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 film “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 art, 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 art 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.
Baryshnikov came of age during the “Khrushchev Thaw,” a relaxation of Stalin-era rule that was welcomed in the West. Still, the party line, as Nikita Khrushchev wrote, was that the Soviet Union’s writers and artists were liable to “stray from the right road” and “treat the tasks of literature and the arts erroneously and in a distorted way,” portraying life “as if the duty of literature and the arts were to find only the faults.” Artists could make art — but the artist was still a worker, and the worker still had to serve the goals of the state.
But almost immediately after he arrived on American soil, Baryshnikov was a celebrity unto himself. “It was weird,” he admits, “to see me on the same day, at the same time, on the cover of Newsweek and on the cover of Time.” From that moment on, his would be the first name most Americans would think of when ballet came up. At various points you could find him in gossip and society columns, attending parties alongside Jacqueline Onassis, dancing with Liza Minnelli to Cole Porter songs on a 1980 prime-time TV special called “Baryshnikov on Broadway.” At its peak, his fame was comparable to a pop star’s at the dawn of the music-video era. I was a child in the 1980s, I told him, and I could remember hearing about him before I become aware of, say, Madonna or Prince; there was a time when sports journalists would invoke his name to describe the athleticism of a young Michael Jordan.
Today, to have achieved this level of fame by dancing in a revival of “Apollo,” or in a ballet Jerome Robbins created specifically for you to Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1, seems unlikely at best. But Baryshnikov arrived at a very specific time — between the period when people like Leonard Bernstein or Maria Callas could be household names and novelists were regular guests on the country’s biggest talk shows and the era when the nation became obsessed with very new kinds of celebrity. Baryshnikov is a highbrow superstar, and possibly one of the last we will ever see.
To get a sense of what has changed, consider the March 20, 1989, issue of Time magazine. Leaf through, and you’ll see ads for things like the PBS news show “Frontline” and a two-volume collection of songs from Stephen Sondheim’s work (including his lesser-known shows). There’s a full-page review of Carl Bernstein’s latest book and a full-page review of “the liveliest MoMA architectural show in years.” There’s an item about Miles Davis’s receiving a knighthood in Spain and a bit about a man who threatened to blow up Dante Alighieri’s tomb — he claimed it was a prank — that ends, “Consign him to the Inferno!” And on the page before that, beside a review of Wendy Wasserstein’s play “The Heidi Chronicles,” is a picture of Baryshnikov, on his knees and elbows in a striped shirt and vest, playing Gregor Samsa in “Metamorphosis,” a stage adaptation of Franz Kafka’s story. The show ran from March until July of that year and earned Baryshnikov a Tony nomination; the Time review calls it “the most ballyhooed highbrow event in the theater so far this year.” Baryshnikov remembers it now as one of the more painful experiences of his career: “Lots of twisting,” he says, contorting his body.
Twisting himself into a Kafkaesque pretzel is precisely the kind of work that brought him to New York, and that he has spent the decades since exploring. When he sought asylum, he was a lead dancer for the Kirov Ballet and touring with the Bolshoi, both classical ballet companies. He was not long in New York before he was gleefully stretching into American modern dance, working with pioneers like Alvin Ailey, Twyla Tharp and Jerome Robbins — whom he always refers to as “Jerry,” and after whom he named the main theater in his arts center. He could have lived anywhere, he told me, “but New York was available, and I wanted to work with Jerry and Mr. B.” — he pointed to the sky to indicate George Balanchine, whose neoclassical choreography bridged their shared Imperial Ballet education with the spectacle of Broadway stages and the naturalness of everyday movement. By 1990, after a decade as the artistic director of American Ballet Theater, Baryshnikov moved on to start the White Oak Dance Project with the choreographer Mark Morris, pushing into hypermodern, even avant-garde dance. (“We don’t do ballet,” the headline of a 1994 Times article on the project read, quoting Baryshnikov joking about stamping ballet steps out of the group’s vocabulary.) With Morris, he said, “you dance as plain as possible,” comparing the work to a singer’s “true voice.” Looking back on his career, he describes some of his best-known ballet performances from a slight distance — but he speaks of his work with Morris a genuine breakthrough, one that opened him up to new possibilities.
