Even with the success of acts like Lonely Island and Flight of the Conchords, people still tend to view musical comedy with some suspicion, and not without reason. Those high-profile success stories aside, at the club level, musical comedy is too often the province of people who aren’t quite good enough to make it as musicians, but not quite funny enough to make it as comedians.

Two local comics, Robert Keller and Rush Zilla, are out to change that perception with their show, Off Key Comedy, which features a wide variety of acts whose only commonality is that they combine music and comedy in one form or another. The third edition of the monthly show will take place on May 23, at Comedy Bar.

Despite the fact that the last show in Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s 2012/2013 season is titled Of a Monstrous Child: A Gaga Musical, Lady Gaga herself takes a secondary role. There are no homages to raw-meat dresses and gold-plated wheelchairs here. Instead, writer and director Alistair Newton uses the House of Gaga as a pathway into the history of the notable performance-art stars that came before her in the pantheon of queer iconography, and how she is and isn’t a construct of all of them put together.

Grant Heaps was 14 when his mother first taught him how to sew. “I was always obsessed with fabric, even as a child,” he says. Because of his penchant for creating outfits, Heaps initially pursued fashion design, but eventually he became frustrated with the demands of making clothing fit. “I decided to forget fashion and move on to working with flat things,” he says. For more than a decade, he has spent his free time constructing two-dimensional works of textile art, from hanging quilts to ornate, decorative chair coverings.

Heaps, who has a full-time gig as the assistant wardrobe coordinator at the National Ballet of Canada, began developing his pieces in the hours after work. “I just like working,” he says. “I work all day, and then I come home and work some more.” His art also requires dedication; there’s one piece made up of tiny, hand-sewn circles that he’s been working on for more than four years.

His efforts have paid off. Three years ago, he completed a residency in North Carolina, where he worked out of an old thrift store and made pieces using materials that were already there. “A friend of mine who owns WORN Fashion Journal told me about it,” he said. “The experience really boosted my confidence.”

Heaps has no formal art training, so he was caught off guard when the Textile Museum of Canada approached him and asked if he wanted to participate in their current exhibition, “Dreamland: Textiles and the Canadian Landscape.” “I always dreamed of someone finding me through my blog, and they did!” he says. “It’s an amazing show. It’s just through a bit of luck after another bit of luck that I got to be in it.”

When asked where he finds inspiration for his pieces, Heaps laughs. “My own emotional distress, really!” he says. “Well that, and pop music.” He often uses words and lyrics in his pieces, in an attempt to draw in viewers. “I want my pieces to provide an emotional impact, if not a necessarily a narrative,” he says. He’s currently working on a series of 60 quilts, which will tell the story of an audience member experiencing a theatrical production.

Thanks to the scraps he receives from the ballet, remnants from clothing factories and stuff he collects off the street, Heaps rarely has to buy fabric. When he does, he goes to thrift stores. He sees others in his age group (that is, in their 20s and 30s) experimenting with similar ways of reusing materials for crafts. “There are a lot of people trying to do something different themselves—trying to make something handmade,” he says. “You can see it in the emergence of crafting groups.”

Because of his day job and the low cost of his materials, Heaps isn’t particularly concerned with profit. While he has displayed his work in cafes, book stores and galleries, he doesn’t usually sell his pieces. “I think if I needed to sell my stuff, it would drive me insane,” he says. “I like that I don’t have to make money off of it. For me, the idea of just doing it for myself works really well.”

Thanks to Moosehead for making this series possible.

Piotr Stanczyk in Hamlet's solo, at the beginning The National Ballet of Canada's Hamlet.

Approximately 30 years old and faced with questions of identity, suicide, and murder, Prince Hamlet of Denmark goes through a profound midlife crisis—perhaps the most profound in the English dramatic canon.

Hamlet is assigned the task of killing his usurping uncle (and stepfather), Claudius, in revenge for the death of his father. Yet, the prince, despite his contempt for Claudius, is daunted by the enormity of the undertaking. And, like a philosophy major vacillating between graduate school and the real world, he demurs.

Hamlet is undoubtedly the most enigmatic of Shakespeare’s characters. Alternately deliberate and rash, simultaneously serious and playful, Hamlet only reveals his true feelings through his lengthy soliloquies and pregnant replies. But even in the absence of his “wild and whirling words,” the prince is not inscrutable, as the National Ballet of Canada’s production of Hamlet proves.

