Discussing 'B Plus, Dancing for Baryshnikov'

Get to know the foremost dancer of the 20th century, Mikhail Baryshnikov through Michael Langlois' new memoir, "B Plus: Dancing for Mikhail Baryshnikov at American Ballet Theatre." This memoir is an intimate look at the upper echelons of the dance world, as it appeared to a young man who made it to the top of the profession.

This event is Thursday, January 24 at 7:30 pm.

Michael Langlois began studying ballet at the age of ten, convinced it would catapult him from Pop Warner directly into the NFL. Eventually forced to choose between football and ballet, he looked at his less-than-five-foot frame and decided ballet might be a more practical option. He went on to train at the North Carolina School of the Arts and the School of American Ballet in New York before being offered a job at American Ballet Theatre by the foremost dancer of the 20th century: Mikhail Baryshnikov.

“What makes ballet so intensely satisfying and beautiful to me,” he writes, “is that it is so spare. There are no props. There are no instruments that have to be manipulated. It is just the dancer at that moment, and whoever they are and whatever they are capable of doing exists then and only then.”

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