Mikhail Baryshnikov, 61 and still alight (and coming to Santa Monica)

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Given the randomness of finding cabs in New York when you’re in a hurry, I arrived half an hour early at the Baryshnikov Arts Center last week to interview Mikhail Baryshnikov. I let his assistant know I was downstairs, she said ‘no problem,’ and I headed for the elevator. When I emerged from the elevator, Baryshnikov was in the hall to meet me, greet me and shepherd me into a waiting conference room.

Baryshnikov doesn’t like to waste time. At 61, he defies age as he once defied gravity. He may be a grandfather, graying now, but the fabled Russian dancer has the stride and carriage of a young man. He is small for a dancer, just 5-foot-7, but muscular and fit in his T-shirt and slacks. He works at the ballet barre every day, he tells me, and he looks terrific.

Why shouldn’t he? Life has been good to him. He’s just back from vacation after touring several European countries, and on Friday he launches a U.S. tour with dancer Ana Laguna at Santa Monica College’s Broad Stage. Besides running an arts center, touring and raising four children, he has in recent years courted Carrie Bradshaw on the last season of HBO’s “Sex and the City,” inhabited Beckett plays at the New York Theatre Workshop and published a book of his own photography. As he says in his lightly accented, idiosyncratic English: “I have the life of seven cats.”

But dancing professionally at his age comes at a price. “Nobody is born a dancer,” Baryshnikov wrote in the 1976 book, ‘Baryshnikov at Work.’ “You have to want it more than anything.” He has had many surgeries, particularly on his right knee, and says experience has been a good teacher. “I know the shortcuts for my body, how long it takes to warm up, what I should do to dance this particular piece,” he says. “I’ve been hurt quite a few times. The more injuries you get, the smarter you get.”

To read the story in Sunday’s Arts & Books section, click here.

--Barbara Isenberg