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Mikhail Baryshnikov on Film‘Making Dreams Come True’ and many others January 2008 London, British Film Institute (BFI) by John Mallinson |
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IN THE WEEK of Mikhail Baryshnikov's 60th birthday the London Ballet Circle and the British Film Institute arranged an evening with two consecutive two-hour programmes of films from British television – something that is unlikely to be repeated for another 10 years. Programme notes and an introduction were by Jane Pritchard who has done so much in recent years to stimulate the BFI to put on dance film programmes. The well-attended evening was entitled Mikhail Baryshnikov: Making Dreams Come True, rather than 'Baryshnikov at 60' which, as Jane Pritchard said, would have been chronologically wrong as the films covered the period of his most active dance life in the West from 1975 aged 27 to 1992 when he was 45. The source of the films, about half each from the BBC and ITV, meant that we saw too little of his work in America and missed some of his most famous partners, especially Gelsey Kirkland. "What has made Baryshnikov a paragon of late-twentieth-century dance is partly the purity of his ballet technique. In him the hidden meaning of ballet, and of classicism – that experience has order, that life can be understood - is clearer than in any other dancer on the stage today. Another part of his preeminence derives, of course, from his virtuosity, the lengths to which he was able to take ballet – the split leaps, the umpteen pirouettes – without sacrificing purity. But what made him an artist, and a complete artist, is the completeness of his performances: the level of concentration, the fullness of ambition, the sheer amount of detail..." One could quote endlessly and with pleasure from that doyenne of American dance writing, Joan Acocella, this taken from her recently collected essays, Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints (Baryshnikov being an artist rather than a saint). In her essay she tries to capture the essence of the man, something that this programme of films allowed us to see more clearly. First was an extract from a documentary of Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova preparing the Don Quixote pas de deux for a Sadler's Wells gala in 1975, refreshingly without commentary, followed by film from the broadcast of the show and, most moving, their Giselle Act II from the same evening. His performance as Basilio showed him at the height of his bravura powers: everything seemingly effortless and flowing, ultimately precise. In the tantalising 10 minute version of Giselle he was at his most grief-struck and convincing. There were times, particularly I think in the recorded ABT performance of Les Sylphides (not shown here), when he looked more po-faced than poetic. This was not one of those. Antoinette Sibley in a later film said how she always saw in him an underlying melancholy, and not just the old Russian stereotype: this seemed to come out in his Albrecht. What would one not give to be able to see a complete performance from those two émigrés – their 1977 performance in the 'Live from Lincoln Center' series used to be available on tape but has not been transferred to DVD.  Mikhail Baryshnikov courtesy and © British Film Institute
Following this was the brief but wonderful pas de deux from Ashton's Rhapsody, from it's premiere in the Queen Mother's birthday gala in 1980. Here Baryshnikov partnered Lesley Collier who cannot have been bettered in that role. Sadly the whole performance was not filmed – four minutes is all that remains. The last item in the first programme was Roland Petit's Carmen, originally made for French television and broadcast by the BBC, also in 1980. Zizi Jeanmaire, then 56, still had much of the seductive brio that she showed in the 1960 film with Roland Petit. Baryshnikov narrowed his eyes and smouldered. The second programme opened with an extract from a South Bank Show about Mark Morris (The Hidden Soul of Harmony, 1989) in which he rehearsed Baryshnikov (amongst others of his company, then resident in Belgium) in his film noir type piece Wonderland. Mark Morris always entertains. This showed Baryshnikov as a good company man at the time when his association with Morris in the White Oak Dance Project was being hatched. The major item was a complete South Bank Show featuring Baryshnikov as dancer and director of American Ballet Theater (The Dancer and the Dance, 1983). The first part of the film briefly recounted his life, especially his indebtedness to his teacher Alexander Pushkin in Leningrad – "he made me." (Most famously Pushkin made Nureyev before him.) What Baryshnikov valued most was being taught how to work, how to apply himself, how to get the best out of himself rather than details of technique. (Acocella reports that Pushkin had two instructions: "Don't fall" and "Get up.") Clips showed him in Le Corsaire, Petruchka and Twyla Tharp's Push Comes to Shove which was made around him. His association with Tharp began early in his American career (1976) and explored their joint preoccupation with connecting modern dance to ballet. The greater part of this film showed Baryshnikov and ABT members in rehearsal and performance for Chinese-American choreographer Choo San Goh's Configurations which was perhaps the least interesting piece on show. A short coda showed parts of a 1992 film about the White Oak company with wonderful clips of works by Morris, Lubovitch and Martha Graham. Like Nureyev before him, throughout his career Baryshnikov has never been content to restrict himself to the classical canon. Unlike Nureyev he stopped performing classical work before the technical difficulties overwhelmed him and he has been able to continue a successful stage career until the present. A programme like this always leaves the certainty that there is much more lurking in archives or gathering dust on the shelves of TV and film production companies, much more that we will never see for reasons of bureaucracy, indifference and copyright. Great thanks to the organisers of this evening for letting us see a little. Baryshnikov performances currently available on DVD:
Live at the Wolf Trap (1975), with Gelsey Kirkland. |
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