Nearly every aspect of choreographer Kevin O’Day’s two-act interpretation of the Bard’s masterpiece is rich with symbolic value. The costumes, the backdrop designs, and, most importantly, the choreography all have clear reasons for being, even as the ceaselessly cogitating Hamlet searches for his.

The performance opens in silence as Hamlet—played by Guillaume Côté when we attended, though there are actually three different casts that will play on alternating days until the show closes on the June 10 (another cast is pictured here)—sits sullenly on the stage, illuminated by a single spotlight. He begins to move in violent spurts scarcely resembling a dance. The tears in Hamlet’s black clothing wordlessly indicate that he has been mourning his father’s death for some time. Hamlet’s mental distress is evident as, on his knees, he faces his chest toward the firmament in appeal to the Fates, only to collapse into a fetal pose as he cowers from them.

Accompanied by jarring and dramatic music, the prince recalls the details of his father’s murder, which plays out behind the translucent backdrop. The creation of set and costume designer Tatyana van Walsum, the backdrop consists of a blown-up microscopic image of bone, rendered in white and set on a greenish background. The knotted mess of human architecture symbolizes the familial entanglement in which Hamlet is trapped, as well as the prince’s preoccupation with death.

Gertrude (Lise-Marie Jourdain) dances with the newly crowned King Claudius (First Soloist Keiichi Hirano) during The National Ballet of Canada's final rehearsal of Hamlet on May 31, the day before the North American premiere.

Meanwhile, at the Danish court, Claudius (Jirí Jelinek) and Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude (Stephanie Hutchison), dance to jazzy, brass-heavy music driven by what can only be described as a pulsing jungle beat. The court itself is done up in orange and auburn (as are the courtesans), perfectly complementing the fiery sexual passion evident between the queen and the new king.

Their confident and carnal dance is contrasted in the following scene by Hamlet and his love, Ophelia (Heather Ogden). Ophelia has been warned by her father, Polonius (Jonathan Renna), not to consort with Hamlet, as the prince’s noble stature demands that he eventually find love elsewhere. Yet she is unable to pull herself away from him. The lovers’ dance is slow but desperate, sad but passionate. The darkened set and beautifully dissonant music perfectly frame the scene. Here again, van Walsum’s clever costume designs successfully elucidate the characters who wear them. Ophelia’s flowered dress foreshadows her madness, while Polonius, who in Shakespeare’s original play speaks bombastically and takes himself too seriously, looks uptight and slightly ridiculous in what appears to be a Nehru jacket.

O’Day is consistently able to define Hamlet’s relationships with other characters through dance, as seen, for example, in the prince’s interactions with Polonius. In Shakespeare’s original, Hamlet feigns madness, which largely excuses the mordant observations he directs at other characters. In one famous scene, Polonius (a Danish privy councillor) asks of Hamlet, “Do you know me, my lord?” to which Hamlet replies, “You’re a fishmonger.” Hamlet intends to hurt Polonius’ sizable ego, but Polonius simply chalks the reply up to madness, and lets it slide. In O’Day’s conception, of course, Hamlet and Polonius dance rather than converse, but the effect is the same: Hamlet leads Polonius in their brief dance together, occasionally letting go to slap him across the face.

One of the production’s most memorable scenes depicts Ophelia’s descent into madness. The only character to vocalize, Ophelia sings a wordless melody in a quavering voice as flower petals fall around her, alluding to a scene in the original play in which Ophelia hands out flowers to several characters while singing. Throughout the solo that follows, Ophelia appears to be pulled in different directions, but with a clear sense of confinement. She is then seen on her back, helplessly moving her legs and arms like an overturned beetle, making a cruel mockery of her name, which comes from the Greek for “helper.” The backdrop appears to ripple, and Ophelia drowns.

Hamlet (Principal Dancer Piotr Stanczyk, front) is joined by Horatio (Brendan Saye, corps de ballet, bottom) and two others (Ryan Booth, middle, and Nan Wang, top) during the Hamlet dress rehearsal at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto, June 31.

