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By Root 912 0

and passionate ardor playing about his lips. (We didn’t see the practiced-seducer panel of his personality until the 1977 movie The Turning Point, where his soulful dog eyes worked overtime.) He wasn’t tall, and unlike some other not-tall danseurs nobles he didn’t project cloud-stature. The altitude was in his jumps and whirlybird pirouettes, which seemed to have not only more air around them than other spring-boarders but a freeze-frame clarity even in fast motion; he achieved high-definition before our analog eyes. The impact on the audience was pandemonious, and when I left the theater, the night itself seemed in an excellent mood. New York nights are like that, acquiring an extra snap to remind you nowhere else will do. I made it a point to see every Baryshnikov performance I affordably could, which back then didn’t require ransoming off a hostage or two, and when Gelsey Kirkland joined ABT, he had a partner who transcended the rodeo tricks that some of the company’s stars were prone to reeling off to crashing waterfalls of ovation and bouquets crapping from the rafters.

Gelsey. A name that falls in the mind’s ear like a sprig of mint. I had fallen for her like a fool since I had first seen her at New York City Ballet, a dancer of Keatsian ethereality—such a cameo face—and yet utterly without coy affectation or approval-catering. Petite, precise, and imperishably young, she appeared enveloped in a personal quiet so profound that she seemed to dance under a glass bell, like an enchanted cricket. Not that she was crunchable. She was one tough little apparition, otherworldly and all there, her tiny little traveling steps in Balanchine’s La Sonnambula while holding a candle a Gothic vision that escaped from the Brontë attic. Offstage, Kirkland was rumored to be a cactus handful, the sketchy rumors of her erraticism that one overheard at the line for the water fountain confirmed by her 1986 memoir, Dancing on My Grave, where she shocked the ballet world with her tales of coke-snorting, eating disorders, collagen treatment, and giving Balanchine back talk. The critic Wilfrid Sheed, reviewing a steaming plate of angry tell-it-like-it-is athletes’ memoirs, once wrote, “The literature of nausea has come to professional football: the ‘I Was a Vampire for the Chicago Bears’ school for one crowd, and ‘I Was a Rich Owner’s Plaything’ for another.” Dancing on My Grave was the literature of nausea’s first venture into tutus, but, onstage, in her prime, none of her personal demons poked through, at least to my un-clinical eye. She spun pure silk out of herself, so becalmed and mission-borne that she seemed to be erasing the connecting dots of the choreography in a continuous breath of movement, in thrall to a higher calling and a guidance system she had personally installed. Gelsey was more than poetry in motion; she could explode out of the bass drum with her own armory show of pyrotechnics, as in the can-you-top-this? trade-off solos in the Don Quixote pas de deux, where she tore off those pirouettes as if daring Baryshnikov to sass her back. Technique and artistry animate ballet, as they do any performing art, but the mystery and alchemy of presence are what open the dome, making you realize there’s more to this world than this world. Memory is such a patchy recording device of performance, and the fugitive clips of Baryshnikov and Kirkland together that surface on YouTube or other video portals preserve only tapestry pieces of their performances, a small, unrepresentative highlight sample that only traps the ghosts of those unrepeatable passing moments of live performance. But they also affirm that we weren’t wrong then, they really were that graced, and nothing about them has dated, except Misha’s Galahad mop of golden hair, more suitable for a Bee Gee. Baryshnikov made the cover of Time magazine in May 1975, the same month that A Chorus Line opened off-Broadway at the Public Theater before moving to Broadway; a month later, that ice bucket of dousing cynicism, Chicago, created by John Kander and Fred Ebb and choreographed by