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Jerome Robbins : Jerome Robbins made indelible changes in both musical theater and classical ballet - 1918-98
Dance Magazine, Oct, 1998 by Clive Barnes
He flirted briefly with Hollywood--codirected the movie of West Side Story (1961) and picked up a couple of Oscars--but it was not for him. And eventually he even tired of Broadway. People wondered why this seeming King of Broadway would abdicate. I knew why. Soon after Fiddler, more than thirty years ago, he told me he was "tired of interpreting other people in staging musicals, while when I choreograph a ballet I am myself the real creative artist, working with my collaborators on a quite different level." Although Robbins gave up the musical--Jerome Robbins' Broadway (1989) was actually a brilliant anthology of his own showbiz dance and was rapturously received--the musical never gave up on him. For years he was everyone's first choice to direct any Broadway musical, and he had a whole school of followers, notably Harold Prince, Bob Fosse (with whom he collaborated on a couple of shows, including The Pajama Game), and Michael Bennett.
Robbins devoted his final decades to New York City Ballet. Admittedly, in 1965 he did stage Stravinsky's Les Noces for his first balletic stomping ground, American Ballet Theatre. (Revived this past season by NYCB, it represents Robbins's final work in the theater.) However, after ABT's Les Noces, and two or three highly significant and artistically rewarding years working on his own, very well-funded, experimental theater project which never gave a public performance, he returned to City Ballet in 1969. This time for good.
For a period after Balanchine's death in 1983, he became, with Peter Martins, a co-ballet master in chief, but the day-to-day running of a company--as he had revealed in the sixties with his own short-lived Ballets: U.S.A.--was not really up his street. Incidentally, Ballets: U.S.A.--more popular, I think, in Europe than here--did some good work, including the creation of his extension of Interplay, which he called N.Y. Export: Op. Jazz (1950); his striking Events (1961); and Moves, (1959), that "ballet to silence about relationships." The dancers, including the likes of Glen Tetley, John Jones, Wilma Curley, and Erin Martin, were a handpicked troupe.
Robbins has left an indelible mark on both the worlds of theater and of dance. But whereas in the theater he will be remembered as a wonderful, extraordinarily dynamic director, who by his example and working methods changed the face of the Broadway musical, in dance he will be remembered as the creator of a number of true masterpieces, some likely to live as long as the art of classic ballet itself. For one thing, he was virtually unique in ballet in his rare gift for comedy--in works such as The Concert (1956) or his much earlier piece to Copland's Clarinet Concerto, The Pied Piper (1951), not even to mention that first Fancy Free, he produced ballets that were really funny. But this was all part of his humanity. He put a human face and a Yankee accent on classic choreography.
In the best of his choreography--much of it to Chopin and Bach--he invested simple but grand dance movements with a marvelous imprint of humanity, and occasionally liked to revisit dance history, such as in his Afternoon of a Faun (1953) and Antique Epigraphs (1984)--both suggesting the Ballets Russes; or his etymological Social Life in the Insect World version of Giselle, that is, The Cage (1951); or his half-ironic homage to the Bolshoi in The Four Seasons (1979). And he was always ready to push out dance's frontiers, in such ballets as his sagely mechanistic Glass Pieces (1983). In other works--such as the supreme Dances at a Gathering (1969); its lustrous Chopinesque spinoffs, In the Night (1970) and Other Dances (1976); the elegiac In Memory Of... (1985); the wonderfully moving Ives, Songs (1988)--he seems to be saying with Shakespeare: "What a piece of work is a man!" This humanism in a way reached its apogee in his strange, experimental ballet Watermill (1972), which showed a man walking slowly, with Zen passivity and concentration, through the passages of life.
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