Baryshnikov’s latest leap

MIAMI —  It’s been, Mikhail Baryshnikov says with a laugh, “the longest and most painful day of my life.”

The world’s most celebrated actor-dancer flew in from London with a bad cold -- high fever, hot flashes. He had only an hour between rehearsing and performing a grueling program of contemporary solos. And now, after midnight, he’s sitting in the ballroom of the Intercontinental Hotel, charming the multitudes at an expensive fundraising soiree.

This is exactly the kind of event that Baryshnikov, who will do the first of five L.A. shows tonight, tried to avoid during his decade as artistic director of American Ballet Theatre. But in the wee hours in Florida, he’s warmly greeting donors steered over to him by Miami impresario Judy Drucker, bowing boyishly at compliments and treating everyone with the same deference he bestows on such friends and colleagues as former New York City Ballet virtuoso Edward Villella, now artistic director of Miami City Ballet. Moreover, though he’s been nixing all newspaper photography during this tour, on- and offstage alike, he also blithely poses for snapshots. What gives?

The next morning, he explains. Sitting in his hotel suite sipping Evian and wearing a black turtleneck over khakis, he tells a visitor that at Ballet Theatre, he considered himself merely one of generations of past and future artistic directors -- “a hired gun,” in his words -- and that fundraising wasn’t in his contract. Now, however, just about everything he does professionally -- including disbanding his White Oak Dance Project after more than a dozen years and taking a non-dancing role in the TV series “Sex and the City” -- is intended to support his visionary Baryshnikov Arts Center, located in the top half of the new six-story W. 37th Arts complex in New York.

Scheduled to open this fall, the complex houses three off-Broadway-style theaters (one of which Baryshnikov plans to acquire by 2006) and, above them, studio, conference and office spaces that he already owns and intends to use to make New York City more art-friendly for young people.

“When I arrived in this country 30 years ago,” he says, “the life on the street, in the dance studios, around the theaters was much more inclusive and less commercial. But now, with a few exceptions, there’s just no connection between talented young people and those who should be their mentors. There’s no place for the graduates of all the art colleges to meet, no exchange of ideas between peers of different arts -- nothing like the interdisciplinary vision that produced such extraordinary work in the 1960s.”

Administered by Baryshnikov and a starry panel of artistic advisors, his center will try to remedy all this disconnection, “to do something for New York City,” he says. “That’s why raising money is worthwhile for me, even if it can be [an] unpleasant and sometimes traumatic experience. I want to raise $20 [million] to $30 million in the next five years or so. But we’re in good shape now: We’ve raised enough money for all the bricks, steel and glass, which is already a great step.”

“Sex and the City” gave Baryshnikov funds that he needed to make payments on the center, but he labels his TV role as a temperamental visual artist “the hardest buck I ever earned. Very long hours, very fast, very demanding, and for me a weird, weird experience.

“For years, I’ve been my own boss, and the only authority over me has been one authority: a choreographer’s authority. But here there were seven directors, 10 writers, a million opinions. And I learned in a short time to control my nerves and frustrations. In this sense, I am very grateful. I learned a lot.”

He kisses off any suggestion that his character on the series was based on him, saying only that “if you are not a professional actor, they try to match the story of this character, whatever it is, to your life experience -- or what’s been printed about you, whether it’s true or not -- so it will be a little bit easier to play.” And he jokes that the series raised his children’s status at school: “Finally, I have achieved something. I’ve made it.”

Baryshnikov didn’t get the girl in “Sex and the City,” and he laughs again when it’s pointed out that on screen, he never gets the girl, not in the movies “The Turning Point” and “Dancers” or in any acting project where there’s been a girl for him to get. Somehow, he’s always been portrayed as too driven, or compulsively promiscuous, for happy endings.

“I am saving this for my private life,” he comments, blue eyes twinkling. “Whatever people think of me as a drifter or an unhappy person, I’m not. I have four children and a grandchild and I am very happy. It’s a bit of a cliche that artists shouldn’t have families because they are so self-centered. But it works perfectly well for my wife, my children, my grandchild and me. We’ve learned to complement each other’s lives and take pleasure in the relationships.

“My children will join me on the tour during their spring break, and they know that I am absent much of the time because Dad has to work. When I arrive home, I realize that Mom is always the person that they tell their problems, and I feel that guilt. But I am waiting for the moment when our lives will be more entangled emotionally -- and it’s beginning to happen. I’m getting closer to my children because I am spending more time at home now.”

Postponed from last fall because of Baryshnikov’s knee injury and subsequent surgery, the current tour program -- which plays UCLA’s Freud Playhouse through Sunday -- has a valedictory air about it. Eliot Feld’s comic “Mr. XYZ,” in particular, begins with the dancer hobbling arthritically with a cane (Baryshnikov at age 56?) and ends with a bye-bye wave set to “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone.” In between come brief mime references to some of Baryshnikov’s greatest ballet roles: “Apollo” and “Prodigal Son” (both incorporating that cane) and his unforgettable strewing-the-lilies exit in “Giselle.”

However, he doesn’t think of this as a farewell tour, he says, though he acknowledges having no immediate plans for dancing after it ends. In a few weeks, he will start rehearsals for “Forbidden Christmas,” a physical theater project by the Georgian director and playwright Rezo Gabriadze that will open at Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theatre in May and play UCLA in December. He’s also involved with co-presenting an adaptation of “War and Peace” by the Russian director Pyotr Fomenko and with bringing to America London’s Royal Court Theatre production of the late British playwright Sara Kane’s last work, “Psychosis 4.48.” The man who started his career in the West as the new Nijinsky looks on his way to becoming the new Diaghilev.

“I cannot say that I am stopping dancing,” he declares. “I don’t want to say this is the end. But I think about it every day. And it may be that one morning, I will make the decision like I always do: I wake up and say, ‘That’s it. Today I stop smoking.’ Or, ‘This relationship is over.’ This might happen in a few weeks, that my relationship with dance would be over to a certain degree. It depends.”

Baryshnikov was a ballet superstar for 15 years but has spent nearly the last 15 in modern dance -- mostly with his White Oak chamber group -- and now believes that “very few people remember me in classical work. For them, I am just a dancer, or maybe that guy in ‘Sex and the City.’ That’s who I am, and that’s fine.

“In the past 30 years, I did some good stuff, some silly stuff, some admirable stuff and some embarrassing stuff. People always question what I do, why I am doing ‘Sex and the City.’ Some people cheer and some of my friends are quietly horrified. It is human life. You make certain decisions, and some of them are good, instinctively good, and some of them are wrong. I work with people I admire, and that’s the way it goes.

“Right now, I don’t know what will happen after this year, but the new priority will definitely be the arts center.”

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Mikhail Baryshnikov

What: “Solos With Piano Music or Not ... An Evening of Music and Dance With Mikhail Baryshnikov”

Where: Freud Playhouse,

UCLA campus, Westwood

When: Today and Thursday to Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m.

Price: $75 to $100

Contact: (310) 825-2102