Composer John King’s jazz-tinged score is at times dissonant, but never distractingly so, and is in this way well-suited to the often grisly and discordant scenes it accompanies. Recorded sounds are frequently used in conjunction with the traditional live orchestra to enhance the sonic atmosphere–and even the interpretive possibilities–of the scenes in which they appear. In the opening scene of the second act, a group of travelling actors rehearse for the famous “play-within-a-play” designed to determine Claudius’ guilt. During this sequence, a programmed digital drumbeat is joined by a live, analogue rock beat. The effect is to make the artificiality of the programmed percussion all the more obvious, perhaps as a nod to the metafictional nature of Hamlet’s play-within-a-play.

Occasionally, the ballet format reveals its limitations. For example, in the original play, Hamlet resolves to kill Claudius, having determined that his uncle is indeed guilty of murder, but hesitates at the last moment because he notices that Claudius is praying. If Claudius is killed while praying, he will go to heaven, and Hamlet is determined to send him to hell. In O’Day’s Hamlet, the prince fails to kill Claudius because, in one of the adaptation’s less artful turns, he is carried off by his erstwhile schoolmates, Rosencrantz (Robert Stephen) and Guildenstern (Christopher Stalzer).

Nevertheless, the adaptation is a success. O’Day is able to transpose a highly introspective drama, famous for its beautiful speeches and clever wordplay, into a speech-free ballet. Côté and Ogden, meanwhile, are the standout performers of the production, portraying their notoriously challenging characters with grace and restraint.

Hamlet remains an enthralling enigma. It’s just that in O’Day’s production, he doesn’t talk so damned much.

THEATRE: The Toronto Festival of Clowns runs this weekend, with performances by local talent, like sketch performer and bouffon Phil Luzi. His Bleed, like many of the festival’s offerings, is definitely not for kids (Scotiabank Studio Theatre, 6 Noble Street, Friday at 8 p.m., $ 10). The National Ballet’s production of Hamlet opens tonight as well, with Piotr Stanczyk dancing the title role (Four Seasons Centre For the Performing Arts, 145 Queen Street West, $25–$234). And it’s your last chance tonight and this weekend to see a pair of great shows closing at the Tarragon Theatre: Michel Tremblay’s The Real World?, which we appreciated for its Inception-like layers of reality, and Seventh Stage’s production of Bryony Lavery’s Stockholm, a sexy and disturbing piece that leaves you wondering who actually suffers from the titular syndrome until the very end (Tarragon Theatre, 30 Bridgman Avenue, 8 p.m., various prices).

MUSIC: There are high-profile shows tonight from NYC-based poet/activist/rapper Talib Kweli and Quebecois punk-folk singer-songwriter Coeur de Pirate. But there are also some great showcases by long-running local music series:

• Wavelength Music Series presents a terrific trio of local acts tonight: exotic orchestral act Del Bel, Constantines alumnus Bry Webb, and folk chanteuse Lisa Bozikovic. 918 Bathurst Cultural Centre (918 Bathurst Street), 8 p.m.–12 a.m., $12 in advance, $15 at the door.
• The Steam Whistle Unsigned series presents great acts who are still playing independent of a record company (by choice or otherwise). Tonight’s strong lineup features already-celebrated acoustic folk outfit The Wilderness of Manitoba, Ottawa-area rockers Amos the Transparent, and rising newcomers Cai.ro. Steam Whistle Brewery (255 Bremner Boulevard), 8 p.m., $5 (proceeds to the Artist’s Health Centre Foundation).
• Scrappy local showcase series The Indie Machine is back. Tonight’s show consists of electronic-oriented music, including headliners OPOPO and MachineFiend. The Silver Dollar (486 Spadina Avenue), doors at 9 p.m., $6.

