Robbins’s Legacy of Anguish and Exuberance
<First published online in the New York Times on April 27, 2008>
THE choreographer and director Jerome Robbins, who would have been 90 on Oct. 11, died 10 years ago this July. This double anniversary is a cue for worldwide commemoration. “Gypsy,” the show he directed and choreographed in 1959, is again a hit on Broadway. A handsome Robbins exhibition, reflecting many facets of his career, is running until June 28 at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, at Lincoln Center. New York City Ballet’s spring season, starting Tuesday, will include no fewer than 33 Robbins works, ranging chronologically from “Fancy Free” (1944) to “Brandenburg” (1997). Other companies - from Seattle to Sydney, from San Francisco to Paris - have presented or will present Robbins programs during the year.
In 1989 Robbins, who had been world-famous since the 1940s, staged one kind of autobiography: “Jerome Robbins’s Broadway.” This remarkable anthology brought together numbers from shows including “On the Town” (1944), “Billion Dollar Baby” (1945), “Look, Ma, I’m Dancing” (1948), “The King and I” (1951), “Peter Pan” (1955), “West Side Story” (1957), “Gypsy” (1959) and “Fiddler on the Roof” (1964) - productions that had embodied a golden age of Broadway musicals. It was an extraordinary retrospective, running for 633 performances and winning four Tony Awards. After the first night Robbins was in tears: “I don’t want it to be over.”
In the two years that followed he spent months working on a yet more autobiographical show. He called it “The Poppa Piece”: it addressed issues in his life that stemmed from his father. Mr. Robbins Sr., who had come to New York in 1905, had been born Herschel Rabinowitz in the land that is now part Lithuania, part Belarus, and then had recently been taken from Poland by Russia. The nexus of issues he embodied for his son (who spent decades in psychoanalysis) included Jewish tradition, masculinity, homophobia and other aspects of repression.
Somehow “The Poppa Piece” tied this small-scale patriarch to the most notorious event of Jerome Robbins’s life, the 1953 House Un-American Activities Committee hearing in which the young but celebrated choreographer named Communist Party members he had known. Though Robbins remained otherwise silent about this throughout his life, in “The Poppa Piece” he labeled it The Trial. And he acknowledged that, for him, The Trial was always about betrayal.
“I betrayed my manhood, my Jewishness, my parents, my sister,” he wrote in a diary. “I can’t undo it, and I can’t undo it in this piece.” Though the piece was in rehearsal for months - prolonged gestation periods had been characteristic of his career, with his casts all expected to learn multiple alternative versions of each piece of material - in the fall of 1991 Robbins suddenly put the lid on it, canceled rehearsals and stopped all further work on it.
This was characteristic. More than once before in his career Robbins, the great showman (and probably the most brilliant show doctor in Broadway history), had known when to close a show before it reached the stage or Broadway because he could see it was doomed.
Shameful as Robbins’s 1953 testimony was, his effort to address it in art seems admirable. His decision to abandon that effort seems more commendable yet. Having put it behind him, he went back not to Broadway - which he had generally renounced in the 1960s - but to ballet.
While he was a young dancer, first on Broadway and then in Ballet Theater (well before it became American Ballet Theater), most of the foremost choreographers of the age - Michel Fokine, Leonide Massine, George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Antony Tudor - had created roles for him to dance before he was 25. Then he worked with Leonard Bernstein and the designer Oliver Smith to create his first ballet, the smash hit “Fancy Free.” An American classic, it is still being danced from coast to coast. Before the year was out, Robbins, Bernstein and Smith had turned the same idea into a musical: “On the Town,” another triumph. He was just 26.
For the next 20 years Robbins rode two horses, creating ballets and musicals with equal success. The ballets included “Interplay” (1945), “The Cage” (1951), “Afternoon of a Faun” and “Fanfare” (1953), “The Concert” (1956), “N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz” (1958) and “Moves” (1959) - of which remain in repertory today.
He was an emphatically American artist. When he formed a ballet company, he called it Ballets U.S.A. The views of New York he created in “Fancy Free,” “On the Town” and “West Side Story” have entered into the mythology of the city. He was a crucial figure in what I have called the New York School of Choreography: a diverse post-1940s range of modernist choreographers who took inspiration from those very different senior figures Balanchine, Martha Graham and Tudor, and who also fed aspects of New York street life into their dance theater. Some of his comedy movement has the quality of New Yorker cartoons; many of his dances have the improvisational, unstudied air that was the lifeblood of much American art; and he had hot lines to adolescence and to jazz.
The whole arc of his career as dancer and choreographer kept bringing him into contact with another father figure: Balanchine. Though an immensely authoritative figure, Balanchine, to Robbins, was genial and encouraging. Balanchine seldom paid serious compliments to any other choreographers. But we know more of his feelings for Robbins than for any other dancemaker of his day.
