Word: baryshnikov
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When the curtain goes up on Once Upon a Time, Twyla Tharp's new dance for American Ballet Theater, Mikhail Baryshnikov is alone onstage. He is elegantly dressed in pleated, '30s-style trousers, the kind that Cary Grant or Katharine Hepburn used to wear in the movies. This attractive, provocative first glance recalls Tharp's triumphant Push Comes to Shove (1976); that ballet began with Baryshnikov's sidling out in a vaguely Slavic tunic and a sassy bowler hat. No doubt about it, Tharp understands this Russian-American firebird better than any other choreographer. She sees...
...soupy Glazounov waltz tunes. That is no easy job, since this muse is coltish and blithely selfabsorbed. Three more young women (Elaine Kudo, Nancy Raffa, Amanda McKerrow), wearing costumes that suggest old-fashioned pinafores, glide in and out. At the end, his red-geranium partner's having vanished, Baryshnikov is hypnotized by the retreating figure of McKerrow...
Once Upon a Time is Tharp's most romantic piece. She sees what choreographers usually see in Baryshnikov: a performer who extends the boundaries of male virtuosity, in that sense the most modern of ballet dancers. But in the clarity and fastidious detail of his technique, as well as his warmth and amplitude, Baryshnikov evokes nostalgia-for the perfumed legends of Nijinsky and the Diaghilev troupe that first ignited the passion for ballet in the West. It is no small feat to capture this double image in a twelve-minute work, but Tharp has done...
...mundane level this Misha seems a bit tired, with his loosened tie and distracted air. It does not take much imagination to see this overworked chap as the head of a big dance company, which of course happens to be Baryshnikov's situation as artistic director of A.B.T. Develop the dancers, search out inspiring choreography, get out there and sell tickets with your own bag of tricks: that is a day's work...
...youthful corps de ballet and to lessen A.B.T.'s chronic reliance on international stars. The corps now is an impeccably disciplined instrument, but the members are so fresh in their almost votive commitment that their precision never suggests a drill team. At the start of his first season, Baryshnikov also picked out a few youthful dancers and virtually pushed them out onstage in important roles. His choices-among them, Susan Jaffe, 21, Cheryl Yeager, 25, Robert La Fosse, 23, Peter Fonseca, 25-are strong ones, but it takes years to develop a finished principal dancer. Of the familiar stars...