Bravo, Baryshnikov!

In a curious gliding step that seemed to send his feet on ahead of him, Mikhail Baryshnikov skimmed across the stage of Lincoln Center's State Theater and leaped high in the air like an uncoiled spring. The audience gasped as he bounded higher and higher, the perfect picture of a desperate Prince trying to dance all night before the cruel Queen of the Willis and save his soul. When the curtain finally came down on the American Ballet Theater's production of Giselle last week, the Manhattan audience threw flowers at the latest runaway genius from Leningrad's Kirov Ballet. For 25 semihysterical minutes, Baryshnikov and his partner, Natalya Makarova, who defected from the Kirov herself four years ago, were dragged back again and again for curtain calls.

It was the 26-year-old Russian dancer's first appearance since he slipped away in Toronto during a guest tour with the Bolshoi company and asked Canada for refuge. His performance as Albrecht proved that Baryshnikov is ultimately a premier danseur noble -- and a star likely to outsoar the shadow of cold war night that made his debut a faintly political occasion.

Thirteen years ago, Rudolf Nureyev, the first Kirov refugee, astonished Western audiences with his heroic bursts of explosive movement, animal magnetism and sheer showmanship, not to say showboatery. Baryshnikov is a dancer of equal authority but far different style. He is short, and his slightly chunky body seems to belong to a superb athlete as well as an artist. He floated Makarova overhead as though she had no more substance than a chiffon gown. His phenomenal double turns in air and grands jetes were done with a breathtaking ease that did not call attention to itself. Yet he conveyed an almost electric impression of great power and speed, held in check by inner devotion to music and the needs of the drama.

Characteristically, Baryshnikov worried about whether his greatest technical feat, the showstopping, leg-beating skitter across the stage called a brise, was dramatically justified. "Do you think it made a bad impression?" he asked after the show. "The interpretation is mine, but the step is in the ballet. It's the last gasp of a soul."

Baryshnikov has repeatedly asserted that if the Kirov had allowed him to dance for extended periods outside Russia, or if the Soviet Union had invited foreign choreographers to Leningrad, he would not have defected. His decision to leave, he told TIME, "was not political. Everybody knows the very interesting choreography is in the United States." He wants to do modern ballets--by Martha Graham, Balanchine, Robbins, MacMillan. "It's difficult not to be at home," he admits. "You have a choice between art and personal well-being."

His childhood dream in Riga was to be a pianist. But his mother enrolled him at twelve in the Latvian Opera Ballet school. "I didn't take it very seriously," he recalls. "Then I really bit into the forbidden fruit and I couldn't tear myself away." From Riga he went to Leningrad, where, like Nureyev, he studied with Ballet Master Alexander Pushkin. At 18, Baryshnikov joined the Kirov as a soloist.

Offstage, Baryshnikov flusters easily. Walking to his seat to see another ballet performance, he blushed deeply at the ripple of applause that acknowledged his presence. In the first days after defecting he was subject to spells of weeping. Friends say that he is uneasy in crowds because he fears being plucked away by the Russian secret police. Despite many offers, he will not join any one company. Instead he hopes to use the American Ballet Theater as his U.S. base while leaving himself free to dance elsewhere. (Guest fees for international stars range from $1,000 to $10,000 for a single performance. As a resident principal with a ballet company, he would earn about $750 a week.) "I want to dance a lot," says Baryshnikov. Whatever the price, he is likely to do just that.

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