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Baryshnikov's life echoes Gene Kelly's refrain, "Gotta Dance." It does not require much stimulation to get Misha's blood stirring. If anything, he has an excess of high-voltage energy. It has been there as long as he can remember. Both he and his mother, a dress fitter in Riga, Latvia, recognized it when he was a child, and they spent a great deal of time trying to channel it. "I was interested in everything," he says, "football, fencing, gymnastics. I even sang in the children's choir. I was also very bad at the piano." All that, in his view, "was better than sitting home and studying" — the problem being more the sitting than the studying. About the only thing he could sit still for was the stage. "Any performance excited me," he recalls. This interest prompted him to apply at the ballet school in Riga, principally "because I had to try something."
The school was attached to a conservatory, and the musical atmosphere was different from anything that Misha had ever known. "By the end of the year, it was difficult to tear me away. All my other activities became secondary, then disappeared. I would leave for school in the morning and not return until night."
At twelve, he was old to begin serious dance studies, perhaps, but talent overcame that handicap. By the time he was 16, he was invited to join a dance troupe touring and performing for teenagers. They went to Leningrad, where he found the atmosphere of the old czarist capital intoxicating. As a dancer, he could not help visiting the Kirov school. There he happened to attend a class taught by the late Alexander Ivanovich Pushkin, a great master who coached Nureyev and Valery Panov. Not hoping for much, Baryshnikov approached Pushkin (no kin to the famed Russian poet) and said, "I would very much like to be your pupil." Pushkin felt his legs and body and asked him to jump up and down. Says Baryshnikov, "I was like a young goat knocking over tables and chairs." Pushkin quickly conducted him downstairs, where the school's doctors "felt me the way they would a race horse." Apparently they approved of his conformation, and since Pushkin was about to start teaching a group of dancers of Baryshnikov's age, he was virtually in.
Misha did have to spend the summer awaiting final word. He tried to pass the time fishing, a sport he still loves, but inwardly he agonized. "It would have been shattering if I had not been accepted. Already I was living the life of the Kirov. Seeing Leningrad and the school was like an electrifying shock. I could not imagine living apart from it." Not knowing how to work out alone, he did his best to "prepare myself morally" for the work that he hoped he would soon be doing. He is a trifle vague as to what this means, but ventures: "There comes a moment in a young artist's life when he knows he has to bring something to the stage from within himself. He has to put in something in order to be able to take something out. Many performers are physically well trained but not morally disciplined and content onstage. They fall apart."