COMEDY: Comedy Bar‘s getting a lot of attention this week, owing to a cover story in The Grid about the various comedy scenes that intersect and flourish there. And certainly, tonight’s shows are as good as any. There’s Catch 23 Improv. And then there’s a special show from Nick Flanagan of Laugh Sabbath and Mark Little of Picnicface. Or, try the late-night frat party Mantown (all were mentioned in The Grid feature). But there’s also plenty of innovative and out-there comedy happening elsewhere in the city:

• Popular and long-running sketch troupe The Boom, now appearing regularly at the Drake Underground, have their first Friday night show there tonight, with host Hunter Collins and guests Dylan Gott, Ladystache, and John Hastings. Drake Hotel Underground (1150 Queen Street West), 8 p.m., $10.
• The wildly unpredictable Marty Topps House Party Show claims to have pop star Carly Rae Jensen as a guest tonight, and that she’ll “sign anything” with an autograph during her appearance. Take that with a grain of salt, but we’re sure these guests are genuine: Brian Barlow, Steph Kaliner, and Eric Andrews. Double Double Land (209 Augusta Avenue), 10 p.m., $5 in advance, $8 at the door.
• The National Theatre of the World, being improvisers, have a hard time saying no. That’s the only rationale behind their insane schedule tonight, when they perform 7:30 and 9 p.m. Script Tease Project shows at Theatre Passe Muraille (16 Ryerson Avenue), then do their monthly Carnegie Hall Show late-night cabaret, with guests acrobat Rebecca Leonard, singer Dean Armstrong, and Jackie English and The Carnegie Hall Dancers. Second City Toronto (51 Mercer Street), 11 p.m., $6–$12.

Urban Planner is Torontoist‘s guide to what’s on in Toronto, published every weekday morning, and in a weekend edition Friday afternoons. If you have an event you’d like considered, email all of its details—as well as images, if you’ve got any—to events@torontoist.com.

Piotr Stanczyk in La Fille mal gardée. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann

LITERATURE: Three authors take to the stage for the Authors at Harbourfront Series today. Robert Hough will be talking about Dr. Brinkley’s Tower, a book about jealousy and greed in 1930s Mexico, Kim Thúy will present her Governor General’s Literary Award-winning book, Ru, about a young girl’s voyage from Vietnam to Quebec (translated from its original French by Sheila Fischman), and Charlotte Gill will read from her book, Eating Dirt about a tree planter. York Quay Centre (235 Queens Quay West), 7:30 p.m., FREE–$10.

DANCE: The National Ballet of Canada is opening its winter season tonight with Sir Frederick Ashton’s comedy, La Fille mal gardée. On stage until Sunday, the classic piece is about a girl who falls in love with a young farmer, but has her unhappy mother to contend with. Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts (145 Queen Street West), 7:30 p.m., $12–$234.

FUNDRAISER: Stop by a screening of the Sonic Youth documentary Sleeping Nights Awake tonight to raise money for the 2012 Images Festival. The film was created by seven high school students in 2006 and is a behind-the-scenes look at the band. The screening will be followed by a live performance by a group called Shaking Hell, which was formed solely for this evening and features members of Republic of Safety, Neck, and Mean Red Spiders. The Garrison (1197 Dundas Street West), 8 p.m., $10.

Urban Planner is Torontoist‘s guide to what’s on in Toronto, published every weekday morning, and in a weekend edition Friday afternoons. If you have an event you’d like considered, email all of its details—as well as images, if you’ve got any—to events@torontoist.com.

Rob Ford and his co-star, Councillor Michelle Berardinetti. A regular Baryshnikov! Photo courtesy of the National Ballet of Canada.

What are the holidays if not for the traditions that go along with them? Not least among these: the National Ballet of Canada’s annual production of The Nutcracker—which has its own traditions as well, including rollerskating bears, dancing horses, and celebrity cameos in the roles of the two Cannon Dolls, appearing for about two and a half minutes during the Act I battle scene.

This year, local journalists, musicians, sport figures, and TV personalities will festoon themselves in the bright clownish costumes throughout The Nutcracker‘s run, but all were overshadowed (and we mean that in a symbolic sense) by one guest in particular who appeared in the season’s opening performance Saturday afternoon: His Worship, Mayor Rob Ford.

Since the first announcement of his dance debut, the jokes have been a little too easy: stuff about “being light on his feet,” “playing the clown,”—and the biggest knee-slapper of all: that he would make any kind of gesture that’s friendly towards the arts.

Ford isn’t exactly an arts organization’s biggest ally, even an international force like the National Ballet of Canada. As he hopped around rambunctiously onstage according to James Kudelka’s choreography, eagerly urging Councillor Michelle Berardinetti at his side to fire the cannon and spew streamers towards the audience, his proposed 10 per cent budget cuts were taking similar aim at the NBC, which stands to lose $114,860 in funding from the City.

