The Books: Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, ‘The Soloist’, by Joan Acocella

On the essays shelf:

Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays by Joan Acocella.

One of Acocella’s most famous essays (it has been anthologized elsewhere), is her giant profile of Mikhail Baryshnikov, done for The New Yorker in 1998. It may be one of the best things ever written about him. She traveled with him back to Latvia, to Riga, his home town, where he was going to put on a solo performance in the theatre where he got his start. There were many emotional and political subcurrents going on during this visit. After all. Baryshnikov had defected. He had left behind his colleagues and teachers and threw his hat into the Western ring. Would there be resentment, especially because of how harsh the life was back in Latvia in those intervening years? There was also, of course, the fact of the crumbling of the Communist Imperium. Baryshnikov had never gone home after he defected, of course. He had shed his past like an old skin and became the biggest star the ballet world has ever known. His fame, too, went further than that. He did movies, where he played leads. He was as gorgeous as a movie star. He pushed himself, by partnering up with Twyla Tharp. He was one of the best examples of classical ballet training that has ever existed, but he moved past that, into other areas of dance. Returning home … what would it mean to this taciturn slightly melancholy man?

Acocella observes Baryshnikov in the studio in Riga, working on the steps for his upcoming concert with his old ballet friends, and she saw not a smidgeon of the Cold War resentment, or anything like that, in the dynamic. All she saw was three old pros working out some steps. As though the intervening years had not happened, as though Baryshnikov was not a world-famous “soloist”. She found it very moving, a perfect example of the truly internationalist slant of not only ballet dancers, but all artists. Get them together and no matter the upheaval in the world, they will settle down to talk about art.

Acecella takes us back to the boyhood, and his early genius for ballet. He moved up the ranks quickly, in some regards following in the footsteps of Nureyev although they were two very different dancers. Nureyev started late, and brought a wild almost folkloric animalistic energy to what he did. Baryshnikov had perfect technique. Perfect. When you listen to dancers talk about him and his technique, it’s mind-blowing as an outsider because I do not know the terms, but the awe is so apparent you just want to be silent and listen and learn. Baryshnikov was short, and feared that he would not get the romantic lead roles (which basically amounted to carrying the dames around). He was strong. His leaps were incredible. He also had an intuitive sense for acting and story (the excerpt below shows that), and so his dancing, while technically brilliant, was also filled with subjective and emotional grace notes. You always knew it was HIM dancing. He was not a robot.

By the time he was a young man, the paranoia in the Russian ballet was at a hysterical pitch. Nureyev had defected. It was a black eye to Soviet pride. Crackdowns ensued, and ballet dancers were trailed wherever they went. The KGB had a special interest in Baryshnikov, because he was the brightest star of them all. He was seen as a huge flight risk. Because of this, he was denied opportunities. Touring with the company was a plum job for all of them: they got to see the West, they got to buy better things than they could get in Russia, they could see what was going on out there in the world. It also paid better. Nobody was making any money. Baryshnikov slowly began to feel that the vise he was in was getting too tight. He was the best dancer around, he knew that, and he wasn’t getting the parts he should be getting, he was being held back. It must have been agony.

Then, of course, he followed in Nureyev’s footsteps (they had had a surreptitious meeting in London while Baryshnikov was on tour: Baryshnikov had to lose the KGB to do so), and defected. It was an international event. The rest is history and the history keeps playing out. He is still a relevant and powerful star. I mean, look at his season-long role on Sex and the City only a couple of years back. He was fantastic and it really played on his Russian melancholy (something fetishized by the Western press), and his work-ethic, and his seeming humorlessness. It was a very funny performance, very good. He has a gift for acting, too. He took America by storm, and quickly became one of the biggest ballet stars in the world, if not the biggest. He was so much better than everyone else around him that he eventually was giving solo concerts (hence, the title of Acocella’s essay), where he could command top dollar, come on, do some jumps, some turns, and go home. He was not a personable man, he suffered through interviews, he found fame difficult. He would take on a ballet role and own it to such an indelible degree that people are still trying to top what he did. He set the bar.

Acocella’s essay is  an emotional portrait of a big mysterious star, who seems to prefer being alone onstage, and yet who always surrounded himself with challenging and groundbreaking choreographers, like Twyla Tharp and Mark Morris.

