Opinion: Fifty years after his defection, we’re still living in the age of Mikhail Baryshnikov

John Fraser is a former dance and theatre critic for The Globe and Mail and its former bureau chief in both Beijing and London. He is the author of many books, including Private View: Inside Baryshnikov’s American Ballet Theatre, and is currently the executive chair of the National NewsMedia Council of Canada.

Fifty years ago today, on the late Saturday evening of June 29, 1974, Mikhail Baryshnikov made his brave and historic decision to abandon the stultifying artistic restrictions of the repressive old Soviet Union and try his luck in the West. After he finished a series of performances at Toronto’s O’Keefe Centre (now Meridian Hall) with a touring division of the Bolshoi Ballet, he exited through a stage door and bolted past Bolshoi managers and KGB security to a waiting getaway car and began his remarkable second life. It is not at all a stretch to say that this singular act, which made headlines around the world, dramatically changed the course of the art of dance during the next half-century.

That’s a big statement. But when you consider how this one artist bolstered the classical ballet at the same time as he thrust himself into both popular entertainment dance as well as some of the outer boundaries of avant-garde “movement,” it is not inaccurate at all. On top of all that, he longed – what am I saying, he lusted – after every artistic opportunity that came his way, as well as pushing for experiences he had to fight hard to do.

Along the way, and typical of this extraordinary artist (as well as highly ironic, considering the breadth of his artistic contributions), he is probably most widely known to a mass audience as Aleksandr Petrovsky, the moody Russian émigré artist who stole the heart of Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie in Sex and the City. This certainly wasn’t The Nutcracker, and it became a major source of fascination for a far larger audience than he’d ever had on the stage. I asked him once what his motivation was for taking on this role in that particular show. The answer was pure Baryshnikov: “Finally,” he said, with the same twinkle in his eyes that enraptured more than just Ms. Parker, “I wanted to try to be in something my children weren’t allowed to watch.”

It wasn’t Aleksandr Petrovsky, however, who helped to start the non-profit organization True Russia with writer Boris Akunin and economist Sergei Guriev, in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The organization’s continuing aim is to unite Russian people around the world to support victims of the invasion. Normally apolitical, Misha (as his friends and the tabloid press love to call him) was not just outraged by the invasion; it also sent him reeling back to his youth in Riga as the son of an “occupier” officer in the Soviet military. He hated that connection so much that at school, and especially after school, he avoided fellow Russians like the plague and hung around instead with young Latvian dissidents and a coterie of Jewish pals. One of those Jewish chums, the former and now late Bolshoi ballet master and character dancer Alexander Minz, who had already made it to the West, was one of the key people to help Misha decide to jump in 1974.

In the end, it wasn’t a difficult decision. He was dying artistically from the deadening bureaucracy of the Soviet arts world, a world that decreed he was too short to take on the great balletic roles and too individualistic to be allowed experiments in modern movement. Although his homeland labelled him a traitor, he knew instead he was a symbol of hope for all Russian artists whose spirits longed to be free.

Is this now the place for the obligatory “fair disclosure?” It’s one I can make with huge pride and gratitude. I was a performing arts journalist (dance and second-string music reviewer) for this newspaper in 1974. In an escapade that now seems to me closer to a Feydeau farce, I was able surreptitiously to hand him a note with a phone number that put him in touch with his friends who were ready in New York to help him make his decision. That little act of intrigue won for me a dear, generous and loyal friend for all these subsequent 50 years.

He was the same with Toronto lawyer and former cabinet minister, Jim Peterson, who handled all the legalities associated with the defection. He was the same with Tim Stewart, who drove the getaway car from O’Keefe Centre and lent his family’s farm in Caledon, Ont., to hide him for a few days. Tim died at the end of last year, and Jim just died. Time passes.

Misha was 26 that June evening and I had just turned 30. Now he’s 76 and I’m 80. How the heck did all that happen? Well, he’s still going strong and still pushing away at show business, high and low. So am I in my world, or at least I still think I am, as I keep pushing away at book-writing and journalism, also high and low.

