A collection of photographs of Jerome Robbins hung in the lobby of the David H. Koch Theater for New York City Ballet’s Spring Season. Family, rehearsal, and performance shots, they plotted the extraordinary life story of Robbins, from his religious ancestors in Poland to his adopted family in the theaters of New York. In one, a young Robbins demonstrates a dance step for the filming of West Side Story; trim and intense, he’s dancing in front of tenements that soon would be razed to make way for Lincoln Center. The film adaptation of West Side Story would sear an association into the popular imagination: dance, New York, youth. And Robbins would go a long way in establishing New York as the dance capital of the world.
Born Jerome Rabinowitz in 1918, Robbins grew up in Weehawken, New Jersey, and was, for a time, expected to take over the family corset manufacturing business. An autodidact and exacting taskmaster–he once complained to a dancer in rehearsal that her hair was arriving late on the count–Robbins struggled for years with his success and his identity as a Jew, homosexual, and informant to the House Un-American Activities Committee. That existential turmoil, combined with his relentless ambition to experiment with (and broaden) his art, transformed the American theater, where he is known for West Side Story, Gypsy, and Fiddler on the Roof–among many others.
Although his shows marked significant advancements in theater dance, it was only fitting that the New York City Ballet would become artistic home to Robbins, a man who dreamed of presenting “American kids dancing” to the world. But in so doing he ensured that he would always be compared with George Balanchine. It’s unfortunate that, for many balletomanes and critics, New York City Ballet will forever be the house that Mr. B built.
Ten years after his death, NYCB presented a Jerome Robbins Celebration as part of its Spring Season, and with 33 ballets and four major revivals, added considerable ammunition to the Robbins supporters in the audience. The range of NYCB’s Robbins repertory, shown in 10 beautifully curated all-Robbins programs, is staggering: From experimental work (Moves, Watermill) to the technically virtuosic (Two and Three Part Inventions, Seasons) to the contemplative (A Suite of Dances) and comic (The Concert), there is a humanist spirit running through them all, guided by a director’s sense of why and where.
Not all his ballets are masterpieces, but the Robbins oeuvre is a welcome antidote to the inwardness and body-consciousness of contemporary ballet–and, dare I say it, to the intellectualism of many of the Balanchine ballets. The NYCB website quotes Balanchine: “Classicism is enduring because it is impersonal.” If you don’t share that philosophy, well, you’re a Robbins man.
When Robbins returned from Broadway to the New York City Ballet in 1969, his first ballet for the company was Dances at a Gathering. This season it appeared on the “Definitive Chopin” program, along with Other Dances and The Concert. That program, as well as “American Fare” (Interplay, Ives, Songs, and I’m Old Fashioned), was one of the treats of the Robbins Celebration, showcasing his themes of community, memory, and ritual.
But the ballet that looks best on the company right now is Robbins’s epic, The Goldberg Variations. A mobius-structured rumination on dance and dancers, it has a distinctly American feeling. Like Dances at a Gathering, there are moments when the dancers form an onstage audience for one another. (Robbins liked to watch dancers in rehearsal, when they were dancing for themselves and the movement quality was gentler.) Relationships evolve as dancers change partners, going from groups of two to three to five.
The dance vocabulary of Part I is revelatory. Robbins uses pedestrian movement and often only indicates the ballet technique: Women walk onto demi-pointe, pirouettes are done in coupé position. At times, the dancers simply walk around, which gives the ballet a modern but approachable feeling, and gives the characters dimension. The performance I attended was beautifully danced. Cameron Grant–what a treasure he is to the company–played the Bach delicately.
Some notable performances from the women this season included Yvonne Boree as the Girl in Pink in Dances at a Gathering, Ashley Bouder as Mabel in Double Feature, Rebecca Krohn in Moves, Kaitlyn Gilliland in Watermill and Piano Pieces, and Wendy Whelan in In the Night, In Memory Of . . . , and The Cage. But the Robbins Festival announced Sara Mearns as the -company’s best young dancer. She was excellent in all the Robbins ballets, perhaps a result of her early training with Robbins specialist Patricia McBride. Fluid and physical, Mearns is also one of the most musical dancers in the company. Her rubato solo in the Spring section of The Four Seasons was a delight; you could see her interacting with conductor Fayçal Karoui. She can fly across the stage (Brahms/Handel) or be introspective (Piano Pieces), demonstrating a sensitivity to the material beyond her colleagues’ abilities. At the conclusion of I’m Old Fashioned, she was the only lead dancer who adapted to the Rita Hayworth mood on which the role was modeled.
The men at NYCB are sometimes unfavorably compared with the men at American Ballet Theatre, where the repertory is “hunkier.” There were many great performances from the City Ballet men this season: Charles -Askegard, partnering Wendy Whelan in In Memory Of . . . , Andrew Veyette in The Goldberg Variations, and in a solo in the otherwise dull Oltremare, Joaquin De Luz in “Divertimento” from Le Baiser de la Fée, Nikolaj Hübbe (now director of the Royal Danish Ballet) appearing as a guest artist in Watermill, and Tom Gold, who is leaving the company this year, as Jimmie Shannon in Double Feature. The elegant Amar Ramasar was best in The Goldberg Variations, as was Gonzalo Garcia in Brahms/Handel.
There were some non-Robbins highlights to the season as well. An Alexei Ratmansky premiere did little for me but seemed to titillate the opening night audience. Damien Woetzel, whom many see as a possible successor to Peter Martins, retired; his understated artistry will be missed. The company performed Susan Stroman’s charming Double Feature, which I would recommend to parents with children old enough to read the title cards that limn the two-hour ballet.
Ten years after Robbins’s death there are only a handful of dancers in the company who knew him. More worrisome, there is no one to take his place. Today, few choreographers are willing to commit to one city, to one group of dancers. Christopher Wheeldon left and Alexei Ratmansky declined a position as resident choreographer with NYCB. Instead, they tour the world as choreographers-for-hire.
This season, each Robbins program began with a film tribute. An onstage screen showed rehearsal videos and still photographs of Jerome Robbins and his collaborators to Chopin mazurkas. It was almost too sad for a Celebration. A feeling of real loss settled over the audience, who sighed at the sight of Leonard Bernstein at his piano, cigarette hanging from his mouth.
With Jerome Robbins went a great era in American theater. I look forward to the next.
Natalie Bostick is a writer in New York.
