The Brooklyn Rail

Dancers and their archives contradict each other: one can never fully satisfy the other. Which is why I curious to attend the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts 2025 Dance Symposium, dedicated to the legacy of Mikhail Baryshnikov, on January 31 in the Bruno Walter Auditorium at Lincoln Center. Six research fellows—a cohort of esteemed artists, scholars, and critics—illuminated different aspects of Baryshnikov’s life and career by drawing on materials in his archive, which the library had acquired in 2011.

I sympathized with their challenge to find a coherent thread through his complex artistic life. I danced with Baryshnikov as a member of his White Oak Dance Project between 1998–2002, after which he dissolved the company to establish his own arts center. In these intervening years, I have become a performance-maker and a writer who dwells frequently on the poetics of archives and their biases. I have also been an NYPL dance research fellow, in 2019, during which time I drew on the Khmer Project oral histories. A full life parsed into a finding aid is unsettling. But the art of dance may be the most disruptive of all to the premise of collecting and saving for posterity. Such a significant amount of a dancer’s art and process escapes the record.

Each artist’s archive seduces researchers differently. For writers, the allure is discovering their choices in flux across many drafts. For Misha, the allure is him. He is striking in his twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies. And he has “re-drafted” his dancing by the decade. Based on the presentations during the symposium, however, the quality of Baryshnikov’s documentation over those decades is uneven.

The fellows flocked to his younger days, when he was filmed for television specials and in feature films. Who wouldn't? He’s irrepressibly charming, like a sexy cherub in Technicolor. More than once, we watched his performance in Push Comes to Shove, the 1976 breakout piece choreographed for him by Twyla Tharp, and a studio rehearsal of American Document, the 1938 dance restaged for him and filmed in 1990 with a nonagenarian Martha Graham. Tharp did far more to shape him as a dancer than Graham. Yet Tharp herself never appeared on screen that day.

The film scholar Maria Vinogradova went back earlier, through Baryshnikov’s collection of black-and-white 8 mm films, which contain a great deal of his teacher, Alexander Pushkin, but apparently not much of him. I wished for more Misha. The choreographer Jordan Demetrius Lloyd created new choreography for the occasion, rightfully placing himself in the historical record. Lloyd drew on footage of a White Oak rehearsal but mostly blanked out the image and kept just the closed caption transcription of Misha’s narration, at the bottom. I admired his creative interpretation of the materials, as I did that of Marcelline Mandeng Nken, another artist in the line-up (who studied with me as a graduate student at Yale School of Art). Nken absorbed the arc of Misha’s Soviet Russia-to-US migration into an arc of the Black diaspora, narrated through live choreography and animation.

Both Lloyd and Nken showed clips from a documentary-like film that was merely a device used within White Oak’s blockbuster 2000s show titled PASTForward, a tribute to Judson Dance Theater. In the live show, which I performed in, the bits of film established context. Taken out of context, the film seemed like a standalone documentary about Misha’s relationship to postmodern dance, with inexplicable black title cards every few minutes. With the live performance removed, for a researcher in 2025 could not fully understand this archival relic.

One symposium isn’t the canon just yet. But it does offer a glimpse of the attraction to certain landmarks over others. Conspicuously missing was much of Misha’s dancing in his midlife. Lloyd showed a clip of a seasoned Misha in a work by Donna Uchizono, but the draw appeared to be that Lloyd knew Jodi Melnick, a figure on the downtown scene today. Another fellow, Alessandra Nicifero, spoke about exile, and included footage of his 2015 one-man show Brodsky/Baryshnikov. The relatively poor quality of the video did not do justice to the intensity of his performance.

 I wondered about the absence of Misha's middle decades throughout the symposium. Did it have to do with the relatively lower quality of the performance and rehearsal videos, which are deeply insufficient as a record of his dancing during that time? Or did it somehow connect to the ageism of our society? How could anyone looking at this archival material now really know what was happening then?

Having witnessed that part of his career in extreme close-up—dancing on stage with him—I can tell you what I think was happening during the White Oak years: he completely overhauled his attention, musculature, and relationship to the audience. Touring to smaller and more intimate venues, he selected choreographers whose approach and philosophies helped him transform his energies, once devoted to space devouring technical feats, now turned inward, packed into discrete actions and a rich gestural life.

By the 1990s, his fame secured, Misha he could go wherever he wanted and pull audiences with him. He did not play it safe. He commissioned along two streams: reconstructions of historically important modern and postmodern dances, and original commissions by emerging downtown choreographers, many of whom are now the establishment. The critics, though, did not go with him, which affects the narrative of his career. Joan Acocella, an astute dance critic with sharp opinions, who up until her death was writing his biography, told me his White Oak years were entirely uninteresting and would not be a prominent part of her book.

This is a mistake. Judging the success or failures of each individual work in the White Oak repertory misses something much more important going on in Baryshnikov’s art. Viewed up close, there was only one stream: Misha moving, and the cacophony of ideas that he fed himself from different choreographers to push himself as an artist into ever greater… What was he seeking? Articulation, intensity, longevity as a performer—the research, the process, was all. He rewired his understanding of live performance again and again. Sometimes his performance was stronger than the material. He was also unafraid to look a bit silly (downstage center, bare bellied doing belly rolls, handcuffed…). As I waited in the wings with him before performing Mark Morris’s The Argument, he would say to me: “Just take it easy.” Once on stage, however, every light bulb in his body went off. By the time I saw him perform again, in the 2015 Letter to a Man, directed by Robert Wilson with spare, geometric choreography by Lucinda Childs, I realized what he had been working on in his forties and fifties. He reworked his balletic bravura into an internal gestural language that on a micro-level could explode a stage.

This is the law of conservation of energy, restated in performance terms: energy cannot be created or destroyed, simply changed in form. In a closed system, the total energy remains constant over time.

Unfortunately, I missed the writer Marina Harss’s presentation, but I did catch Brian Seibert’s (a colleague of mine from Yale). Seibert’s lively talk showed juicy clips of a younger Baryshnikov becoming American through the different collaborators he met in the seventies and eighties. There is another kind of Americanness represented in the footage from the 1990s and 2000s, in the not great resolution, pure documentation, not cinematic at all. Through his dancing in midlife, he achieved an even deeper, granular understanding of performance, as an artist continually transforming himself before the public’s eyes. You might not know all this from the video documentation, unless you were there, as I was, and the other dancers who danced with him at that time. The inward search that he sought and manifested is another version of American freedom of expression.

Misha’s personal history—his defection from the Soviet Union in 1974, and his American citizenship twelve years later—is a geopolitical one. The fiftieth anniversary of his arrival in this country has fallen during a profoundly unsettling reshuffling of US global allies and adversaries. “The America I know is dead,” a major poet declared during a recent public event. I find myself looking to artists older than me, desperate for their wisdom. Maybe there’s something to the strength of the introversion that Baryshnikov found in the middle of his life in the United States that can remind us at this moment in time—the force lies within.