Step Right Up, Kids (and Thank the Dance Gods You’re Not Elephants)
<First published online in the New York Times on May 1, 2008>
With Jerome Robbins’s death in 1998, roles in his ballets and shows began to be taken by performers who had never met him. Ten years later, we’ve already entered the era when his ballets are danced by those born after his lifetime. Enter the School of American Ballet.
New York City Ballet’s spring season will largely be a Robbinsfest. It opened on Tuesday night at the New York State Theater with a gala triple bill of his work, starting with “Circus Polka,” the Stravinsky ballet he choreographed in 1972 for 48 children and himself as the Ringmaster cracking the whip. To see the number and the tininess of these children is, for many of us, to recall an even more classic and adorable Robbins moment: the March of the Siamese Children in “The King and I” (1951). But whereas the Siamese children are solemn and ceremonious, these Stravinskian children are ebullient and gleeful. Robbins has them entering in successive groups of 16; the third and final one features the smallest tots, who, of course, win a loud gasp from the audience. The eldest are 14, the youngest 8.
Their youthfulness is the point. Stravinsky wrote the music for George Balanchine to choreograph (in 1942) for circus elephants, and it is legend that he agreed only when Balanchine assured him that the elephants were “very young.” Actually it was choreographed for 50 women (and starred Balanchine’s wife Vera Zorina) and 50 elephants (and starred the cow elephant Modoc), but no matter: Stravinsky’s score is dedicated, “For a Young Elephant.”
It was Robbins, however, who for City Ballet’s 1972 Stravinsky Festival brought “Circus Polka” back to the stage, now for children of the School of American Ballet: his whip-cracking role preserved the circus element. On Tuesday that role was played by Robert La Fosse, a leading City Ballet performer of Robbins roles from 1986 until 2002. When all the kids have arrived, he marshals them in three concentric rings (revolving clockwise, counterclockwise, clockwise) and the tots brightly trot to music that, unlike them, has an elephantine galumph.
In the 1972 Robbins original, they ended up in the formation of the initials “I. S.” (Igor Stravinsky). Now, they read “J. R.” This was first done for a 1998 tribute to Robbins, when the Ringmaster was Mikhail Baryshnikov. (A splendid photograph of the Baryshnikov finale hangs in the New York State Theater. In February, when I last checked, the caption mistakenly attributed the choreography to “Balanchine, 1942”; I hope someone has honored the Robbins celebration by correcting it at last.)
Film and slide-show displays on Tuesday paid tribute to Robbins as both dancer and choreographer at City Ballet. The evening’s more familiar but substantial pieces were “The Four Seasons” (1979) and “West Side Story Suite” (1995), nicely illustrating two different sides of his talent, ballet classicism and dramatic characterization.
Robbins’s humor and wit keep bubbling up throughout “The Four Seasons.” The dance for four male zephyrs in “Spring” stays marvelously unpredictable. (Which of them will do the next jump? And how many?) The slow iambic throbs of the knee-bends in the “Summer” adagio add their own sultry, suggestive slyness, and the fecund, lavish virtuoso outpouring of “Fall” is a geyser of Bacchanalian revelry.
By contrast the dancing of “West Side Story Suite” is earnest, its emphasis on character and youthful intensity. My reactions to this piece vacillate rapidly. On the one hand, “West Side Story” is now so familiar that parts seem corny. How many jazzy finger-splaying gestures, how many sideways leg-extensions can we see and still respond sincerely?
On the other, there are rhythms and images here that genuinely get under the skin. I can’t resist the rapid double hand claps in “America,” for example. And when Damian Woetzel leads the Jets in a little skimming step from side to side, the way it spreads spatially with each mini-phrase is always exhilarating. Starting as a tight little nucleus, Mr. Woetzel and company have soon expanded, and we feel the excitement of this before we pause to feel their aggression and defensiveness.
It was remarkably good to see the unmannered cleanness of City Ballet’s dancing (the School of American Ballet’s too) throughout Tuesday’s performance. And the dancing of “The Four Seasons” has acquired more bloom than when the ballet was revived in January (yet more is needed). Tyler Angle’s performance in the “Summer” pas de deux is especially welcome: at the apex of the sideways jumps in his solo, he opens up and out with luxuriant ease.
Mr. Woetzel is one of a number of men - others include Mr. Angle, Robert Fairchild (Tony) and Sean Suozzi - who capture the streetwise New York body language of “West Side Story” with heart-catching intensity. Not only is this spring season a chance to rediscover Robbins’s choreography in depth and breadth, but it is also New York’s last chance to cherish the dancing of Mr. Woetzel, who gives his farewell performance on June 18. Who, looking at him as Riff in “West Side Story,” can believe that he was doing lead roles well over 20 years ago? In a ballet like this he still looks the embodiment of adolescence: raw, vulnerable, dangerous and doing everything for the first time.
@New York Times, 2008