He followed a similar path outside of dance as well. Yes, he did mainstream acting: popular dance movies like “The Turning Point” (for which he earned an Academy Award nomination) and “White Nights,” and later a high-profile role in the final season of “Sex and the City” as one of Carrie Bradshaw’s boyfriends, the Russian artist Aleksandr Petrovsky. (“I was in South America performing a few years ago, going down a boat on the Black River,” he told me. “Another boat comes by, and I hear this guy screaming — ‘Peloski? Roski? No, no, Trotsky? No, Petrovsky!’” He laughed. “I wanted to say, ‘No, it’s Gorbachev.’”) He still pops up on screens now and then — an uncredited role in the 2014 action film “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit” here, a part in the British TV comedy “Doll & Em” there. But he is, and has always been, more likely to be found performing in much headier theater. In 2022 he appeared in “The Orchard,” a staging of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” by the Ukrainian American director Igor Golyak that was received as a statement on Russia’s war on his home country and the threat of technology’s rendering humans obsolete; it featured, in addition to Baryshnikov and the actress Jessica Hecht, a 12-foot robotic arm and a cyberdog. He has appeared in a collection of Samuel Beckett one-act plays, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis with original music by Philip Glass; in a stage adaptation by the Russian artist Dmitry Krymov of a story by the Nobel Prize winner Ivan Bunin; in “The Hunting Gun,” a stage adaptation of a 1949 novella from Japan; and in a performance based on poems by Joseph Brodsky, another Nobel winner, in Riga, Latvia, where Baryshnikov was born and raised.
The average celebrity ends up selling things, not playing Gregor Samsa as a cockroach. Baryshnikov has always had the fame to do so. (Even as we ordered coffee at a bagel shop near his apartment, I heard a mother tell her child, “That’s the greatest ballet dancer in the world.”) His current contender for the most famous name in American ballet, Misty Copeland, has appeared in commercials and had a Barbie doll created in her honor. But apart from a handful of fragrances (starting, in 1989, with “Misha by Mikhail Baryshnikov”), Baryshnikov has done little of that; his outlook is more old-fashioned, romantic about the job of the artist. “I made a commitment to myself that I wouldn’t be interested in money,” he told me. “I never wanted to know how much money was in the bank.” When I asked if he paid any attention to social media platforms like TikTok — where young people post and analyze clips from his best-known dance performances, explaining his technique and his accomplishments — he gave me a look that defied the idea that there are no stupid questions.
This, perhaps, is why it is so hard to imagine seeing the likes of him again: He’s a beloved, dashing and elegant dancer who still gets stopped as he walks down city streets, but his focus is almost entirely on a realm of fine arts that, increasingly, struggles to capture public notice. This is the kind of work the Baryshnikov Arts Center supports. Over the course of our conversations, Baryshnikov brought up a number of performances there, from the Australian choreographer Lucy Guerin’s “Corridor” to William Forsythe’s 2007 dance installation “You Made Me a Monster” — part of Toni Morrison’s “Art Is Otherwise” festival, and yet another intersection with a Nobel laureate in literature. When we met one day this past spring, he implored me to come to see “4 | 2 | 3,” choreographed by the duo Baye & Asa; when I told him I had to be out of town, he looked just shy of heartbroken. “You’re missing such a special thing,” he said.
His apartment is handsome, and decent in size, by Manhattan standards. Light streams through two windows to land on a wall of photographs. Baryshnikov spent decades as an avid photographer; a few books of his work have been published, and some of the photos on the wall are his. Others are images of heroes he likes to look at. There’s a shot of the photojournalist Eve Arnold, who also photographed Hollywood icons like Marilyn Monroe; he met her when she was taking photos on the set of “White Nights,” and they became friends. Then he pointed to another picture and told me it was a neighbor from when he first moved to the United States: “Judy Tomkins. She was married to Calvin Tomkins” — the author and critic — “for a time. She was a photographer, gardener and also a bit of a philosopher.” There was a shot of Marlene Dietrich, another of Fred Astaire, some scattered shots of Baryshnikov with various friends. Beneath them was a desk featuring more photos of his children and friends, along with ephemera including a note from the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, whose genius Baryshnikov is happy to extol.
This is, obviously, a theme with him. Baryshnikov can easily find fault with his own work — critiquing things he did decades ago, pointing out things other dancers were doing better at the time. But he lights up when talking about the artists who have influenced him, and he is similarly in awe of the younger artists working out of his center today. “I fall in love with artists,” he says. “Sometimes I don’t even know it. I feel deep sympathy. It’s like how the French say une amitié amoureuse — it’s a loving friendship.” Diana Krall, for instance, who performed at his celebration upstate: He saw her perform once, at a live taping of “A Prairie Home Companion,” and “in just a few chords I was thinking I wanted to meet that person and shake her hand.”
Laurie Anderson was another performer at that birthday event. Baryshnikov first met her and her late husband, the musician Lou Reed, at an event they did along with Patti Smith, reading Catalan poetry at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. He remembers going out to dinner with the couple, their conversations stretching late into the evening, then getting a call early the next morning. “Hello, it’s Lou Reed,” he says, imitating Reed’s grumpy New York accent. “I’d say: ‘Yes, Lou. I recognize your voice.’” Anderson hasn’t spent a great deal of time with ballet, but she has gotten to see Baryshnikov’s work multiple times, and spoke with admiration of “The Old Woman,” his 2013 collaboration with the experimental theater director Robert Wilson and the actor Willem Dafoe, bringing the Soviet-era absurdist Daniil Kharms’s work to the stage. “He is somebody who can work in so many different zones,” she says.
