The British Film Institute will celebrate Mikhail Baryshnikov's 60th birthday with an evening devoted to archive recordings of some of his most celebrated performances. Baryshnikov turns 60 on Sunday the 27th of January 2008 and two nights later the BFI will present Making Dreams Come True at its London Southbank HQ near Waterloo.

Although an ethnic Russian, Mikhail Baryshnikov was born in Riga, the capital city of Latvia: he studied at the Vaganova School in Leningrad from the age of 16 under the legendary Alexander Pushkin and joined the Kirov in 1967, rapidly rising through the ranks to become a leading artist.

In 1974, whilst touring Canada with a mixed group of Soviet dancers, he followed two other famous Kirov dancers, Rudolf Nureyev and Natalia Makarova, by walking away from his life in the Soviet Union (Baryshnikov has always disliked the term defection). Having made this momentous decision to leave behind his family and even his beloved pet dog, Baryshnikov threw himself into his artistry, quickly becoming an inspirational muse for many modern choreographers. Back in Leningrad his apartment was left empty on the pretext that he would return and his name was excised from all official records. Even choreography created for him at the Kirov was reassigned to the dancers who followed. It was not until glasnost in the early 1990s that his name was rehabilitated in the annals of Russian ballet.

Baryshnikov's life in the West flowed quickly through many chapters. In the period immediately following his flight from the KGB his virtuosity was in constant demand for repeated guest appearances in the classical repertoire of the nineteenth century; but this led quickly to a thirst for learning the modern twentieth century classics from western choreographers and he performed works by Ashton, Petit and Balanchine in his first year in the West.

The first of the two BFI programmes (beginning at 6.30 pm) concentrates on this initial period in the West and his early partnerships with some of the greatest ballerinas of that era, notably Margot Fonteyn, Zizi Jeanmaire and Makarova herself, dancing in excerpts from work by Petipa including Baryshnikovs renowned virtuoso interpretation of the grand pas de deux from Don Quixote - Fokine, Ashton and Roland Petit, who had sought unsuccessfully to work with Baryshnikov whilst at the Kirov. The dancer scored a notable success as the young man in Petits Le Jeune Homme et La Mort, followed by Carmen, and La Pique Dame..

It was Baryshnikov's curiosity for new work, especially that which would provide him with strong dramatic opportunities, that was to become his defining trait. Although he reported that he felt like a cow on ice whilst performing it, Baryshnikov made a great success, with Judith Jamison, in Alvin Ailey's Pas de Duke and, in 1976, came the beginning of a long-term collaboration with Twyla Tharp. Their partnership was not always successful in individual projects, particularly for a conservative American public that wanted to see Baryshnikov dance only in Petipa ballets, but it thrived for many years and their collaboration has stood the test of time.

In New York, Baryshnikov crossed over Lincoln Square twice, leaving the American Ballet Theatre to join Balanchine at New York City Ballet in 1978, only to come back again a year later (with Balanchine's blessing) when he was offered the chance to direct the ABT. Although not ideally suited to some aspects of the artistic director's role, Baryshnikov survived for almost a decade. It was enough to convince him that he wanted to continue running a company but only on his own terms and not as a prison that tied him or his dancers down and so was born the White Oak Project, which was largely to sustain the last fertile period of Baryshnikov the dancer-director.

In this final decade of the twentieth century he alternated work with White Oak with ongoing freelance projects, such as touring with the Japanese Kabuki star, Tamasaburo Bando. He continued to devour dance works by the modern American masters, including Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor and Trisha Brown. Other ballet dancers have made a similar transition but, with Baryshnikov, it was much more than just performance and he threw himself into learning the detailed techniques that underpinned their movement.

The second programme at the BFI on 29th January (which begins at 8.45 pm) emphasises the contemporary direction that Baryshnikov took with this later work, through his collaborations with Tharp, Mark Morris (particularly in the White Oak project) and Choo-San Goh. This programme will incorporate extracts from The South Bank Show on the collaboration between Morris and Baryshnikov.

Baryshnikov was one of the most remarkable ballet dancers of the late twentieth century and one of very few who managed a successful transition to contemporary dance to sustain a long career (which is far from over). This retrospective gives equal weight to these clear strands in his work, both in classical ballet and in his ongoing development of modern choreography, and it's a very appropriate way to celebrate this significant milestone.


Graham Watts