Baryshnikov returns to Tel Aviv with solo show

When Mikhail Baryshnikov performs his one-man show “Brodsky/Baryshnikov” on the Suzanne Dellal stage this week, he’ll be continuing a long romance with the Israeli dance theater, said Yair Vardi, director of the Tel Aviv center for dance and theater.

“It’s a long romance, it’s not something that started a minute ago,” Vardi added.

In fact, Baryshnikov likes Tel Aviv so much that he is starting the international tour of “Brodsky/Baryshnikov” in Tel Aviv before debuting in New York this spring.

“Why not?” crowed Vardi, who first saw the play in Riga, Baryshnikov’s birthplace, and where it ran for three weeks in December of last year. “We’re the second and then to New York. We’re before New York!”

He has cause to be proud. “Brodsky/Baryshnikov” is reportedly the dancer’s most personal work to date, “far closer to theater than ballet, a meditation, in part, on aging and death,” wrote Linda Kinstler in the Paris Review.

Directed by Alvis Hermanis, the play is composed entirely of the poetry of Baryshnikov’s good friend and teacher, Joseph Brodsky, who died in 1996. The two shared more than 20 years of friendship, meeting in New York in 1974, where they both landed after leaving Russia.

Some of Brodsky’s poems were dedicated to Baryshnikov and the play uses their conversations, as well as Baryshnikov’s own supple, sinuous movements, said Vardi.

For Vardi, the ability to bring Baryshnikov to Tel Aviv is an open invitation to the local Russian Israeli population, a community he wants to have in the theater.

“Brodsky is something very important for us and I want the Russian audience to know they have a home here,” he said. “So we went for it.”

The original plan was for four performances, beginning Tuesday, January 19 through January 24, but the theater added a fifth performance on Friday evening, after the other performances were sold out.

“He wants to perform,” said Vardi of Baryshnikov. “He’s an artist; he wants to do a lot, he wants to be out on stage, he doesn’t rest at all and he doesn’t just cast things aside.”

Vardi’s relationship with the renowned dancer began in 2010, when he and dancer Ana Laguna first appeared in their “Three Solos and a Duet” at Suzanne Dellal and the Herzliya Performing Arts Center.

“I asked him to come and he loved the idea,” said Vardi. “He was suspicious of Israel at first, but he liked it immediately.”

That first visit was followed by several others, including his appearance in the stage adaptation of “In Paris” at Suzanne Dellal and a summer visit to the theater’s dance studio, the home of the Batsheva Dance Company.

During that visit, Baryshnikov, who is also an amateur photographer, took pictures of Israeli choreographers Ohad Naharin, Yasmeen Godder and Sharon Eyal, and ended up forging an exhibit of his dance photographs that was on display at Suzanne Dellal.

When Vardi began thinking about bringing Baryshnikov again, he knew that this particular solo show made the most sense for the theater. The dancer is also appearing solo in Robert Wilson’s “Letter to a Man,” based on the diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky, but that one “is too big and expensive for us,” said Vardi.

“Brodsky/Baryshnikov,” January 19, 20, 21, 22 and 24. Tickets NIS 490 and NIS 540, Suzanne Dellal Center for Dance and Theater, Tel Aviv.