Mikhail Baryshnikov and Joseph Brodsky, in a Song of Exiled Russians
Mikhail Baryshnikov’s new one-man show is somewhere between a play and a poetry recital.
GEORDIE WOOD FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
By MARINA HARSS
MARCH 2, 2016
It may seem odd that the poet Joseph Brodsky, a man who had little time for ballet — “the art of better days,” he called it in a 1975 poem — should have counted among his closest friends the Russian dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov. (The poem, in fact, was dedicated to him.) Brodsky was eight years older than Mr. Baryshnikov, and in his friend’s dancing he saw something more than ballet, something, as he told the Russian musicologist Solomon Volkov, closer to metaphysics.
Mr. Baryshnikov remembers first reading Brodsky’s poetry at 16, just arrived in Leningrad from Riga, Latvia, to study ballet. “The magnetism was there,” Mr. Baryshnikov said recently in a room at the Baryshnikov Arts Center lined with prints of St. Petersburg; his poetry “respected man’s brain and heart and dignity.” This was a year after Brodsky’s trial, in 1964, for “social parasitism,” a Kafkaesque exercise. The trial transcript had circulated secretly, and Brodsky’s sang-froid on the stand turned him into a symbol of resistance and artistic freedom. (He was imprisoned, and spent a year and a half in internal exile.)
The two were introduced at a party in New York, soon after Brodsky’s forced departure from the Soviet Union (in 1972) and Baryshnikov’s 1974 defection; they immediately became close. During their 22-year friendship — Brodsky died at 55 in 1996 — they spoke often, opened a restaurant, drank and took walks along the Hudson.
Last year, Mr. Baryshnikov, who has made increasingly frequent forays into theater, teamed with the Latvian director Alvis Hermanis, director of New Riga Theater, for “Brodsky/Baryshnikov,” a one-man show, which opened in Riga in October and comes to the Baryshnikov Arts Center, starting Wednesday, March 9.
It’s not really a play, or a poetry recital, but something in between. Mr. Hermanis has layered together poems from throughout Brodsky’s career. On Skype from Milan, he explained his concept: “I said to Misha, you have to imagine you are not alone onstage. There are two people, and there’s something going on between them, some secret.”
Joseph Brodsky, left, and Mr. Baryshnikov in New York in 1985.
LEONID LUBIANITSKY
Mr. Baryshnikov recently talked about Brodsky and the show. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation.
Alvis Hermanis has said that the evening is almost like a séance with Brodsky.
It’s a little bit that. I almost never directly connect to the audience. It is like someone reciting poetry for his own enjoyment, like people sing in the shower. I’m trying to remember his voice, his mannerisms. Sometimes I imitate him. And suddenly the tape starts with Joseph’s own voice. His presence is what those poems are about.
As if he were speaking from beyond the grave. He was terrified of death.
Yes, he was terrified of dying like I am terrified of dying. I think about this every day. He died very young, and he started at an early age to speak of these matters. He knew his heart was weak. But he smoked, and he ate what he liked; he was a very sensuous man. He couldn’t work without a cigarette.
At several points, you perform dreamlike dances accompanied by the recorded sound of your voice, or Brodsky’s voice.
I don’t really dance in the show, but I move quite a bit. Hermanis and I decided there shouldn’t be any choreography per se but reaction, emotion, like a body language or electricity running through the body. There are references to Butoh and to flamenco. In a poem about flowers, I suggested using an element of onnagata [female impersonation] from Kabuki. Because, what can be closer to a beautiful flower than that?
“I really don’t dance in the show, but I move quite a bit,” Mr. Baryshnikov said.
GEORDIE WOOD FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
The movement happens in a glass structure upstage, elegant but abandoned.
Alvis had a concept that all the magic happens inside of that place. Inside, you start to move not in a pedestrian way. And yet it’s not quite a choreography.
It has been said that, in part because of his sophisticated use of meter and rhyme, Brodsky’s poetry is untranslatable.
Joseph would argue with that. He used to translate himself with Richard Wilbur and others. But he would also argue that the best pleasure is you alone in the evening with the book in your hands. His idea was that only poets should read poems out loud. Mortals should read them quietly to themselves.
What would he have thought of the show?
I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. He was very skeptical in general about the theater. He felt that the theater lacked truth. He wrote two plays himself but was always very clear that these works were intended for the reader, not to be performed in the theater. He always felt that it was a much more profound experience to read a play while lying on one’s couch.
A scene from “Brodsky/Baryshnikov,” at the show’s world premiere in Riga, Latvia, in October 2015.
JANIS DEINATS
You talked to him every day?
Almost every day, even when I was traveling. We talked about mundane things. He liked to walk. From Morton Street where he lived up the Hudson or East River, the Brooklyn Bridge, the East Village. He was fascinated by the light and proximity to the water.
What do you miss the most about him?
Some kind of internal security of friendship. The first years after he went, I felt, even though I have some very close friends, many of whom he introduced me to, very lonely, practically alone, though I had children and my wife and my family. With him, I always felt security if I wanted to talk about something private.