He asked Robbins to stage the fight between mice and toys in “The Nutcracker” (1954), and they collaborated on other projects up to the 1970s. He loved “The Concert” so much that he once played the part of the hen-pecked but lascivious husband in it. He kept watching “Dances at a Gathering” from the wings. And he told the ballerina Violette Verdy: “You know, Violette, the real American choreographer at the New York City Ballet is Jerry, not me. He’s the one who can capture the fashions, the trends, the relaxed character of American dancers, their lack of a past or a style, but an ability to do all they’re asked without discussion or preconception.” In turn Robbins in the 1970s could write in his journal, “When I watch Balanchine work, it’s so extraordinary that I want to give up.”
There were complications between the two. Balanchine knew that Robbins’s ballets were almost invariably hits, and his less pleasant remarks are likely to have been prompted by jealousy or frustration; likewise some of his compliments may have been prompted by his awareness of Robbins’s usefulness to the company. Robbins, in turn, did not always behave well either.
Even so, it was to Balanchine’s company, New York City Ballet, that Robbins devoted most of the last 30 years of his life. This kept him in Balanchine’s shadow, but on the whole he loved and revered that shadow. It is hard to think of any world-famous artist in history working as Robbins chose to: as great a celebrity as Balanchine or more so, and much wealthier, he used the dancers Balanchine had trained, he used ballet technique as Balanchine had developed it, and his ballets were performed in a repertory that was dominated by Balanchine’s. He had the humility (and the enthusiasm) to regard Balanchine as the greater artist, as the choreographer from whom he could always learn.
His permanent return to ballet, and specifically to City Ballet, occurred in 1969, with the epoch-making “Dances at a Gathering.” Where Balanchine ballets are architectural constructions in space and time, “Dances” - classic of 1960s nonhierarchical equality and intimacy - showed dancers responding to the space, to the music and to one another, becoming a community, summoning up a dreamlike kaleidoscope of feelings as the music (piano pieces by Chopin) proceeded like changes in the light.
In the solo that opens the ballet, the first male dancer addresses the audience so little that he may be hard to identify. (At the Royal Ballet, Robbins told Rudolf Nureyev, of all people, “I don’t want the audience to know who you are until you’re off the stage.”) In its first 10 years at either City Ballet or the Royal Ballet, each of its dancers had in it an unaffected bloom that went beyond anything you knew they had achieved elsewhere. You could see senior choreographers - Tudor in “The Leaves Are Fading,” Frederick Ashton in “A Month in the Country,” even Balanchine in ballets like “Duo Concertant,” “Sonatine” and “Robert Schumann’s ‘Davidsbündlertänze,’ ” - borrowing from the flavors and devices of this Robbins dance drama.
The purity that Robbins was seeking in the plotless, abstract conditions of his later ballets may well have embodied the redemption he felt he needed for his own guilt. (Naming names was not the only thing he felt guilty about; apart from his many repressions, he was notorious for the tongue-lashings he inflicted on successive performers over the years.) Often enough he achieved that purity, and in ballets that survive. He could even work with the younger Twyla Tharp, whom he greatly admired, on “Brahms/Handel” (1984) for New York City Ballet, surely still the most irresistible and ebullient masterpiece created for that company since the death of Balanchine the year before.
Three biographies of Robbins have been published in this decade; I have recently read all of them. Greg Lawrence’s “Dance With Demons: The Life of Jerome Robbins” (Putnam’s, 2001) has an astonishing wealth of personal and professional detail; Amanda Vaill’s “Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins” (Broadway, 2006) and Deborah Jowitt’s “Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance” (Simon & Schuster, 2004) draw, in equal detail, from Robbins’s private papers: Ms. Vaill’s work has the largest amount of personal material, but Ms. Jowitt’s, the best shaped of all three books, has the strongest sense of his place in dance history and of the main issues, personal and artistic, in his life.
I enjoyed (and am indebted to) all three. And each, despite the many accounts of Robbins’s cruelty to performers and even to office staff members, make me like the man immensely. He was passionate about art and literature (and dogs), he was loved by a wide range of friends to whom he gave real consideration, he had few affectations or offstage pretensions, and he was often the best fun in the world.
His onstage legacy remains colossal. Much of it will not need too much dusting off; few of City Ballet’s Robbins works have been out of repertory worldwide for more than a few seasons. Plenty of it will continue spreading in the years to come. (In 2009 Pacific Northwest Ballet, in Seattle, is to perform “Dances at a Gathering” for the first time.) The big issue now is, How well are his dances surviving him? I am impatient to find out in the coming months.
@New York Times, 2008