But just like trips to the family cottage, we all know that Ford is a stickler for tradition. So while he tends to ignore other invitations to smaller, independent shows (of which there have been, and continue to be, quite a few including another holiday show that’s on right now), it is interesting that he has chosen to participate in The Nutcracker. Because while it is still a holiday favourite for little girls in puffy party dresses, their parents, and their grandparents, it is exactly what you would call “safe.” Audiences will always chuckle when the robotic rat flies across the floor, gasp when the tree magically grows, melt when tiny little lambs bounce in disorganized unison, and sigh when the Sugar Plum Fairy has her final pas de deux with The Nutcracker Prince. And they will definitely always shell out for a ticket.

Karen Kain herself has said “If we do not make the revenue we need in Nutcracker, we’re really in big trouble and we can’t keep the company afloat.” While the NBC prefers to fill the rest of their season with alternative, challenging pieces, it relies on the annual holiday cash cow (a brutish term, really, for such a lovely show) in order to survive. But in the era of Rob Ford, where every dollar counts even more than before, the appeal to “play it safe” for the box office’s sake could be fatal to Toronto’s artistic edge.

The idea of artistic risks versus conventional productions has arisen in the local theatre arts media as of late, with several articles coming down on the new direction of Canadian Stage under the helm of artistic director Matthew Jocelyn (who is on the verge of announcing the line-up for his third season with the company). While other outlets have piped up in support of Canadian Stage’s mostly-acclaimed 2011–2012 season, it’s now in a rather sticky position with its home, The St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts, up for sale by the City. Many have said that the size of the Bluma Appel Theatre just isn’t the right fit for the company anymore, now that they’ve switched their box-office friendly seasons of big-budget, post-Broadway names for more challenging, conceptual works.

Soulpepper Theatre, known for remounting theatrical icons in a classical style, is also trying something new in 2012 by kicking off its season with Kim’s Convenience, the 2011 Toronto Fringe runaway hit that will be the company’s first original production. Though it might not draw in Soulpepper’s customary audiences, the season is also bolstered with other well-known names like The Crucible, Death of a Salesman, and A Christmas Carol—choices that could also fall under the realm of good, but also safe.

Moves by both of these companies are examples of efforts to draw in new and younger audiences, efforts that are poorly timed with an administration like Ford’s. And even with the arts sector cheerleading for the new Culture Plan (drawn up by a committee co-chaired by Kain), it’s worth noting that it too advocates for large scale, international artistic events—not necessarily those that seek to push boundaries or experiment extensively.

This may seem to be very Torontoist-y of us to take what might be a genuine gesture of goodwill towards a theatrical production on behalf of Ford and still find something to criticize, but if there was ever a point that an artist or arts supporter was content in saying “at least it’s something,” then we are in a very, very bad place.

The National Ballet of Canada has just announced the date we have all been waiting to hear about: when our mayor will make his cameo appearance in the Nutcracker. Everyone run and book tickets for this Saturday, December 10, at 2 p.m., for that is when His Worship will join in a long Toronto tradition of local figures taking the stage in the annual bit of holiday fun. (For a visual aid, the role he plays can be seen starting at about the 35-second mark in the video above.) Among Ford’s predecessors: former mayors David Miller and Barbara Hall, MP Olivia Chow, city councillors Michael Thompson and Adam Vaughan, Mats Sundin, Margaret Atwood, and Rick Mercer.

In his role, Ford will be “colourfully costumed as [a] Russian Petrouchka doll,” and will “shoot a cannon into the audience to begin the battle scene.”

The jokes, they write themselves.

Mister Heavenly. Photo by Jacqueline Di Milia.

BALLET: The National Ballet of Canada is unveiling its 60th season with Russian choreographer Alexei Ratmansky’s take on the classic tale of star-cross’d lovers in Romeo and Juliet. The show is set to a score by Prokofiev with Tony Award winner Richard Hudson in charge of set and costumes. Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts (145 Queen Street West), 7:30 p.m., $25–$234.

