Jerome Robbins - An American Original
By Clive Barnes
April 1990
Jerome Robins at 70 is a genius standing alone on the prickly eminence of his success. Even that success itself is now a symbol of American dance, for Jerome Robbins at 70 has not simply become the greatest living classic choreographer, he is almost more significantly the greatest American-born classic choreographer who has ever lived. Thus his career, by virtually embracing the whole story of American ballet almost from its beginnings, is a paradigm for its dancing times. A heavy burden, apparently lightly, or at least gracefully, borne.
Robbins by now is no stranger to panegyrics, and his ears must burn with praise with a regularity doubtless becoming monotonous. This year his return to Broadway after a quarter of a century’s absence, not with the staging of a new Broadway musical, but with a retrospective of his two decades of labor in that theatrical vineyard, has been the latest, and perhaps the most fervent occasion, for the casting of laurels.
Certainly Robbins has done the musical enormous service –indeed he transfigured what might one day, and one day quite soon, be regarded as that theatrical form’s final period of glory. Although posterity will certainly remember him for Broadway, it is surely his career in ballet that will be honored as long as ballet itself is honored.
His Broadway skills, consummate as they are, are still as much those of an interpreter of other artists as those of a prime creator, while as a classic choreographer he himself reigns creatively supreme. It is a great and popular thing to have been the motive force behind West Side Story, but in terms of the future, I suspect that Dances at a Gathering will prove to have a longer shelf life.
Where does one start with Jerome Robbins….how does one consider a career that has lasted a half-century, straddles the worlds of opera house and Broadway, has embraced three ballet companies, American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet and his own, short-lived but momentous, Ballets U.S.A.; and after a startling beginning both as a dancer and choreographer, has settled down to a prolific string of shows and ballets of prodigal variety and exceptional quality? How indeed!
We all have our first memories of Robbins. Old people, such as myself, remember him as a dancer, but to the vast majority he was the name of a choreographer encountered on a program or in a magazine. My own first sight and hearing of Robbins was on July 4, 1946 –and he was a dancer and choreographer both. The occasion was Ballet Theatre’s European debut at the Royal Operan House, Covent Garden in London. The ballet was Robbins’ own Fancy Free, which was itself a revelation –something ecstatically like Gene Kelly in tights –and Robbins himself was the Third, rumba-dancing, Sailor.
People forget what a very good dancer Robbins was –major choreographers, incidentally, almost always are. I missed him in the two great parts George Balanchine created for him –the title roles in Tyl Ulenspiegl and in the revived Prodigal Son, neither of which he danced in London. Yet I did see probably every performance he ever gave in London –not that many as it happened –and remember him vividly, really vividly, in such diverse ballets as his own Interplay and Age of Anxiety, as well as Helen of Troy, Bourree Fantasque and Petrouchka, the title role of which he shared with Michael Kidd.
He gave up dancing comparatively early, and he was never a great classic technician –he was no slouch either, remember he originated the solo in Interplay –but he burned with presence. No one who ever saw his Petrouchka is likely to forget it –it had a dejected sawdust pathos I can still recall after more than 40 years.
If as a dancer you can pin him down as a presence, how can one characterize him as a choreographer? This is more difficult because for so many reasons he has played the chameleon with effortless success. The real Robbins is probably a cast of the mind rather than the style of a ballet. The major influence on him has been Balanchine –no one doubts this –but it was an influence by example and manner rather than precept and style.
Robbins was inspired as much as anything by Balanchine’s professionalism –which rivaled another theater-worker he also enormously admires, George Abbott –and by his concept of the ballet master, as a craftsman, sometimes to be compared with a chef, at others with a cabinetmaker, who provided a repertory for his dancers. Balanchine taught Robbins to be a choreographer for all seasons –a lesson that some choreographers, even some as wonderful as the late Antony Tudor, never learned –and versatility became a hallmark of his craft.
He also took from Balanchine a sort of Maryinsky-like reverence for the classic dance. His background, partly as a hoofer, never made him the sort of performer you would instantly or instinctively cast as a Bluebird, but as a choreographer he became so critically aware of pure classicism, so confidently versed in its academic school, that like Balanchine, and that small and precious number of their peers, he was able to create inventively on its themes, as to the manner born, almost as if, like Balanchine and the poet Alexander Pope, he too had indeed been an infant able “to lisp in numbers,” with classicism as his borrowed birthright.
If we had to point to some distinguishing profile in Robbins’ work, it would have to be compounded of his humanism and his ability to transfigure a sequence of dance steps into a poetic image that transcends mimetic characterization. You can see all of this in Fancy Free dating from 1944 as well as in Ives, Songs dating from 1988, and from most stops along the route.
These two elements of the human and poetic, of character and image, are particularly evident in Robbins’ approach to comedy. Think simply of The Concert, conceivably the funniest ballet ever made, and you realize you are not just watching the foibles of real people, but that their reality is made effective –if you like, made real –by methods essentially choreographer. It is at the same time dependent upon the minute observations of human nature and its interplay with movement. This is not that original –the same connection was made with equal force by others, particularly Martha Graham and Tudor. It was Robbins’ gift to give that connection a peculiarly American accent.
The Americanism of Robbins is inescapable. His choreographic career started virtually as a revolt against the Russianization of American Ballet Theatre –it was that very same Russian-style Petrouchka he danced so meaningfully who broke out to become the World War II gob on shore-leave in Times Square. But this accent went far deeper than the superficialities of subject 0he actually blended the jazzy and folksy riches of American vernacular dance into ballet. Other people worked along similar lines, but it was Robbins’ choreographer that definitely worked. After Interplay, American classic dance found its own pop dialect –a dialect that made its own way on Broadway, but also affected many aspects of classical ballet both here and overseas.
People writing or talking of Robbins always stress his perfectionism, almost as if perfectionism were a dangerous infectious disease. Robbins is a perfectionist. More than most he has a Platonic ideal of what a ballet should, or even might, look like, and although he knows that the reality involves compromise, he wants that compromise to be in his favor. As a consequence, as a colleague he is not so much difficult as demanding. Balanchine, always, I felt, more pragmatic, would normally and courteously defer to his younger partner, in matters of rehearsal time and dancers. I once, very cheekily, asked Balanchine why he did that, and Balanchine smiled like a cat, and said: “He would do the same for me if I needed.”
Now Balanchine has gone and the Company, six years after his death, has come to terms with the loss. Before he left on a sabbatical while he sheared, shaped and dragooned his Broadway anthology into triumph, Robbins’ role, now as co-Ballet Master in Chief along with Peter Martins, has changed comparatively little. Perhaps rather more general artistic responsibility came his way, but he retains particular control over his own repertory, apparently leaving the day-to-day running and shaping of the Company to Martins and the ballet staff.
It is a system that appears to be working for the company. Robbins has made clear that at the age of 70 he wants to be particularly careful about the use he makes of his genius, which is sensitive and sensible. What is important is his living presence and inspiration inside the Company that he, together with Kirstein and Balanchine, effectively founded –that wondrous machine for dancing called New York City Ballet.
Tonight his special New York City Ballet audience, as well as his dancers, past, present and even those to come, honor Jerome Robbins for what he has done and for what he has given. His identification with New York City Ballet is now indelible, his works are part of the living fabric of the Company. New York City Ballet will forever dance differently because Robbins once made them dance, and as he moves, with almost startling vigor, into his eighth decade, we all look to his future with confidence, just as we look to his past with gratitude and love.
New York City Ballet (A Celebration of Jerome Robbins) Annual Spring Gala, June 8, 1989