Among the hundreds of video recordings that Mikhail Baryshnikov has collected over the decades are a handful that show him rehearsing with the titans of dance George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. But perhaps the most treasured is a cloudy black-and-white clip of the 16-year-old Baryshnikov at a lesson with his revered teacher Alexander Pushkin at the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet in St. Petersburg. “This man just made me as a dancer,” Mr. Baryshnikov explains in another video, an interview from 1974, when he defected to Canada from the Soviet Union. Pushkin, he tells the translator in Russian, was a magician and a father figure.
These videotapes are part of a cache of personal recordings, photographs, documents, letters and scrapbooks that Mr. Baryshnikov, 63, has donated to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, including nearly 650 videotapes of Mr. Baryshnikov’s glorious dancing.
Mr. Baryshnikov’s hunger for artistic freedom, which inspired him to defect as a young man, has continually pushed him to experiment in dance, as well as theater, film, television and photography. Two hundred of the tapes detail the dozen years he spent with the experimental White Oak Dance Project, the group, since disbanded, that he founded in 1990 with Mark Morris.
Seated in his office at Baryshnikov Arts Center on West 37th Street in Manhattan, where he is surrounded by paintings and sketches of dancers and costumes, Mr. Baryshnikov said he donated the archives so young artists starting out could study how dancers and choreographers work. Jan Schmidt, curator of the library’s Jerome Robbins Dance Division, said Mr. Baryshnikov’s superstar status would draw scholars, students and the general public to the collection. She estimated it would take three years for the library to copy the videotapes into a digital format and to catalog all the material. Curators are assembling a brief collection of clips to show donors at its Nov. 1 dance division fund-raiser. Source: www.nytimes.com