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At seventy years of age, he is the absolute myth of dance. Mikhail Baryshnikov is more than an étoile, he is an all-around showman with one of the greatest careers ever to be seen in the business. A dancer, choreographer, screen and stage actor, Misha, as he has come to be known, brings to Venice his show Brosdky/Baryshnikov, an homage to another Soviet exile like him, the Russian-American author Joseph Brodsky. Since his younger years, Baryshnikov loved Brodsky’s verses and saw him as a spiritual alter ego.

The dancer was born in Riga from Russian parents in 1948 and began taking ballet classes as a child. At twelve, he was accepted at the Leningrad Ballet School, then directed by Alexander Pushkin, to later join the Kirov Ballet Company, where he added the Giselle and the Don Quixote to his repertoire. He stayed with Kirov from 1968 to 1974, when he defected to Canada and then moved to the United States.

He was promoted étoile of the New York City Ballet under George Balachine and, in the 1980s, choreographer at the American Ballet Theatre. He didn’t disdain musical theatre, either, and worked with Liza Minnelli in Baryshnikov on Broadway.

Brodsky/Baryshnikov, authored by Alvis Hermanis of the New Riga Theatre, is a one-man show where Baryshnikov reads poetry by Brodsky (in Russian, captioned in Italian) and gives body and motion to the text. The fact that the show is in Venice also idealizes the strong relation between Brodsky and the city, which he loved only second to St Petersburg and where he rests forever.

In the show at Fenice, Misha embarks on a travel to touch the most meaningful, emotional pieces by his long-time friend, a travel into the inner world of a poet aboard the thin, agile vessel of Misha’s dance.

«Brodsky/Baryshnikov»

13, 14, 15 July

Teatro La Fenice