NYPL to Present 2024 Dance Symposium Focusing on Mikhail Baryshnikov

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center will present the 2025 Dance Symposium, a day-long exploration of Mikhail Baryshnikov and his legacy as they celebrate the 50th anniversary since his arrival to the U.S. from the Soviet Union. Since 2015, the Jerome Robbins Dance Division has run its Dance Research Fellowship program welcoming a class of dancers, choreographers, artists, and scholars to focus on a particular topic using the Library’s archives. At the end of the program cycle, the fellows present their work through lecture, performance, and discussion at an annual symposium.

The symposium, taking place on January 31, 2024, is open and free to the public, in person as well as online. More information, including the day’s itinerary, can be found on our website. 

The Jerome Robbins Dance Division at the Library for the Performing Arts acquired the Mikhail Baryshnikov archive in 2011. The archive is the focus of these fellows’ research and work.

The Dance Symposium consists of six presentations by a range of artists and scholars picking up on different themes of Baryshnikov’s work. Writer Marina Harss compares the trajectories of Baryshnikov with George Balanchine and Alexei Ratmansky, who also left their home countries to pursue their career in dance. Dance artist Jordan Demetrius Lloyd looks beyond Barsyhnikov’s classical ballet training to explore his place in “downtown dance,” focusing on works by Twyla Tharp, Donna Uchizono, and others. Exploring Baryshnikov’s multidirectional influences and mentorships, dance scholar Alessandra Nicifero looks closely at Alvis Hermanis’ Brodsky/Baryshnikov and Trisha Brown’s Homemade, which starred Barsynikov. Interdisciplinary artist Marcelline Mandeng Nken examines Barsyhnikov’s acclaimed performance in Giselle in 1977, which Nken says challenged traditional ideals of masculinity in dance. Author Brian Seibert investigates the process by which, during the dozen years following his arrival in the U.S., Baryshnikov became American, artistically and as a public figure. Finally, historian Maria Vinogradova has watched nearly 1,500 minutes of 8mm footage in Barsyhnikov’s archive to better understand how film influenced and shaped the work of dancers, and especially Soviet dancers.

“Last year, the fellowship focused on the Martha Graham archive for the centennial celebration of her dance company, and it proved a fruitful opportunity for researchers, artists, and dancers to explore Graham’s work more closely. This year, we’re thrilled to celebrate and explore the career of Mikhail Baryshnikov, an artist who has not only changed the trajectory of dance worldwide, but has been a great friend and supporter to the Dance Division,” said Linda Murray, the Anne H. Bass Curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division. 

Information about the Dance Research Fellows and their research projects is below.

The 2024-5 Dance Research Fellowship is generously sponsored by the Geraldine Stutz Trust.

Marina Harss

You can never go home—Baryshnikov, Balanchine, Ratmansky, émigré artists in New York

“I did all there was to do, I wanted to do more, more was somewhere else, so I went.” So says Mikhail Baryshnikov at the start of David Gordon’s Made in USA, a dance-theater work broadcast on “Dance In America” in 1987. Almost as an aside, he adds, “you can never go home.” Baryshnikov never returned to Russia after leaving his career at what was then the Kirov Ballet, and his life in what was then the Soviet Union, in 1974. He is neither the first nor the last artist to leave home and shut the door behind him. Half a century earlier, the choreographer and dancer George Balanchine had done the same, before going on to co-found New York City Ballet and create a completely new, post-Imperial, post-Russian way of dancing. Balanchine was also the first choreographer Baryshnikov wanted to work with in his new, post-Soviet life. And almost two decades after Baryshnikov’s departure, Alexei Ratmansky—a dancer and budding choreographer—also left his home, in Kyiv, the capital of a newly-independent country salvaged from the ashes of the Soviet Union. He too had been inspired at a young age by Balanchine’s ballets and had once hoped to join his company. Unlike his predecessors, Ratmansky could go back. After making his way to New York, one of the first people he worked with was Mikhail Baryshnikov. During her research fellowship, Marina Harss has explored and reflected upon on the things that unite and separate these three artists: Balanchine’s galvanizing effect on the two others; the lineage and schooling that unites them, but also sometimes divides them; their approach to the old and the new; their outlook and attachment to New York. And their estrangement from the Russia of their past life. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the world has undergone a rupture like the one experienced by Balanchine and Baryshnikov. It turns out that borders are not so porous after all. How has dislocation shaped the artist each of them became or is still in the process of becoming?

Marina Harss is a dance writer based in New York City, whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Guardian, Dance Magazine, and elsewhere. In 2023, her critical biography of the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, The Boy from Kyiv,  was published by Farrar Straus and Giroux.

Jordan Demetrius Lloyd

Mikhail Baryshnikov: registers of performance in 2024

As a dancer, Baryshnikov was recognized for his incredible artistry. Choreographer and performer Jordan Demetrius Lloyd has used the fellowship to explore Baryshnikov’s transition from classical ballet to modern and post-modern dance. Lloyd’s research uses modern day code-switching as a conceptual framework to consider how dancers approach performance across dance genres and mediums. With Baryshnikov’s classical ballet training, Lloyd looks beyond his technical prowess to better understand how Baryshnikov situated himself within what is commonly referred to as “downtown dance.” Lloyd tracks Baryshnikov’s career from 1985-2003, focusing on works by Twyla Tharp, Mark Morris, Donna Uchizono, and Tere O’Connor. From the execution of gesture, line, and focus, to the embodiment of downtown aesthetics, Lloyd's research speaks to a larger conversation about the perceptual codes of dance genres and forms.

