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.”

Lee Yupin, the concert's director of choreography, gives some tips on what to look out for: "See the elegance, discipline, beauty, grace and strength at the same time. "All these are subtle qualities which you cannot describe. It's the inner-most passion that the dancers have in order to actually fulfill this kind of dancing dream." A full length ballet normally has three acts to it that usually lasts more than one-and-a-half hours. Mindful not to bore a local public who are new to the experience, Yupin purposely cut the KK show to just one hour and two acts, with an interval.