Anderson and Baryshnikov have something crucial in common. Few would call Anderson’s music commercial, and yet in 1981 she had one of history’s most unlikely pop hits with the song “O Superman,” a haunting slice of minimalism that consists largely of Anderson’s speaking, her voice filtered through a vocoder, for more than eight minutes. Like Baryshnikov, she is the rare artist who has experienced transcending the avant-garde to seize mainstream attention — something she finds difficult to imagine happening to many people these days. “There are a hundred times more artists now,” she says. “Everybody is screaming for attention, it’s incredibly corporate and it’s really speedy.”
The writer and cultural critic W. David Marx shares that feeling. “The culture industry today is much more rationalized, which means catering to existing tastes,” he says, “and this has depleted ‘high culture’ to almost zero. The wealthy are no longer as formal, museums and galleries have moved away from academic art and toward pop spectacle and even intellectual magazines try to make their content more accessible.” I thought of this as I was walking to one of my meetings with Baryshnikov. Near the Fashion Institute of Technology, I passed some students photographing a model in what looked like some mixed homage to the Japanese designer Issey Miyake and “RuPaul’s Drag Race”; on her head was a black hat with the logo of the literary magazine n+1 reworked to look like the graphic on a can of Monster energy drink. This caught my eye for several reasons: for its speedy, syncretic collisions of high and low culture; for the distance between those hypermodern collisions and the deep traditions of movement passed between generations in dance; and because I own the same hat. A student was holding a Bluetooth speaker playing Max Richter’s take on Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” — right until the model complained that it sounded like a car commercial, and the music was replaced by something that vaguely resembled Taylor Swift.
In 1974, when a 26-year-old Baryshnikov sought asylum, he framed it not as a political choice but an artistic one, rooted in his need to create freely. During the Cold War, this explanation didn’t make much difference; the beautiful young dancer choosing America over its ideological enemy was celebrated as a triumph of capitalism over communism. “I arrived during Watergate,” he says, and despite having “Democratic inclinations” he eventually met with Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, whom he found charming. (“I spent the day with him and Betty at his office outside Los Angeles, which was based on a golf course.”) He had also become friendly with Jimmy Carter, and danced for his family at the White House. But it was the next president with whom he found himself spending the most time. Baryshnikov performed choreography by Twyla Tharp at Ronald Reagan’s second inaugural ball, while Frank Sinatra smoked a cigarette and sang for the millions watching at home. He occasionally dined with the president and first lady.
It was one of those dinners that helped reveal to him the unsteady status of the arts in America. Reagan was overseeing a budget reduction that included deep cuts to arts funding. “It was a private dinner,” he told me, “and at some point I asked: Why did you include the arts?” The Reagans, he pointed out, weren’t just seen as appreciators of the arts; they had themselves both come from the acting world. Surely they believed in the arts’ importance? Baryshnikov asked me to lean in as he mimicked the president’s response, complete with an aw, shucks expression: “He said, ‘Can’t sell it.’”
The conversation stuck with Baryshnikov. If the man considered the leader of the free world couldn’t manage to fund arts programs, who could? Baryshnikov’s creative drive is still very much intact. But his legacy, as he sees it, will not revolve around his bravura 1970s and ’80s solos in “Don Quixote” or “Giselle,” or the way his fame ushered new generations into ballet. It will be whatever he can do to ensure great art, and the people who create it, can flourish.
As we sat in the offices of the Baryshnikov Arts Center during one of our talks, meetings were going on everywhere around us. He suggested we go somewhere quiet, but there were no offices available, and he didn’t want to kick anybody out of a conference room. A few minutes later I found myself alongside him in a dark little supply closet, where he wanted to show me a video he had made.
It took him a few minutes to call it up on a laptop. It was for an experimental multimedia project he was working on with a friend; the clip was built from shots of Baryshnikov, speaking some dialogue and improvising some dance. The movement was nothing like his work when he was younger — no leaping or spinning — but it was impossible not to marvel at the intricacy of the movements. Being able to do work, he told me, was invigorating; interacting with artists at the center inspired him each day. But, he added, “I know that it’s not for long anymore, because I’m already at a certain age.” It could be, he said later, that “I grew up under Stalin, ran away, and I’ll finish up under Trump” — but the art itself was always present, always rejuvenating.
He turned to the video, and we watched as he did something resembling a break-dancer’s pop-and-lock — a complex movement that, I said, he made look deceptively simple. But Baryshnikov said the move wasn’t that hard. He stood up in the cramped closet and started moving his arms from right to left, his body drifting in waves. He twisted his torso slowly, eyes closed, and smiled as he finished his demonstration. “I’m still excited,” he said.
Jason Diamond is the author of the memoir “Searching for John Hughes” and of the essay collection “The Sprawl.” His debut novel, “Kaplan’s Plot,” is scheduled to be released next fall. Thea Traff is a New York-based photographer and photo editor who frequently contributes to The Times. Her portraiture focuses on the emotional complexity of human life through the use of dramatic lighting and sculptural poses.
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