I loved working at Baryshnikov Arts. Maybe it’s because I’m an actor and am rarely offered opportunities to dance, but there was something else magical about going to work there. On my second day of rehearsal, when I was learning Irish step dance for the first time, I saw a man peering into my rehearsal room with cute circular spectacles. I didn’t realize it immediately, but it would later occur to me that this was Mikhail Baryshnikov. I felt deeply embarrassed to think that one of the select rehearsal spaces in his building was being taken up by someone who could hardly Irish step dance without looking like an uncoordinated, aspiring leprechaun. But I was touched nonetheless that he had seen me, and I felt an air of majesty at having been witnessed by him.
A few days later, after I’d moved to another rehearsal space down the hall, I was passing the room he had seen me dancing in, and I looked inside to see if someone was in there. Sure enough, I saw Mikhail Baryshnikov running lines and making faces in the mirror. He seemed to be preparing a clown-like character and it was as though we had traded places. For obvious reasons, these exchanges (or maybe you should call them non-exchanges) delighted me. When I think of people who have buildings named after them, I don’t think of them as still being alive, let alone very much alive, running lines and making silly faces in the mirror with their script strewn about them. If the man who has proven everything he needs to prove as an artist is showing up for the sake of play, then I have no excuse not to show up to my work with that same spirit. Seeing him left me with the feeling that we have to make the most of every day, and that task is not heavy as it seems. In fact, it can be as light as making faces in the mirror. I actually can’t think of a better description for acting.
I appreciate the way Baryshnikov Arts stewards the next generation of dancers, creators, and actors, and that it happens under a roof in which Mikhail Baryshnikov himself is closely watching and preparing work of his own, as though he is walking through a garden and checking its tomatoes to see if they have ripened. I was a tomato in the garden of Baryshnikov, you should know, and while I wasn’t ripe when he saw me, I like to think that he recognized me as an early seed, one that would grow red and full in time. I believe Baryshnikov Arts is his most sincere dreamscape built out of the desire to play in the present, not just as a statement of legacy, but as a playpen for today. It was just as much his rehearsal room as it was mine, and what an honor it was to have danced inside it. It’s an honor that every dancer, actor, or creator would be lucky to experience. How lucky am I and everyone else associated with BA to have experienced it, if only briefly? I can’t think of a better place to play.
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