Midnight Media Cafe - Le Jeune Homme et La Mort

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More in the classical vein:

Le Jeune Homme et La Mort (The Young Man and Death)

From the film White Nights


My parents were both dancers, my mother ballet and my father flamenco, so I was raised around classical music and dance. My mother used to take me to the theater performances, as well as to ballet films, of which there were a lot more in the 60's and 70's than there are now. That's probably due to the presence of two spectacular ballet stars, both of whom made world headlines by defecting from Russia to the U.S. - Rudolf Nureyev in the 1960's, and Mikhail Baryshnikov in the 1970's. Each of them redefined the role of the male dancer, Nureyev by bringing him front and center in a way not seen since Nijinsky, and Baryshnikov by blowing the whole "ballet=gay" stereotype out of the water. (Not since Gene Kelly had there been a famous dancer so completely, vigorously heterosexual.)

Baryshnikov was, of course, young and cute in a puppyish way, the opposite of the older Nureyev's hotheaded, catlike sleekness. He joined the American Ballet Theater after his defection, and eventually became their artistic director. But the classical canon bored him after a while, and he moved over to the New York City Ballet, George Balanchine's company, one more prestigious but alas, also more insular. (They do not tour, so that pretty much ended Misha's days of traveling to dance.) He seemed quite happy, and immersed himself in the more modern, complicated styles of dance to be had in America. And he did a little acting now and then.

Tonight's clip is the opening sequence from the film White Nights, in which he plays...guess what? A famous dancer who defected from Russia! (Yeah, I know, you're shocked. Believe me, the rest of the film isn't much better.) The plot of this film is somewhat heavy-handed, but it has good performances from great actors (and a corker from Jerzy Skolimowsky, a Polish director).

More importantly, it has several killer dance sequences from both Baryshnikov and his co-star Gregory Hines. This scene here is the full ballet of Roland Petit's Le Jeune Homme et La Mort (The Young Man and Death), set to a score by Bach. It's a typically French story, about a young guy living in a garret, who apparently has so much artistic integrity that he cannot afford a shirt. After he rages eloquently about the woe of his life, all done in the silent language of ballet, he is visited by Death (Florence Faure), who in classic French style is a knockout babe. He flails in a tormented manner, she slaps him around, he kisses her feet, she kicks him in the head...basically an Apache dance in reverse. Eventually she demands the ultimate proof of his ardor. As I said, tres Gallique.

It's a fascinatingly strenuous dance, very athletic, and in this you can see echoes of Kelly's gymnastic style. Baryshnikov is always a pleasure to watch, and the music, Bach's Passacaglia in C Minor, rolls under the action like an uneasy sea, lifting and lowering, lifting and lowering, gliding outward towards an endless, stormy vista. The combination of styles is hallucinatory, and Petit does a number of interesting things to capture that sweaty, suicidal tone. (Check out Misha's slow motion fall at one point. The man's abs must be rocks.)

So, enjoy this slice of 18th-century music and mid-20th-century dance. And Misha, of course, who was such a hottie.