"I don't know who you could really put next to him," said ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov, reached yesterday in Madrid. "To imitate somebody like Michael Jackson is impossible. Why bother? You just relax and admire."
Jackson was a perfectionist, and could relate to other perfectionists. Baryshnikov got to know him through Elizabeth Taylor, who would "drag him to see me dance," Baryshnikov said, when he was at American Ballet Theatre and later when performing in the White Oak Dance Project, his modern-dance company. They would talk about ballet -- Jackson had a lot of questions, he recalled, "like a 12-year-old" -- and he would ask about working with choreographers. He told Baryshnikov that choreographers would suggest ideas to him, but that he created his own dances. What Baryshnikov remembers most about Jackson, he said, was "not even his turns or his grabbing his crotch. Just his simple, bouncy walk across the stage, that was what was most beautiful and arresting, swinging his hips, kicking his heel forward. That's to me what he is: that superior confidence in his body as a dancer. You wanted to say, 'Wow, this guy, what a cat; he can really move in his own way.' "