I am so sorry I did not see him live in his prime.

He is a legend.

Here is an excerpt.

Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays, ‘The Soloist’, by Joan Acocella

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. (One of his classmates there was Alexander Godunov, who would also defect, and dance at American Ballet Theatre under Baryshnikov’s directorship.) Soon he showed extraordinary talent. Erika Vitina stresses the mother’s involvement in Misha’s ballet studies. “The father had no interest whatsoever in the ballet school. The mother brought him to the ballet school, put him there. All this happened physically, hand to hand.”

“I was mama’s boy in a way,” Baryshnikov says. He remembers how beautiful she was. (In fact, in the one photograph I have seen of her she looks uncannily like him. It could be Baryshnikov with a wig on.) “My mother was a country girl from the Volga River,” he said in a 1986 interview with Roman Polanski. “She spoke with a strong Volga accent. Very beautiful, very Russian – a one-hundred-percent pure Russian bride. But to tell the whole story of my mother, it’s a long story.” The end of the story is that during the summer when he was twelve she again took him to the Volga to stay with her mother and she went back to Riga, alone, and hanged herself in the bathroom of the communal apartment. Vladimir found her. Baryshnikov never knew why she did it. “Father did not want to talk about it,” he told me. Soon afterward, Vladimir left for the Army, and the father told Misha that now they would live together, just the two of them. The following year, Nikolai went away on a business trip and returned with a new wife, a new life. “I understood that I am not wanted,” Baryshnikov said.

He looked for other families. He spent most summers with the family of Erika Vitina, and he stayed with them at other times as well. “Other times,” Vitina says, “he would ring our doorbell late at night, saying that he had run away. But a week later I would receive a call from the ballet school” – she, too, had a child enrolled there – “and would be told that unless I sent Misha home they would have to call the police. We spent two years in this manner. From time to time, he’d come to stay with me, and then his father would take him away again.” Insofar as Baryshnikov has lived a life of exile, it had begun.

Erika Vitina recalls that his nights were often hard. Because he worried that he was too short to be a ballet dancer, he slept on a wooden plank – he had been told that this would help him grow faster (less traction) – and the blankets wouldn’t stay tucked in. Before going to bed herself, Vitina would look in and cover him up again. Often, he would be calling out in his sleep, caught in a nightmare. But during the day, she says, he was “a happy, sunny boy”. Now, looking back on those years, Baryshnikov is quick to dispel any atmosphere of pathos. “Children being left, it’s not always like the books of Charles Dickens. When you lose your parents in childhood, it’s a fact of life, and, you know, human beings are extraordinary powerful survivors. My mother commit suicide. I was lucky it was not in front of me, okay?” Which is truth, and Father was confused, and we never had any relationship, serious relationship, I never knew my father, in a way. But what? It’s made me different? No, I mean, I blame for every fuckups in my life my parents? No.

“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, an actor. He is thinking all the time what this role must be. I remember, once, Nutcracker. He was thirteen, perhaps. I was prince, and he was toy soldier. After Mouse King dies, Misha relax his body. No longer stiff, like wooden soldier. Soft. Our ballet director ask him, ‘Who say you should do that?’ And he answer, ‘When Mouse King dies, toys become humans. Toys become boys. Movements must change.’ He devise that himself. Small boy, but thinking.”

I asked Baryshnikov recently whether, after his mother’s death, ballet might have been a way for him to return to her. He paused for a long time and then said, “In Russia, dancing is part of happiness in groups. Groups at parties, people dancing in circle, and they push child to center, to dance. Child soon works up little routine. Can do a little this” – hand at the back of the neck – “a little this” – arms joined horizontally across the chest – “and soon make up some special steps and learn to save them for end, to make big finale. This way, child gets attention from adults.”

In the case of a child artist, and particularly one who has suffered a terrible loss, it is tempting to read artistic decisions as psychological decisions, because we assume that a child cannot really be an artist. But, as many people have said, children are probably more artistic than adults, bolder in imagination, more unashamedly fascinated with shape, line, detail. In Baryshnikov’s case, the mother’s devotion and then the loss of her can help to explain one thing: the work he put into ballet. For the rest – the physical gift, the fusion of steps with fantasy, the interest in making something true and complete (“Toys become boys”), all of which are as much a part of him today as they were when he was twelve – we must look to him alone.