Word: baryshnikov
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...season (1986-87) with the American Ballet Theatre: the rehearsals, the tour, the filming of the Herbert Ross movie Dancers in Italy. Their achievement is that they manage to animate the dailiness of backstage life from the point of view of both the artistic management, led by Mikhail Baryshnikov, and the dancers. Fraser's prose may be gushy at times, and Arnold's photos are grainy, but both beat with life and explode with candor. The arias of shop talk, the revelation of fears and jealousies, as well as the wry wisdom and humor, are riveting and give the blithe...
...cameras love Baryshnikov, but the key to this book's success is Fraser's total sympathy with this complex artist. Fraser helped Baryshnikov break away from a Soviet tour group in 1974, and he seems to have won his complete trust. Usually reticent, Baryshnikov speaks with stinging intimacy of his mother's suicide when he was twelve, broods about women (he loves American women but has difficulty living under the same roof with one) and gripes about the toils of fund raising. He also talks -- without the least defensiveness -- about one of his several goals: to be a giant-screen...
...Baryshnikov's enduring commitment has been to the American Ballet Theatre. After several years of critical condescension -- and he does read and ! react to adverse reviews -- he is finally getting some respect for having greatly improved the level of performance, relying less on imported etoiles and instead nurturing young talent within the troupe...
...walk it turns out to be! For an artistic director has strong stylistic preferences. Take the case of senior ballerina Martine van Hamel and what she calls "this age business." " 'I have tried to explain to her that she should perhaps no longer dance Kitri in Don Q((uixote)),' Baryshnikov said one day with genuine frustration. 'It happens . . . That's life.' " But to a ballerina, it's death. The still elegant star points rudely to Baryshnikov's young picks, all shorter and skinnier than she. Her verdict: "Chickens." Sighs the boss: "She's one damn tough cookie...
Without any debate, Baryshnikov is a performer of artistic genius, but no man is a hero to his corps de ballet. The big morale crisis in Private View involved the casting of the film Dancers, a modern gloss on the classic Giselle. Less than half the troupe's dancers were selected; for the rest, rejection amounted to a devastating appraisal of their entire season. When corps member Julie Kent, 17 and exquisite, won the ingenue role, angry charges of unfairness increased. Fraser notes that when the movie was finished and Kent's disastrous speaking voice squeaked through the land, tempers...