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Baryshnikov Talks: An Exclusive Interview
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12018 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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12 / 1987 |
2,771 Words |
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Dan Yakir
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BARI, Italy--Mikhail Baryshnikov, considered by many the world's greatest dancer, is in this Adriatic city to make a feature film called Dancers, which incorporates the ballet Giselle into a parallel contemporary plot.
At thirty-nine, and following several knee injuries, Baryshnikov decided to record his favorite ballet on film in what may be his last dance performance in front of the camera.
"There's just not much time left for me to dance," explains Baryshnikov, relaxing on the set between takes. "It happens that this was one of my first serious roles at the Kirov Ballet. I danced it through my entire career with different ballerinas. Somehow, this character grew up with me. I danced it for the first time in 1970, and seventeen years for a dancer probably equals fifty years in the life of a normal human being. It's like a dog's counting system; dancers and dogs are in the same category."
Baryshnikov initially conceived of the project as a dance documentary, but director Herbert Ross and his wife, executive coproducer Nora Kaye (who died six months after the completion of the shoot), convinced the dancer to make a full-fledged feature film instead. Ross, who used to be a choreographer before embarking on a Hollywood career (The Goodbye Girl, Funny Lady, The Secret of My Success) and Kaye, a legendary prima ballerina, had already worked with Baryshnikov on his 1977 film debut, The Turning Point, which garnered him an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor.
In Dancers, a contemporary story about a dance troupe mirrors the relationships and dilemmas in the ballet Giselle, sequences of which appear in the film. In the ballet, Baryshnikov plays Duke Albrecht of Silesia, seducer of the innocent villager Giselle. Offstage, as Tony, the director of the company, he rediscovers love and experiences an emotional awakening thanks to Lisa (Julie Kent), a naïve young dancer. He also has an affair with a fiery, ambitious dancer named Francesca, played by Alessandra Ferri, the Italian prima ballerina who also plays Giselle in the ballet. And he has to deal with Nadine (Leslie Browne), a cynical dancer who is disillusioned with men. Browne also plays Myrtha, Queen of the Wilis, in the ballet; she leads the ghosts of abandoned women, specters who take revenge on men.
"It's a lovely, full-length nineteenth-century ballet,' Baryshnikov says, "very compact dramatically. It has an extraordinary emotional and visual range. It's a story about human lives that is relevant to audiences today, just as it was in the nineteenth century. It's made of accidents and misunderstandings… It's like calling the wrong number or not receiving the telegram or meeting the wrong person at the wrong time--these can turn a human life upside down.
"When I first did it, my interpretation was very emotional. At the age of twenty, I looked sixteen, and played it almost as a kind of high-school involvement with the girl…It was total involvement, very raw. The younger [I played it] the more human it was--it was spontaneous, because I was a kid myself. To project passion was the easiest thing for me to do at that age. It was the time of my first emotional involvements with women.
Today it's different. "Now, Albrecht looks at Giselle from the
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