The world-renowned dancer will perform in a play based on two Anton Chekhov short stories opening Feb. 21 at Hartford Stage and running through March 24.
If you want to watch Mikhail Baryshnikov dance, don’t go see him perform in “Man in a Case” in Hartford.
“It’s not a dance show,” Baryshnikov said during a recent phone interview in Hartford. “Do not come if you want to see me dance a classical pas de deux or even a big modern dance kind of evening. This is theater.”
The world-renowned dancer had just finished rehearsing a play based on two Anton Chekhov short stories.The play is set to open Thursday at Hartford Stage for 33 performances, which run through March 24.
And if you’re holding your breath to see the 65-year-old performer dance on stage, be prepared to wait a while. Right now, Baryshnikov’s focused on the experimental, ensemble theater piece he has worked on for the past 10 weeks with four other actors under the direction of Big Dance Theater co-founders Annie-B Parson and her husband, Paul Lazar.
“If you want to see a dance, you should drive to New York and see (New York) City Ballet or (American) Ballet Theater or other companies,” Baryshnikov said. “This is experimental work. That’s what Annie-B and Paul do. It’s theater, which includes many different facets of dance, theater, visual, scenic, sound forms. That’s what we’ll do. If people want to see me dance, they can wait or they’ll be too late.”
“There are many great dancers in the world, not just me,” Baryshnikov added.
That’s quite a change from when Baryshnikov performed an evening of modern dance in Holyoke at the War Memorial Auditorium in 2004. At the time, he said in an interview with The Republican that he didn’t think of himself as an actor.
"Film, theater and television always kind of scared me," he had said. "I don't ever seriously think of myself as an actor at all and I don't plan any film career or television career."
As for dancing, the 55-year-old performer said at the time that he remained passionately in love with dance. Or as he put it, “I guess it's lust, lust of it."
Three years later, he was in Hartford for another evening of memorable modern dance as part of the Hell's Kitchen Dance Tour in June 2007.
Nowadays, it’s Baryshnikov’s acting career that’s taking center stage. That might seem like a huge departure for the dancer featured on the cover of Time Magazine on May 19, 1975 with the headline “Baryshnikov, Ballet’s New Idol.” But the former Kirov Ballet soloist who famously defected in 1974 to dance with American Ballet Theater and then the New York City Ballet has always done things his way.
As anyone who has ever seen him dance will tell you, it wasn’t just his jaw-dropping leaps or pirouettes that made him special. Like a great silent movie actor, Baryshnikov has the ability to express so much emotion with just a slight sideways glance or even a subtle flick of the wrist.
Baryshnikov earned an Academy-award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his role as a ballet dancer in the 1977 movie "The Turning Point." He also acted in several other movies (“White Nights” and “Company Business”) before taking on perhaps his best-known recent acting role: as Carrie Bradshaw’s boyfriend in the final season of HBO’s “Sex and the City” in 2004.
Since then, he’s acted in more experimental works on stage. In 2007, he appeared in four, one-act Samuel Beckett plays in New York City. (In one play, Baryshnikov lies motionless on a bed for 17 minutes while a voice reels off the thoughts haunting his character.) Then in 2011 and 2012, Baryshnikov acted in “In Paris,” a play based on a short story by Nobel Prize-winning Russian writer Ivan Bunin. When the play was performed in New York in 2012, The New Yorker’s Alec Wilkinson hailed Baryshnikov’s portrayal of a former Russian general who falls in love in Paris in the 1930s. “I had the feeling that I had seen something magnificent that had happened only there and nowhere else,” Wilkinson wrote.
Maybe that explains why Baryshnikov sounded a bit annoyed when asked why he decided to collaborate with Lazar and Parsons on “Man in a Case” in Hartford since he’s more well known for his dancing.
“Because I do quite a bit of the theater in recent years, that’s why,” Baryshnikov said. “In Annie B’s work, it’s always 90 percent theater, but it’s all movement and dance and singing you know. If you know their work, you wouldn’t ask a question like that, but that’s the way it is.”
“It’s called Big Dance Theater but it’s mostly theater,” he added. “I’ve been doing quite a bit of theater the last few years.”
Baryshnikov approached Lazar and Parsons about doing a play based a short story by Chekhov soon after Hartford Stage’s artistic director, Darko Tresnjak, commissioned Baryshnikov to do a work for the theater.
