A Tribute to Robbins and His Artistic Partners, Past and Present

<First published online in the New York Times on May 3, 2008>

A nice touch to the current New York City Ballet season - observing the 10th anniversary of Jerome Robbins’s death - is its inclusion of guest artists. At Tuesday’s gala the mezzo-soprano Susan Graham sang “Somewhere” during “West Side Story Suite”: crossover at its best (and far more idiomatic than Leonard Bernstein’s own infelicitous recording with Kiri Te Kanawa and José Carreras).

European guest dancers will appear in Robbins’s ballets in June; just now, a series of different American Ballet Theater men is gracing various City Ballet lineups of his “Fancy Free.” Marcelo Gomes will dance in it on Sunday; Herman Cornejo on Tuesday; and on Thursday there was Ethan Stiefel, returning to the company where he first made his name.

“Fancy Free” opened the new program of Robbins’s “Bernstein Collaborations” on Thursday night at the New York State Theater, and it’s amazing how rewatchable it proves to be. It occurred to me that it actually becomes a reverse-gender account of the Judgment of Paris myth - three deities competing - and may well have been prompted partly by Antony Tudor’s 1938 ballet of that title. (Robbins came yet closer to Tudor’s concept with the three “Gimmick” strippers of “Gypsy.”)

There was nothing guest-star-like about Mr. Stiefel on Thursday: the ballet’s male camaraderie had real sweetness, with him in the middle, most open-hearted role. Damian Woetzel, always a model of American directness and informality, made time stand still in the rumba, and Joaquin De Luz was the appealingly pint-size showoff.

I love the three solos that these men dance: displays of virility absurd and enchanting at the same time. What a glowing partnership Tiler Peck has developed these 12 months with Mr. Woetzel. She showed here the beating heart that I hope she will soon reveal in her Balanchine roles too.

“Fancy Free,” the most familiar of this program’s three ballets, also proves the most substantial. Robbins and Bernstein intended otherwise with “Dybbuk” (1974), a series of dances that abstract aspects of S. Ansky’s play “The Dybbuk.” But my mind goes in and out of Robbins’s version of the story without being able to settle.

Part of the problem is that Robbins often applied to “Dybbuk,” with unremitting earnestness, the cartoon emphasis that so suits his comedy ballets: his characters keep striking indicative poses and hitting musical punch lines. What story there is starts to look like another gender reversal: tell the “Dybbuk” story in dance terms, with its tale of religion and vows of eternal love that bring one lover back as a presence from beyond the grave, and it feels like a male-female answer to the female-male “Bayadère.” (And the intensely Jewish aura of “Dybbuk” replaces the Indian climate of that 19th century classic.)

But Robbins won’t give us a narrative, and so “Dybbuk” is just a suite. (In 1980 he abbreviated it into a “Suite of Dances.”) So, obviously, is “West Side Story Suite,” which I reviewed two days ago. Again Robbins applied cartoon methods to serious ends. Not always, though. In several dances here, and in brief passages of “Dybbuk,” he gets a connective rhythm going, so that we seem to enter the characters’ thoughts. That’s what Robert Fairchild, as Tony in “West Side Story,” managed on Thursday in “Something’s Coming.” And Janie Taylor (a debut) had it throughout “Dybbuk”: you felt her character’s crying soul, her psychic need.

You can currently also honor the Robbins anniversary with not one exhibition but two, and they’re neighbors at Lincoln Center. I need to revisit “New York Story: Jerome Robbins and His World” at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (which runs until June 28): its wealth of detail takes in his background, his politics, his musicals, his ballets, his visual and musical collaborators, and more. My favorite exhibit was his trunk, a real old touring trunk with labels bearing the names of all the ballet and musical companies with which he traveled from the 1940s on. In no other theater exhibition could such a trunk belong so well, since Robbins onstage so often showed such an acute sense of theater life offstage.

Meanwhile, City Ballet has just opened a new array of poster-size photographs on all four levels of the State Theater promenade. Amid the gala flimflam of opening night, they were scarcely visible, but on Thursday it was a pleasure to walk around and take them all in. They too include Robbins on Broadway, Robbins in rehearsal, Robbins the dancer, Robbins the boy with the bursting grin, Robbins the elegant old man hard at work, and - above all - Robbins’s ballets with their original and subsequent casts. The detail of the captions is particularly welcome. At this first inspection, the only error my pedantic eye spotted was a photograph of a Jenifer Ringer and Ask la Cour in “Piano Pieces” that is dated as 2008, when surely it was taken in 2007.

Inside the theater the commemoration continues. “Bernstein Collaborations” was introduced by a film sequence of Robbins in 1994 rehearsing with Mr. Woetzel in the rumba solo of “Fancy Free” (the ballet that first brought Robbins and Bernstein together, 50 years before). Moments later, but 14 years after the film was made, the curtain rose on, yes, “Fancy Free” with Mr. Woetzel dancing the rumba. As another Robbins character sang, “Tradition!”

@New York Times, 2008