He ran through about a dozen years' worth of soft-rock and mild dance-floor songs in English and Spanish — "Bailamos," "No Me Digas Que No," "Hero," "Dirty Dancer" (with video guest-rap by Lil Wayne), "I Like It" (with video guest-rap by Pitbull).
Afterwards he travelled to St Petersburg, where Zelensky, a hero to the dancer when he was growing up, phoned him up and "took me under his arm".
He sometimes seemed to be re-living his own youth in Johannesburg in the Fifties, when he was not only a politician, but a township hero, ladies' man, dancer and boxer, and loved talking about the old black musicians, writers and sportsmen.
Here the hero faced three dancers as three suns that offered no hope until the projected sun, like a pneuma or spirit, offered some sort of metaphysical relief.
He adores La Traviata and loved the film Billy Elliot, in which the young ballet-dancer hero ends up on the stage of the Royal Opera House.
To publicize the story further, Zadra posted a link to her Go Fund Me profile on the Facebook page of one of her professional heroes, the American dancer Misty Copeland.
"Wendy is a hero and a great dancer of the 21st century," Mr. Woetzel said.
A quiet meditation on aging, it also addresses Mr. Baryshnikov's larger-than-life status and people's desire, as Mr. Neumann put it, for "him to be the hero, the extraordinary virtuosic dancer again and again".
Cervantes's quixotic hero, accompanied by 13 dancers, is filmed on Paris Métro platforms to the sound of African music, flamenco and hip-hop (Aug. 29, 30 and 31).
Paul Berthalet Brian Stokes Mitchelll), a French Resistance hero and once a brilliant dancer, has been transformed by injury into an embittered puppeteer.