MUSIC: Indie rock group Mister Heavenly performs a show in Toronto tonight at the Great Hall. The trio is made up of Nick Thorburn of Islands, Honus Honus of Man Man, and Joe Plumber of Modest Mouse. Earlier this year Michael Cera temporarily joined the new group on its West Coast tour, and tonight they’ll hit the stage with Mr. Dream. The Great Hall (1087 Queen Street West), 8 p.m., $14.

READING: The Pivot Reading Series is hosting three authors this evening for its bi-weekly reading. Hitting the stage are Cris Costa, who recently completed a poetry chapbook called liv-id-in-wake; Hal Niedzviecki, whose most recent work is a collection of short stories called Look Down, This is Where it Must Have Happened; and Robin Richardson, with her first poetry collection, Grunt of the Minotaur. The Press Club (850 Dundas Street West), 8 p.m., PWYC.

Urban Planner is Torontoist‘s guide to what’s on in Toronto, published every weekday morning, and in a weekend edition Friday afternoons. If you have an event you’d like considered, email all of its details—as well as images, if you’ve got any—to events@torontoist.com.

Baryshnikov’s defection was not planned in advance. It was mostly improvised once opportunity presented itself. “My decision to stay in the West was never made in the former Soviet Union,” he told John Fraser of the National Post in a rare interview on June 5, 1999. “As I was preparing to leave on the trip to Canada in 1974 I honestly thought I would be coming back to my country. You have to understand my circumstances. If I had wanted to leave home permanently, if it had been something that was pushing at my mind so strongly I couldn’t resist it, then there were several opportunities before this trip.”
When the Bolshoi Ballet was double-booked for June 1974, with a planned tour to Canada as well as performances in England, Baryshnikov was added to the lineup for the former set of shows, while most of the Bolshoi’s best-known dancers went to London. Baryshnikov and Irina Kolpakova, a fellow star at the renowned Kirov Ballet, were invited in order to add interest to the troupe of past-their-peak and second-string dancers being sent to Canada.
The cross-Canada tour was to include stops in Ottawa and Montreal, then a week-long engagement at Toronto’s O’Keefe Centre (now Sony Centre), before heading west to Vancouver. Dance fans from across North America travelled to Canada to catch their first glimpse of the young and talented Baryshnikov.

The impressions of one audience member at a Bolshoi performance in Montreal were quoted in Gennady Smakov’s Baryshnikov: From Russia to the West (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1981). She recalled:

His head and hands are large, and his face—pale, peaked features and distant eyes—is the face of Petrouchka…Baryshnikov is able to perform unparalleled spectacular feats as an extension of classical rather than character or acrobatic dancing…He gets into a step sequence more quickly, complicates it more variously, and prolongs it more extravagantly than any dancer I’ve ever seen. And he finishes when he wants to, not when he has to. Perhaps his greatest gift is his sense of fantasy in classical gesture. He pursues the extremes of its logic so that every step takes on an unforeseen dimension. His grande pirouette is a rhapsody of swelling volume and displaced weight.

Veronica Tennant, then a rising star with the National Ballet of Canada, was in attendance at a show in Toronto. In a segment broadcast on CBC’s The National Magazine on June 29, 1999, she cheered: “He was even more spectacular than you could have possibly have imagined. The house went crazy. When he took off and jumped, it was literally like a cannon shot and the entire audience just gasped when he took off in his jumps.” While the sub-par Bolshoi troupe as a whole was being savaged in the critical press, Baryshnikov was being hailed as the successor to the greatest of Russian dancers, Vaslav Nijinsky and Rudolf Nureyev.

Globe and Mail, June 8, 1974.

