Listen to this article, read by Robert Petkoff
We were on the third or fourth flight of thick marble steps in a prewar Midtown apartment building when Mikhail Baryshnikov turned to ask if I was OK. I was clutching my inhaler, sweat rolling down my forehead. Totally fine, I answered. Was he OK? He was, after all, three decades my senior, with a lifetime of wear from leaps and pirouettes and enough knee surgeries that he forgets the exact number. But his face was dry and his breathing steady: “I think I can manage,” he said.
It may be out of the question for him to pull off 11 pirouettes, the way he did in the 1985 sinema “White Nights,” but Baryshnikov still dances; he works at a barre a few mornings a week, and still stretches and moves in ways a lot of younger people could not imagine. Simply watching him cross a room, something he accomplishes with a striking mix of lightness and intensity, I found it hard not to think of the number of times I’ve seen the word “flawless” used to describe his movement. Last year, to celebrate his 75th birthday, there was a “Day of Music and Celebration” at the Kaatsbaan Cultural Park in upstate New York. This was a remarkable event not just for its impressive array of performers — the singer-songwriter Regina Spektor, the jazz singer and pianist Diana Krall, the Japanese American multi-instrumentalist Kaoru Watanabe — but also because Baryshnikov is not typically excited by parties thrown in his honor; if he had it his way, he’d never celebrate the anniversary of his birth. “When other people invite me to their birthdays,” he says, “that’s fine. I like to go to those.”
As I discovered in the time I spent with Baryshnikov — Misha, as most everybody in his world knows him — he has a great appreciation for the works of others, and a great memory for friends, collaborators and heroes. He talked about befriending the actor James Cagney and being a pallbearer at his funeral; about guest-editing an issue of Vogue Paris with contributions from Susan Sontag and Milos Forman; about living near the comedian Susie Essman, who played Larry David’s foulmouthed foil on“Curb Your Enthusiasm.” (“Very friendly. A wonderful woman.”) He seemed far less concerned with his own personal milestones — be it his birthday or the 50th anniversary, this year, of his request for political asylum from the Soviet Union.
He made that request while on tour with the Bolshoi Ballet in Canada, but quickly got to work in the United States, where he would eventually become a citizen. Since then he has traveled extensively enough to feel at home in many places, but he describes himself, more than anything else, as a New Yorker. His residence is up north, in territory anybody in the five boroughs would call “upstate.” Up late sometimes with insomnia in the upstate quiet, he’ll take short walks, or read, or lie in bed trying to meditate — activities his dog, Zola, an 11-year-old Havanese, can’t tolerate. “She’s like: Why are you doing this to me? I need sleep. And I’m like, You’re a dog.”
He feels most at ease, he says, when driving each morning to the Baryshnikov Arts Center in Manhattan, where he does his work. On a good day, with no traffic, the trip takes about 30 minutes. As we mounted the last set of marble steps to the apartment he keeps in the city — for late nights, or to offer visiting friends — he told me the drive that morning took 50 minutes, but the extra time didn’t bother him. It was, for one thing, “more time for me to listen to NPR.” Baryshnikov loves public radio; he brings up his constant NPR listening quite a bit.
He offered me a glass of water as we settled in to talk. An acquaintance had put us in touch because I write about interesting New Yorkers, and Baryshnikov is certainly one of those. But I was more fascinated by his career-long commitment to exploring rarefied forms of arka, rather than chasing mainstream acclaim — by his frequent mentions of the shrinking time he has left to ensure that the arts center bearing his name can live on after he’s gone, and the sense that his life’s third act has him up at night worrying over the future of high arka in America. He has, for decades, been staggeringly famous; it is not absurd to imagine another world in which he might have followed that fame toward full-time Hollywood stardom, or guest appearances on “Dancing With the Stars,” or serving as a spokesman for some topical pain-relief brand. And yet he has always been stubbornly devoted to art-making itself, and he may be among the most famous people in this country who can say that.