“Hartford Stage, the new artistic director, asked me if I wanted to develop a project in the close future,” Baryshnikov said. “We talked and I suggested we look through the short stories of Chekhov and particularly this one. At that time, we didn’t have any director in mind and I suggested Annie B and Paul and he happily agreed. And that’s how this project came about.”
Parsons, in the same interview with Baryshnikov and Lazar, agreed, saying, “We wanted to work with Chekhov. We have worked with Chekhov in a lot of different ways but we have never done a full Chekhov piece. So this is something when Misha mentioned that as a possibility, we definitely jumped right on it.”
“Man in a Case” at Hartford Stage is based on the 1898 Chekhov story of the same name and a second Chekhov story, “About Love.”
Baryshnikov said he was especially drawn to the story “Man in a Case” and the central character he plays, Byelikov, a rigid, judgmental classical Greek teacher nicknamed “the spider” who falls in love with a young Russian woman named Varinka.
“I grew up with this character in Russia,” Baryshnikov said, referring to Byelikov. “A lot of Russian literature, particularly Chekhov stories and plays or short stories and this particular short story, were always a must read in my tender age. So I grew up with this character and it attracts me, that kind of mysterious quality. We know very little about him besides he’s teaching classical Greek, Greek language and he’s kind of eccentric and conservative, but then something happens to him very unexpected. It’s a challenge for all of us, particularly for my directors, how they want to tell this story because there’s a story to tell although it’s a small story but a very deep one in my view. And that’s why we are very much interested in this character in the story.”
“I thought this character and this story resonates . . . with the present,” Baryshnikov added. “What’s really happening in politics and human rights and women’s issues, you know, and it’s very challenging for all of us to present this in a way that really much resonates with the present day.”
Lazar was drawn to “Man in a Case” for different reasons.
“’Man in a Case’ struck me as a story that was very stageable,” Lazar said. “As you know, Chekhov has written five, six plays. But there’s only certain of his 400 plus stories that lend themselves to being staged. And I felt and Annie did and we ultimately agreed that ‘Man in a Case’ is one of those rare stories that lends itself to being staged.”
Then Parsons suggested combining “Man in a Case” with “About Love” into one piece.
“I brought ‘About Love’ up because it was a story that I really, really loved,” Parsons said. “I wasn’t sure that it was stageable. We had been working on ‘Man in a Case’ for a while. I had it sort of in my back pocket as a possibility and once we started working on the Chekhov with this group as a group, we sort of proved to ourselves in some sense that we could do it and it came very naturally and easily once we started working on it because we kind of warmed up with ‘Man in a Case.’ It’s a very deep story and I think it’s an extremely personal story for him and it feels in some sense like an opposite, but then not at all in another sense. It seems like they have very similar themes.”
Baryshnikov, Lazar and Parsons had never worked together before “Man in a Case.” But Baryshnikov said he was familiar with the couple’s experimental theater pieces, which range from works based on the writings of Mark Twain and Gustave Flaubert to choreography by Parsons for “Here Lies Love,” a ‘disco musical’ based on David Byrne’s experimental 2010 album about Imelda Marcos that premieres April 2 at the Public Theater in New York.
“This is the first time, but I knew of course Annie B and Paul’s work with Big Dance and Paul’s of course some work he did apart from Big Dance Theater like with the Wooster Group and other companies,” Baryshnikov said.
Parsons and Lazar also knew Baryshnikov since they created parts of four of their works at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, which he founded in 2005.
“Annie and I have had the good fortune of working at the Baryshnikov Arts Center,” Lazar said. “As I’m sure you’re aware, it’s this sort of maverick cultural institution in New York, the Baryshnikov Arts Center, which provides opportunities for rehearsal and performance and for so many cutting-edge theater and dance companies. So we were there in the building in rehearsal working with various companies, so we’ve been in each other’s mitts because of BAC.”
So how is their first collaboration going so far?
“We’ll see when the pedal hits the metal,” Lazar said, laughing. “The audience, I hope they don’t have tomatoes and stuff. We’ll find out soon enough.”
Baryshnikov added he believes the play will connect with audiences for another reason: the subject matter of the two Chekhov stories in “Man in a Case.”
“It’s all about love, that’s the main point,” Baryshnikov said. “And I think in many ways, it’s a kind of romantic show in many respects.”
That shouldn’t be too much of a stretch, since audiences have been in love with the dancer/actor nicknamed Misha for more than four decades.