Baryshnikov had been groomed for dancing since his childhood in Riga, Latvia. In 1964, he was recruited as a sixteen-year-old to study at the acclaimed Vaganova Ballet Academy. Three years later, he joined Leningrad’s esteemed Kirov Ballet. He lived the sheltered, comfortable life of a star in the Soviet Union. He had a spacious apartment, and received the highest salary of the dancers at the Kirov company. He enjoyed relative freedom from the deprivations experienced in the rest of Soviet society.
Seeking to remain politically neutral, he’d always avoided becoming a member of the Communist Party. But prior to the 1974 tour, he’d come under increasing pressure, as a prominent personage, to do his duty. He told Fraser: “I knew the government was beginning to feel that it was time to do my duty: to marry my live-in girlfriend, to join the Party, to sign on to the system. Once you rose to a certain height professionally, they always came for you.” The Kirov Ballet, like all Soviet institutions, was infiltrated by both official KGB agents and informants—and they made no secret of their surveillance of him. After his return from a dance tour to London in 1972, KGB officers informed him that they had a record of everything he’d done and everyone he’d seen abroad—including his romantic liaison with an American girl.
“It was during this period,” the dancer told Fraser, “that I really began to take stock of my life and realize how uneasy I was feeling most of the time.”
More than political concerns, Baryshnikov’s strongest motivation for defecting was his artistic aspiration. The Kirov Ballet was especially conservative in an already culturally conservative milieu, performing mostly classical works. Baryshnikov found it constraining because he wanted to explore more experimental, contemporary dance, and to push his own abilities further. And, as Barbara Aria puts it in Misha (St. Martin’s Press, 1989), Baryshnikov “couldn’t choose his own roles or partners, he couldn’t choose choreographers, he had no choice in where, or when, or what he danced.”
Nevertheless, few anticipated he would defect during the 1974 tour.
John Fraser, then a young reporter and dance critic for the Globe and Mail, attended the Bolshoi’s opening night performance at the O’Keefe Centre on the evening of Monday, June 24, 1974. He’d just returned to his office to compose his review of the show—scathing save for a heady measure of praise for Baryshnikov—when he noticed a message marked “Urgent” sitting on his typewriter.
The telephone message was from Trish Barnes, then-wife of New York Times critic Clive Barnes. Intrigued, Fraser called her back. As Fraser recounted in Private View (Bantam Books, 1988), Barnes asked Fraser to do her a favour. “You have to get a message through to him tonight or tomorrow,” he said, referring to Baryshnikov. “It’s absolutely crucial. I tried to do it in Montreal, but the situation was impossible. Use your ingenuity and see what you can do.” She gave him a telephone number to relay to the Russian, with the message that friends wanted to speak with him.
Fraser probed for clarifying information, but Barnes remained vague. She repeated: “He has three very close friends here who simply have to make contact with him. Remember these names: Dina, Tina, and Sasha. Have you got them? Dina, Tina, and Sasha.”
Fraser hastily typed his review to meet his deadline and rushed back to the O’Keefe Centre, where he knew an opening night gala was being held. He found Baryshnikov, bored and disinterested in all around him, sitting at the head table. The dancer was joined by the artistic director of the National Ballet of Canada, Celia Franca, the Party apparatchiks overseeing the Bolshoi tour, Alexander Lapauri and his wife Raissa Struchkova, as well as KGB agents acting under the guise of being translators, and representatives of the company sponsoring the event. Fraser’s initial attempt to make contact with Baryshnikov by striking a conservation with Franca resulted in his being ushered to his rightful place—to a table-setting on the other side of the room.
As the gala wore on, guests began hopping from table to table to mingle. Finding Baryshnikov alone, Fraser stepped over and delivered his message. He spoke in broken French because he knew no Russian and the dancer could speak no English. Baryshnikov was elated at hearing his friends’ names, but Fraser’s intrigue quickly descended into farce.
Perhaps inspired by a cheap spy novel, Fraser had written the telephone number on a tiny scrap of sticky paper and hidden it beneath his signet ring. The intent was that when the two shook hands, the number would stick to the dancer’s palm. In reality, the scrap of paper had gotten tangled around the ring, and Fraser had to discreetly pry it off—while Baryshnikov started laughing aloud. The dancer retrieved a notebook from his pocket and, after Fraser borrowed a pen from a nearby table, recorded the number. He finished the task just as Lapauri and Franca were returned to the table.
Baryshnikov found an opportunity to call the number, and his friends rushed to Toronto. Alexander Minz (nicknamed Sasha), who was a former Kirov character dancer, and dance photographer Dina Makarova arrived that week from New York. And Christina Berlin, Baryshnikov’s romantic liaison on his 1972 tour, flew from London. These friends—along with a hastily convened network of local acquaintances like Peterson and Tim Stewart, who owned the farmhouse—set the wheels in motion for the dancer’s defection.
But a hesitant Baryshnikov wavered; he was nervous about whether he would succeed, or even find work, in the West. He was calmed when his friends made clear that they would employ their connections to the North American dance community to help him.
The final decision was made, and a plan was finalized. At 10:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 29—after the Bolshoi’s final Toronto show—Baryshnikov would slip quietly through the stage door to a car parked outside a nearby restaurant, and be whisked to a safe house.
That evening, however, the plan began unravelling almost immediately. A technical problem at the O’Keefe Centre delayed the start of the show. So when Baryshnikov emerged on-stage for his final number—the pas de deux from Don Quixote—he was already 15 minutes behind schedule. And by pouring all his energy and emotion into what he knew would be his last performance, Baryshnikov prompted another delay by earning curtain call after curtain call from the ecstatic crowd.
Rushing to his dressing room, he learned that the whole company was expected on a bus as soon as possible to attend a mandatory closing reception. Heading out the stage door in street clothes, just a few feet from the waiting bus, Baryshnikov stopped to sign autographs for a gathered crowd. Sensing that this was his final opportunity, he slipped into the crowd of autograph seekers. As voices from the bus called to him—”Misha, where are you going?”—he broke into a run, with fans streaming after him across the parking lot. Not knowing exactly where he was going, he sprinted into the street. With brakes squealing, a car nearly hit him.
By this time, the getaway car’s driver had grown worried because Baryshnikov was a half-hour late. He decided to head to the theatre to investigate whether the dancer might have changed his mind or been caught. As soon as he emerged from the parked car, the driver spotted a figure moving quickly through the night and hustled Baryshnikov into a passing taxi. They made their way to the farmhouse in Caledon Hills.

