Celebrating Dance Magazine Chairman’s Award Honoree Mikhail Baryshnikov
This week we’re sharing tributes to all of the 2024 Dance Magazine Award honorees. For tickets to the awards ceremony on December 2, visit store.dancemedia.com.
The name Mikhail Baryshnikov is synonymous with artistic brilliance and the thrill of performance. But in the five decades since Baryshnikov’s sudden and highly publicized departure from what was then the Soviet Union, his name has also come to be linked with another equally valuable endeavor: the fostering of new and innovative works. This was true when Baryshnikov was the artistic director of American Ballet Theatre (1980–1989), and later when he co-founded the touring ensemble White Oak Dance Project, with Mark Morris, in 1990.
But it is with the creation of the Baryshnikov Arts Center, now Baryshnikov Arts, that this mission has found its most distilled expression. Since it opened its doors in Hell’s Kitchen in 2005, Baryshnikov Arts has offered space and support to artists at all stages of their development. The aim has been to ease the financial pressure on them, and thus encourage ambitious, courageous thinking: a chance to go beyond what they have done before, to explore new creative pathways and try different things.
“When I realized we could have a space with multiple studios, I started to think about a bigger picture,” Baryshnikov said recently. “My hope was to create a place where artists would feel safe, supported, and at home.” Baryshnikov Arts has become exactly that, through live performances and commissions, but most crucially through its residency program. Recipients of these residencies, which number up to 20 per year, receive funding, rehearsal time, administrative and production support, and the opportunity to show their work-in-process if they so choose. They have included Yasuko Yokoshi, Rashaun Mitchell, Okwui Okpokwasili, Pam Tanowitz, Camille A. Brown, Ain Gordon, John Jasperse, and many others, some well-known, others just starting out. More than 300 works have sprung from these residencies.
The institution bears Baryshnikov’s name, but its work is the result of the combined efforts of a braintrust, since October 2022 led by its president and executive director, Sonja Kostich. “I’m proud of everything we’ve accomplished so far,” says Baryshnikov, “but the residency program has a special place in my heart.”