BARYSHNIKOV: GOTTA DANCE

He is short, with rounded muscles and the pale face of a man made up permanently as Petrouchka. Yet when he launches his perfectly arched body into the arc of one of his improbably sustained leaps--high, light, the leg beats blurring precision--he transcends the limits of physique and, it sometimes seems, those of gravity itself. If one goes by the gasps in the theater or the ecstasies of the critics, such moments turn Mikhail Baryshnikov, if not into a minor god, then into a major sorcerer.

The paradox of the man turns out to be as fascinating to dance fans as the miracle of the artist in flight. Offstage he broods aloud about the "moral preparation" and asceticism that he insists are as important to the dancer as physical training --while avidly sipping a Scotch and soda and smoking cigarettes. He thinks of himself as a loner, "a wolf lost from the pack," but he is perhaps another kind of wolf as well. He has conducted affairs with several women--among them, dancers he has worked with--since arriving in the West last summer. He ended one of them with what friends regard as chilly abruptness.

The man who has said, "I am drawn to sad ballets, sad feelings," can be the life of the party when the spirit moves him. He is an accomplished mimic with enough cheek to throw his imitations directly in the face of his target. He is also a man who usually does not have to be begged to sit down at the piano and play for a convivial group. Once, at a bash for the American Ballet Theater in Texas, he and several other male dancers skinny-dipped in the pool. When he saw a woman soloist at the other end, he led a group of playful men in taking off her bathing suit.

Paradoxical? "Misha" is more than that. He is an enigma compounded of moody shyness, bold theatricality, post-adolescent intellectual pretense and a sweetness that makes him melt at the sight of an appealing house pet. But that is how it should be for the newest, brightest star in an art that is itself a series of paradoxes. What other discipline demands of its practitioners that they train like athletes and sweat like stevedores in order to achieve romantic effects of the most ethereal nature? What other art places such emphasis on tradition, yet depends on such unreliable resources--the kinesthetic memories of its artists, the visual recollections of its devotees --to preserve that tradition? What other art has stressed so emphatically the feminine graces, while making most of its durable legends out of men?

There have been a handful of such dancers in this century. In his brief time (1908-17), Vaslav Nijinsky's wild genius established itself as the mythic standard against which all premiers danseurs will apparently always be judged. In the '50s and early '60s, Erik Bruhn, 46, now resident producer of the National Ballet of Canada, dominated ballet with sheer elegance. His style was pure and restrained, his partnering impeccable. If anything his reputation has increased since his retirement. He has an enormous following and will dance again this summer at A.B.T. When Rudolf Nureyev burst upon the West in 1961, he brought back some of the Nijinsky excitement. Nureyev has always had Tartar energy and impact; now 37, he has become a dancer of protean range.

As audiences at A.B.T.'s spring season in Washington, D.C. can see this week, Baryshnikov at 27 ranks with these dancers. It is less than a year since he broke away from a Soviet touring company in Toronto, but the public has already made him a superstar and calls him by his nickname. To discourage long lines last winter, a ticket outlet in Manhattan put up a sign saying "Misha tickets all sold out."

Baryshnikov (pronounced Ba-rish-ni-koff) is a one-man theatrical event that nearly defies summary. He is an unbelievable technician with invisible technique. Most dancers, even the great ones, make obvious preliminaries to leaps. He simply floats into confounding feats of acrobatics and then comes to still, collected repose. He forces the eye into a double take: did that man actually do that just now? Dance Critic Walter Terry says that "Baryshnikov is probably the most dazzling virtuoso we have seen. He is more spectacular in sheer technique than any other male dancer. What he actually does, no one can really define. His steps are in no ballet dictionary. And he seems to be able to stop in mid-air and sit in space." Patricia Wilde, who teaches in the A.B.T. school, has seen him "put a whole lot of steps together and do them in the air in perfect classical form. Most dancers do this on the ground, but not in the air."

Baryshnikov is a fine actor as well. He takes open, youthful joy in being onstage, while respecting what he calls "the sensitive weave" of the work's overall design. His Albrecht in Giselle, for example, is a coltish kid in love with the idea of love, touchingly unable to comprehend that, as a nobleman, he just cannot have this terrific peasant girl. He excels at shrewd, straightforward comedy. In Frederick Ashton's Les Patineurs, the dancers appear to be on ice skates. Misha seems about to fall over backward at times--a mime performance that Marcel Marceau might envy. Perhaps his greatest tour de force so far is Roland Petit's Le Jeune Homme et la Mart. The ballet is a cartoon of existential angst, but, leaping over bed, chair and table, Baryshnikov turns it into a young man's rage at mortality.

In all his roles, Baryshnikov fairly radiates daring. It has been suggested that he must believe in Laurence Olivier's dictum that nothing is really interesting onstage unless the performer is risking sudden death. It is a notion that amuses him: "It is not so important that the actor or dancer feel he is risking death as it is that the audience should feel he is." Much more important to Baryshnikov is the insistence that "the essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure." In that sentence, one feels, he comes closer to the heart of his appeal than any observer can. Audiences love a man taking not just enormous joy in his work, but still greater satisfaction in the knowledge that he may very well be the best of the best.