Jordan Demetrius Lloyd is a dance artist originally from Albany, NY. As a performer, he has worked with David Dorfman Dance, Netta Yerushalmy, Beth Gill, Tere O'Connor, Donna Uchizono, Monica Bill Barnes, and more. As a choreographer, Lloyd has received The Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, two New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award nominations, and was listed on Dance Magazines 2023 "25 to Watch" list.

Alessandra Nicifero

Dancing in exile as a collaborative practice of citizenship: Alvis Hermanis’ Brodsky/Baryshnikov in conversation with Trisha Brown’s Homemade

In 2000, Baryshnikov co-directed PASTForward with David Gordon as part of his White Oak Dance Project. The project brought prominent members of the Judson Dance Theater together with new generations of performers and new audiences. Baryshnikov, who had previously danced with Trisha Brown in If You Could See Us (1996), performed Brown’s Homemade (1966) —a reflection on the very essence of choreography, its transmission, and the simultaneous co-existence of different temporalities. For her fellowship, Alessandra Nicifero explored Baryshnikov’s multidirectional influences and mentorships, with a closer lens on Hermanis’ Brodsky/Baryshnikov (2015). In this case, Baryshnikov’s choreographic response to Joseph Brodsky’s poetry, reflects more explicitly on the experience of exile, embodying a contrapuntal conversation between two formal languages—that of poetry and movement.  

Alessandra Nicifero is an independent dance scholar and translator based in New York. Her articles and reviews on performing arts have been published in Hystrio, Danza&Danza, and Dance Research Journal, where she previously served on the editorial board. Her monograph on Bill T. Jones was published in 2010, and she co-edited Choreographing Discourses, A Mark Franko Reader (Routledge, 2018) with Mark Franko.

Marcelline Mandeng Nken

Queening the knight: Baryshnikov’s vulnerability and masculinity on display

Baryshnikov's emotional depth, vulnerability, and athleticism throughout his acclaimed performance in Giselle in 1977 challenged traditional ideals of masculinity in dance. His embodiment of Albrecht, the prince charming, harkens back to King Louis XIV's court ballet, theorized as an anti-essentialist symbol of power. For her fellowship, Marcelline Mandeng Nken presents a work titled "Queening the Knight," which assumes Baryshnikov's rendition as a score open to interpretation. The work mythologizes the dance legacy of Baryshnikov, pairing his ephemera with the archetype of Janus, the two-faced Roman god of gates and doorways, as a device for nonlinear storytelling. Our hero's journey follows the evolution of a bogatyr, a medieval knight from Russian epic poetry, who trades in his armor for the suit and tie of the modern-day white-collar worker: a uniform that monuments the anxieties and triumphs of urban landscapes. A series of dualities emerge at the membrane where the two characters meet to create a mosaic portrait of Baryshnikov as a dancer and artistic director.

Marcelline Mandeng Nken is an interdisciplinary artist born and raised in Yaoundé, Cameroun. She is a recent MFA graduate of Yale School of Art and an alumni of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In March, she presented HAPTICS: In Full Bloom, a performance installation that parallels the intellectual and material labor of Black women to that of arthropods, such as  bees, and spiders, to explore inherited technologies of care that sustain our livelihood.

Brian Seibert

Baryshnikov, the American dancer

In 1986, Baryshnikov became a naturalized citizen of the U.S., a change in status he celebrated on national television during a centenary celebration of the Statue of Liberty, performing a work to music by George Gershwin choreographed by the foremost Russian figure of ballet to have become American: George Balanchine. Brian Seibert investigates the process by which, during the dozen years following his arrival in the U.S., Baryshnikov became American—less politically than artistically and as a public figure. In many of the performances that Baryshnikov took on, from “Baryshnikov on Broadway” to dancing choreography by Twyla Tharp, the very idea of a Russian ballet star being interested in Broadway or Hollywood is treated as exceptional, surprising, somewhat comic. Through his fellowship, Seibert tracks his evolution, showing how, by the time Baryshnikov was officially naturalized, he had already become culturally naturalized in the public mind, an American dancer.

Brian Seibert is the author of What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award and won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Since 2011, he has been a dance critic and features writer for The New York Times. He teaches at Yale University.

Maria Vinogradova

Baryshnikov and the Kirov cohort: their Soviet years on 8mm film

The Baryshnikov archive at the Dance Division includes nearly 1,500 minutes of 8mm footage. According to Maria Vinogradova, it is likely that not all of them were shot by Baryshnikov himself, but that he also acted as a gatherer of films created by fellow dancers. Currently completing a book on the history of Soviet filmmaking, Vinogradova has found that dancers constitute a special chapter in this history. Ballet dancers, due to their elevated social status, were able to travel abroad—a privilege available to just a handful of Soviet people. At the same time, since its very inception, film was enthusiastically received by dancers worldwide as an aid in their work, especially in the absence of a system of notation for dance. Soviet dancers, many of whom owned film cameras, understood this significance of the medium, using it both as an aid in their professional work and a means to record their often extraordinary daily lives. The scope of Baryshnikov’s 8mm film collection at the Library for the Performing Arts, as appears from the metadata, reflects both impulses. This collection will be in the center of Vinogradova’s research during the fellowship tenure.

Maria Vinogradova, PhD, is a film and media historian specializing in the study of Soviet film culture, in particular, nonfiction, experimental and amateur films: their creation, distribution, circulation, and afterlives in the post-celluloid era. She is currently working on her book manuscript On the Public Rails: A History of Soviet Amateur Filmmaking (1957-1991). This project has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (2021-2022) and National Endowment for the Humanities (2022-2023).