired from Hubbard Street Dance Chicago at 40. “I had a baby at age 36. Twyla Tharp warned me that the first couple of years would be okay. But when the baby hits 3, she said, it will be impossible, and she was right. If I took him on the road, he’d get sick out of town. If I left him home, he’d get sick and need me there. It was all too stressful.”
“I’m still dancing, and I plan to go into musical theater, where I began, but I’m retiring from concert dance,” says Patrick Mullaney, 33, who left Hubbard Street at the end of last season. “I felt stagnant, and I said to myself, before I’m injured, before I totally want to leave the business, I need to find something that will spark me back to life. Plus, I want to be paid. Concert dance is at the bottom of the totem pole in pay versus how hard you work.”
None of these experts suggest Misha is too old. He survived, they argue, by easing out of classical dance and becoming almost exclusively a modern dancer. He found Mullaney’s spark in another way, in other words.
“Misha has gone into a completely different field,” says Tallchief. “We knew him as the supreme classical dancer. I saw him in `Giselle’ and never looked at the girl once. But, now, as long as his health is fine, he is doing something else.”
Notes Duell, “He’s not trying to show us those super pyrotechnical tricks anymore. And you have to look at the whole picture of an artist. I don’t think Misha would be the extraordinary modern dancer he is now if he hadn’t done what he did as a classical dancer. At the heart of all dance, there’s an aspect of character, of some kind of story, whether it’s `Swan Lake’ or abstract dance. Even if there’s not a plot, there’s a content. Misha always had a presence beyond technique.”
“As long as he has pride and dignity, people will want to see him move,” says Mullaney. “Some of these young people who are leads in big ballet companies don’t have it. They can turn, they can move their feet, but they don’t have the passion, that thing that rolls off the stage and makes a dancer a star.”
And there are those practitioners proving that the dancer can be ageless. Liz Lerman, whose Washington, D.C.-based troupe has won international acclaim with dancers ranging in age from their 20s to their 70s, gracefully blending them all, says, “If you define dance narrowly to be about a certain physical virtuosity, then you have a problem with aging. But there is dance that’s not about jumping high. It has a different kind of depth. There are some movements that look better on older people. I’d love to create a duet for Baryshnikov and a woman in my company in her 70s. That would be touching. He could be a child again.”