Baryshnikov's life echoes Gene Kelly's refrain, "Gotta Dance." It does not require much stimulation to get Misha's blood stirring. If anything, he has an excess of high-voltage energy. It has been there as long as he can remember. Both he and his mother, a dress fitter in Riga, Latvia, recognized it when he was a child, and they spent a great deal of time trying to channel it. "I was interested in everything," he says, "football, fencing, gymnastics. I even sang in the children's choir. I was also very bad at the piano." All that, in his view, "was better than sitting home and studying" -- the problem being more the sitting than the studying. About the only thing he could sit still for was the stage. "Any performance excited me," he recalls. This interest prompted him to apply at the ballet school in Riga, principally "because I had to try something."

The school was attached to a conservatory, and the musical atmosphere was different from anything that Misha had ever known. "By the end of the year, it was difficult to tear me away. All my other activities became secondary, then disappeared. I would leave for school in the morning and not return until night."

At twelve, he was old to begin serious dance studies, perhaps, but talent overcame that handicap. By the time he was 16, he was invited to join a dance troupe touring and performing for teenagers. They went to Leningrad, where he found the atmosphere of the old czarist capital intoxicating. As a dancer, he could not help visiting the Kirov school. There he happened to attend a class taught by the late Alexander Ivanovich Pushkin, a great master who coached Nureyev and Valery Panov. Not hoping for much, Baryshnikov approached Pushkin (no kin to the famed Russian poet) and said, "I would very much like to be your pupil." Pushkin felt his legs and body and asked him to jump up and down. Says Baryshnikov, "I was like a young goat knocking over tables and chairs." Pushkin quickly conducted him downstairs, where the school's doctors "felt me the way they would a race horse." Apparently they approved of his conformation, and since Pushkin was about to start teaching a group of dancers of Baryshnikov's age, he was virtually in.

Misha did have to spend the summer awaiting final word. He tried to pass the time fishing, a sport he still loves, but inwardly he agonized. "It would have been shattering if I had not been accepted. Already I was living the life of the Kirov. Seeing Leningrad and the school was like an electrifying shock. I could not imagine living apart from it." Not knowing how to work out alone, he did his best to "prepare myself morally" for the work that he hoped he would soon be doing. He is a trifle vague as to what this means, but ventures: "There comes a moment in a young artist's life when he knows he has to bring something to the stage from within himself. He has to put in something in order to be able to take something out. Many performers are physically well trained but not morally disciplined and content onstage. They fall apart."

Not Baryshnikov. The school is very demanding, the students working from 9 in the morning to 10 at night. Misha studied fencing, makeup, French, Russian and Western literature as well as classical dancing. The Kirov is famous for its instruction in acting, particularly mime. Still, it is not solely or even largely this grounding that makes Baryshnikov grateful for his school years. What made them unique was Pushkin's presence.

"I was his last pupil. I will never find the kind of pedagogue I had in Pushkin," he says. "He was such a pure and simple character that it is hard to talk about him in simple words. He was like somebody who stepped out of an icon. Pushkin had an ability to infect you with such a love for dance that you almost became obsessed with it. It is almost like a disease." Like all great teachers, he had an inspired ability to simplify. Says Baryshnikov: "He taught the most logical series of steps and movements that I have ever seen."

Baryshnikov entered the company at the end of his third year of study--and not as a humble member of the corps. He started as a soloist, and in his first week danced the peasant pas de deux in Giselle. Visiting dancers and critics from abroad noticed him at once, and word began spreading in the West that the Kirov had a new discovery. By 1970, when he was 22, Baryshnikov was enjoying his first Western triumph in London. A little later he was suffering the first signs of official disapproval back home. His preference for clothes--and chicks--from the West had been duly noted, and he believed that his mail was being censored. He might have tolerated such minor harassments, but artistic confinement was another matter. Like Nureyev and one of his current partners, Natalia Makarova, he began to need the challenge of new choreographic ideas. That was the main reason for self-exile from Russia. "We had to come to America," he says, "because the standards of dancing are the highest and the choreography beyond anywhere else."

He is at pains to point out that his was not a political defection: "If only the Kirov had permitted me to perform with other companies in the West. If only they had asked foreign choreographers to compose works for us in which the Western contemporary approach to ballet is being explored." The actual escape in Toronto was typically daring. Baryshnikov could have walked out of his hotel room. Instead, he waited until after his last performance, then dashed through a crowd of well-wishers. He was nearly run over but made it safely to a waiting car a couple of blocks away.