There were no serious repercussions because of the defection. He was already well-estranged from his father, his mother had died when he was very young, and, as a bit of a loner, he had kept his friends at a safe distance. That’s why as soon as Misha managed to get his new life in New York into some sort of order, he began performing with extraordinary urgency and prowess at American Ballet Theatre. Like so many who remember those days at ABT, the athletic magic combined with his impeccable and elegant demeanour established new highs in the world of dance. He had, for example, a trademark tour en l’air in which he jumped so high as he crossed his legs at the high point that you had the distinct impression he was literally walking on air. For me, this was the physical reality T.S. Eliot evoked when he described “the still point in the turning world.”

All along his postdefection trajectory, he has tried to find those unique moments, one way or another. Although he could have jumped immediately into star status at ABT, he chose instead to become an “ordinary” corps member of George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet because he wanted the experience of working with the mighty Russian choreographer. Although he eventually agreed to be the artistic director of ABT, it always seemed to me it was primarily as a means to explore work with contemporary choreographers and as-yet undiscovered dancers than a desire to run a great troupe. The only power to which Mikhail Baryshnikov was ever attracted, so far as I was ever able to see, was to be in a strong enough position that he could keep pushing himself and the frontiers of his art.

With financial help from affluent admirers, he was able to launch the Baryshnikov Arts Centre which has steadily grown in influence in the whole avant-garde arts scene in New York, which is to say everywhere, when you consider the global influence and power of the dance scene in New York. And as his physical strengths gradually succumbed to the realities of aging, he was always moving restlessly along, looking for new opportunities. I mean, honest to God, just a few months ago I went down to Montreal to see him perform anonymously as the Yellow Clown in an extraordinary theatrical curiosity, Slava’s SnowShow. Performance after performance, no one in the Montreal venue had a clue that the world’s most celebrated living dancer was in their midst; that anonymity after a life so focused on centre stage gave him enormous satisfaction. He said he enjoyed feeling nervous on stage again!

Ditto for all the other unexpected things he has been up to, from a remarkable touring exhibition of his photography, to a dramatic theatrical evening built around the narration of poetry by the late Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Brodsky, who was a close comrade. Thankfully, we live in the age of total media penetration, and so if you want to catch so much of what Misha has accomplished in his lifetime, or at least the gist of it, just spend a few hours scouring YouTube. It’s there particularly you can see in vivid reality the scope of his achievement. And you will also be able to say, like those who saw Anna Pavlova dance or Laurence Olivier act: I lived in the age of Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Twenty-five years ago, the University of Toronto awarded Misha an honorary degree in recognition of what he had already accomplished back then and to take due, prideful note that his artistic conquest of the West began in Toronto. He gave a great address in Convocation Hall to hundreds of graduating students, many of whom had parents who’d also fled Soviet-dominated Europe. It was an extraordinary scene because the majority of students wanted to shake his hand after they had been hooded. They understood what they would be able to say to their grandchildren. In his address, he said that like the students and their parents, he hoped for a world where no one felt they had to leave their homeland because they could not follow their dreams.

On that memorable occasion, Misha brought with him his small White Oak Dance Project company, which performed all week long at the large Elgin Theatre to sold-out audiences. The six-figure profit from one of those nights was donated to Massey College and the University of Toronto to support the Scholar at Risk program, which offered academic scholars who had fled from totalitarian or war-torn countries a chance to connect with fellow academics in a college that respected and honoured their accomplishments and courage, and gave them a step up as they tried to figure out the rest of their lives.

Then he did something else, something probably unique in the school’s history: He purchased nearly 500 copies of a posthumously published and beautifully illustrated Joseph Brodsky poem, Coming to America, signed them all and directed the university to send them to every undergraduate and graduate student who convocated with him. It was, he told them, a commemoration of a singular event when their lives interacted.

A quarter-century later, he is still the searching, generous artist he has always been. There is a bit more grumbling about aching bones, but he still cuts an amazing figure on (and off) the stage. He is still a loyal and generous friend. He is still grateful to Canada for that initial rescue from the Soviet Union. He is still a consummate artist unafraid to take risks. Thanks to all that, the world is a richer place than it would have been if he had not taken that grand jeté west a half-century ago.