Learning Nuances of Ballet From a Master of Fusion

If you asked a New York ballet dancer to name the teacher of the moment, Azari Plisetski would probably not spring to mind. But Mikhail Baryshnikov would like to change that. A major admirer of Mr. Plisetski, 69, who is widely credited with rejuvenating Cuban ballet in the 1960’s and bringing Cuban male dancers to the fore internationally, Mr. Baryshnikov invited Mr. Plisetski to teach professional classes this week at his studios on West 37th Street.
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Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
Azari Plisetski leading a ballet class at the Baryshnikov Arts Center on Tuesday.
“When you see a Cuban dancer, he moves like nobody else, but in such a simple, noble manner,” Mr. Baryshnikov said after class on Tuesday.
He invited Mr. Plisetski, the younger brother of the ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, because of the way his teaching fuses many styles of dancing. “French, Bolshoi, his Cuban experience, even a little Stanley,” Mr. Baryshnikov said, referred to the revered Danish teacher Stanley Williams.
Fifteen dancers from American Ballet Theater took the Tuesday class, which began with lush, lyrical stretching sequences at the barre and moved on to combinations of steps in the center that were filled with quick, finicky footwork that demanded extreme physical control.
Mr. Plisetski spoke quietly and succinctly, sometimes communicating combinations with the time-honored ballet device of moving his fingers through the steps like agile schools of fish. “Et one, et two, et one, two, three,” he called out in a polyglot ballet language, occasionally consulting José Manuel Carreño, a star on the stage but a student here, in Spanish about a better choice of words. Nothing was pushed; corrections tended to be individual and murmured.
His focus, Mr. Plisetski said, was the coordination of the arms and “more expression in the neck and head.” Nuances were important, he said. He imitated a dancer executing a basic step with his head up and then slightly down, a seemingly minor detail that enhanced and then diminished the effect of the airy pulled-up body Mr. Plisetski seemed to emphasize in the class. “It’s like a little seasoning,” he added. “And it’s also important not to exaggerate.”
Mr. Plisetski spoke of teaching small boys in Cuba early in his time there, all from orphanages because boys from good Cuban families did not study ballet in the 1960’s.
“I made a little choreography for them, a joke,” he said, demonstrating a dashing saber dance. “You understand?” he asked the children, teaching them a formal ballet exercise for the first time. “Yes,” they answered.
But the sequence, danced once again in the Baryshnikov studio by Mr. Plisetski, suddenly had lilting rumba hips. “I understood immediately that for each people the word is the same, but with a different pronunciation.”
Mr. Baryshnikov said he was thinking of having twice-yearly series of classes at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, inviting ballet teachers from a variety of backgrounds to teach professional dancers, with question-and-answer sessions after class. “To get a ‘second opinion,’ ” he said. “To practice their craft. You cannot live in a ghetto.”
For Mr. Baryshnikov the future of classical ballet lies in the teaching of it. “The initiative comes from the school, the teaching,” he said.
He and Mr. Plisetski, who now teaches at Maurice Béjart’s school in Lausanne, Switzerland, spoke of long-ago fellow dancers and of teachers. “You took my first class, in 1975, at Roland Petit’s,” Mr. Plisetski reminded Mr. Baryshnikov, who was then learning that French choreographer’s dramatic, stylized “Jeune Homme et la Mort.”
Yet another influence to be added to the mix. “It’s fusion that gives the good results,” Mr. Plisetski said. “As in natural selection.”