He is now a man hungry to taste all the artistic pleasures he was denied at home, and some friends feel that he has grabbed for too much, too fast. But the selection of A.B.T. as his first home in the West, a choice made easier by Makarova's powerful desire to have him as a partner, is basically sound. The company, probably the best in the U.S., had repertory roles like Albrecht that Baryshnikov already knew, and could offer him new parts when he was ready. He has insisted on teaming not only with Makarova but also with Gelsey Kirkland, 22, who is both a precocious star and a defector of sorts, from George Balanchine's New York City Ballet. Baryshnikov was surprised to find that a great many more performances are demanded of a star here than in Russia. There he might dance five times in a month; here it is more like five performances a week. He is thriving on the work, "asking for more and more performances because I have begun to enjoy the taste of it. That is about the greatest transformation that has taken place for me. It does not matter who dances at the Kirov; all tickets are sold. Here an artist dances primarily if he sells tickets." It is a correlation that cannot but please almost any artist--especially when he receives an estimated $2,000 per outing.

This clout helps Baryshnikov realize his other thwarted aim from Kirov days--to dance roles drawn from outside the classical repertory. Les Patineurs is one of these, as is Le Jeune Homme et la Mort, which he flew to Paris to learn from Choreographer Petit. In the summer he will add Shadowplay, which Antony Tudor is reworking especially for him. Such innovators as Twyla Tharp and Alvin Ailey are also working on new ballets for him. John Neumeier, director of the Hamburg Opera Ballet, will stage Hamlet for him--probably next winter.

In short, Misha has been placing great burdens on himself. Considering the obvious problems of adjusting to a new country, a new style of life, he probably should not have undertaken his month-long tour of Australia with Makarova last January. He badly sprained a tendon in his ankle while dancing the Don Quixote pas de deux in Sydney. He was able to finish the performance, but fainted after two curtain calls. The accident put him in bed and on crutches for weeks and still causes pain.

Even Baryshnikov admits that he is running on "nervous energy. I am entering my new life, but I am not there yet. Until schedules and organization come, it's all nervous energy." Remi Saunder, a Russian emigre who devotes herself to helping Russian artists resettle in the West, believes that some of this nearly manic activity is inevitable right now. Major performing artists in Russia are treated very well materially but have little training in the use of initiative. Says she: "There you are given food, but not the choice of food." As a man who came West for a choice of choreography, Baryshnikov will need some experience before he learns what is worth doing and what to pass by. Meanwhile, predictably, he tries just about everything.

As he attempts to reassemble his life, he has at least found comforting surrogate parents in the U.S. They are Mrs. Saunder and Howard Oilman, board chairman of the Oilman Paper Co. A major patron of music and dance, Oilman has lent Baryshnikov a New York penthouse rent-free. Saunder and Oilman have introduced him to musicians like Cellist Mstislav Rostropovitch and Conductor Leonard Bernstein. Baryshnikov has plunged eagerly into an investigation of American culture. He spends his spare time at plays, operas and especially movies. He is a considerable student of television, whether afternoon cartoons or old movies on the late show (he has worked up imitations of Humphrey Bogart's "Hello, sweetheart" and any number of commercial pitchmen). In a more Russian vein, he has begun reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose books fill him with "pain and awe," according to Mrs. Saunder.

At work he is well liked personally, but there are some problems at A.B.T. American dancers cannot help resenting the publicity that Russians seem to get effortlessly. They feel that newcomers are taking roles that they, the company's veterans, have been working toward for years. "Americans have nothing to sell but their dancing," says Cynthia Gregory, 28. "I just feel helpless. No matter how well we dance, we never get that kind of recognition." Ted Kivitt, 32, who has shared a dressing room with Baryshnikov at Manhattan's primitive City Center, says: "The timing has been bad for me. It was my time for getting recognition. It is like taking ten giant steps backward." Adds Deborah Dobson, 24: "We are all starting to get a little inhibited. When you are out there onstage and you are not a star, you feel almost like apologizing."

Baryshnikov has tried to make friends in the company by passing on as much as he can of his peerless training to beginning performers, by teaching his steps to young stars like Fernando Bujones, 20, or simply by breaking rehearsal tension with a rendition of show tunes on the grand piano.

Still, the uniqueness of his talent is bound to set him apart. After he has created a full life for himself here, his sudden shifts in mood may be less noticeable. His abrupt withdrawals from company and into himself may disappear.

He is loosening up. The stereo rig blares, though Misha may interrupt it to recite the Russian poetry -- Pasternak, Mandelstam, Pushkin -- he loves. Records of Florence Foster Jenkins' haywire coloratura are another new enthusiasm. He enjoyed a recent trip to Paris because "there, people have more time than in New York." He is absorbing the American pace, however. When Gelsey Kirkland stalled at a recent photo session, he nudged her with "Let's go, Gelsey, let's go."

It is hard to imagine him slowing down, easing off. "To relax is difficult for me. I know it is important to have a sensible schedule and not to exaggerate, but I am like a horse used to pulling a great load. I can't begin to think what would happen if I stopped dancing. I have to squelch those thoughts, drive them down. The stage is a form of opium for me -- a psychological feeling I must have, I cannot be without."

The feeling is not a thing he begs for, this romantic yet remarkably lucid dancer. He takes the stage because it is his by right of conquest over the audience. He gives back the excitement he finds in that conquest. It is enough. It is everything.

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