Globe and Mail, July 6, 1974.

On Monday, July 1, news of Baryshnikov’s defection was plastered on the front page of newspapers around the world. It was another day before Peterson, responsible for filing the star’s political asylum claim, secured a special permit allowing the dancer to remain in Canada for at least six months. The dancer’s first post-defection interview was granted to Fraser, an apparent reward for his part in the drama, and appeared on the front page of the Globe and Mail the following Saturday.
Back in the USSR, the KGB spread rumours that Baryshnikov had merely been allowed a short-term sojourn in the West. For years, officials would maintain his apartment as he had left it to perpetuate the ruse that Baryshnikov might return at any moment. But posters of the ballet star were quietly removed from the streets all over the Soviet Union. It wasn’t long before, Aria adds, “Baryshnikov’s name would be removed from books and his image on film and tape locked away.”

To find relief from the stress and mental fatigue of his situation, Baryshnikov threw himself into work. Having decided to stage his first post-defection performance in Canada, as Aria tells it, he signed on to join Veronica Tennant and the National Ballet of Canada in a performance of August Bournonville’s La Sylphide. It would be a personal and professional challenge because, with no knowledge of English, he had to communicate with his dance partner and others in French. Furthermore, the Danish choreography was an entirely different form from the Russian school of ballet. But, Tennant recalled for The National, he picked up the technique in a snap. “It was extraordinary,” she added, “to see someone learn and absorb so quickly. And then the words of English started to come within a matter of days.” Staged at Ontario Place, the production aired on Canadian television on August 14, 1974.
“But it was very clear that I wouldn’t stay in Canada,” Baryshnikov explained to Simon Houpt in the Globe and Mail of May 15, 1999. He gravitated to New York City where he first performed with the American Ballet Theatre, then the New York City Ballet, and later formed his own contemporary dance company, the White Oak Dance Project. Along the way, as his fame spread, he appeared in Broadway productions and Hollywood movies.
Baryshnikov has never considered himself courageous compared to those in his country who continued to live under the yoke of Soviet rule; he has remained notoriously shy about discussing his defection at length. Even in June 1999, when he reunited with some of the local players in his Cold War drama on the occasion of receiving an honorary degree from the University of Toronto, the only journalist to publish anything more than perfunctory quotes from the acclaimed dancer was John Fraser.
Other sources consulted: John Fraser, Globe and Mail (March 5, 2004); John Fraser, Saturday Night (October 1986); Martin Knelman, Toronto Star (September 25, 2010); Robert Lewis, Maclean’s (July 11, 1994); William Littler, Toronto Star (June 5, 1999); and Susan Walker, Toronto Star (June 16, 1999).