It doesn’t mat­ter how high you lift your leg. The tech­nique is about trans­parency, sim­plic­ity and mak­ing an earnest attempt

Says Mikhail Barysh­nikov, the famous dancer, actor, pro­ducer and pho­tog­ra­pher — a tal­ent for whom the USSR was not big enough.

Mikhail was born in 1948 to Russ­ian par­ents, in Riga, the cap­i­tal of now inde­pen­dent Latvia. His dance is promi­nent from his early years, so it’s no sur­prise that he pur­sues the career of a clas­si­cal bal­let dancer. He grad­u­ates from the Leningrad Chore­og­ra­phy School and gets accepted to the Kirov Bal­let also in Leningrad where he per­forms the sig­na­ture roles for a num­ber of years. Mikhail has it tough in the USSR: being not very tall by Soviet stan­dards – 168cm only, he was more likely to be granted only second-class bal­let roles. More so, he dis­liked the rigid­ity of the Soviet bal­let rules which had been around for over a hun­dred years: he longed for inno­va­tion and his own breath­ing space, which the Soviet dance orga­ni­za­tions were unlikely to grant.

This is how he got to pon­der­ing a relo­ca­tion to a more lib­eral, pos­si­bly West­ern coun­try – which would have never hap­pened, as the USSR did not allow immi­gra­tion, let alone immi­gra­tion to the cap­i­tal­is­tic coun­tries. It was some­what pre­dictable that in 1974, while tour­ing Canada with the dance troupe of Bol­shoi The­atre, he defected: he says he was explor­ing his dance bound­aries. Indeed, in the first two years after the defec­tion, he danced with no less than 13 chore­o­g­ra­phers, “look­ing for himself”.

“Mr B”, as he was known in the West, barely spoke a word of Eng­lish and very lit­tle French, had a name vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble to pro­nounce, child­ish height but a huge ego to live with. How­ever, none of it mat­tered as his tal­ent, his mas­tery of ges­ture and stage­craft were incred­i­bly com­pelling. “It doesn’t mat­ter how high you lift your leg. The tech­nique is about trans­parency, sim­plic­ity and mak­ing an earnest attempt.” The idea of a “ran­dom dance” appealed to him, where the thrown dice deter­mines sequence of the dance moves.

He left clas­si­cal bal­let in 1990, turn­ing his genius towards the other forms of art­ful expres­sions: mod­ern dance, act­ing and pho­tog­ra­phy. Among the notice­able (and cer­tainly less known facts) is his role as Yuri Kopeikine, a famous Russ­ian wom­an­iser bal­let dancer in the 1977 film The Turn­ing Point, for which he received an Oscar  nom­i­na­tion. He has had a few pho­to­graphic exhi­bi­tions around the world, and just like in dance, his clear images of what’s on the photo are por­trayed with ele­gance and style.

For him New York is home these days. Now he is a sec­ond most famous Mikhail of the Soviet Union (right after Mikhail Gorbachev).

Related posts:

1. In The Bookshop
2. Gaddafi Really Had It Coming
3. The Patri­otic Edu­ca­tion in USSR. Part 2  —  Pio­neers, Soviet Boy Scouts
4. A Swiss­man in Moscow: Leonard Gianadda, 1957.
5. Pic­tur­ing the Soviet Republics: Ukraine