Jerome Robbins as Ballet Maker

This past November, the Dutch National Ballet performed at New York City Center. On the program that evening I attended was Jerome Robbins’ Other Dances: a duet set to Chopin, created for Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova, two Soviet ballet stars who defected to America in 1976. In this ballet, Robbins calls on his dancers to perform folkish movements that occasionally resemble a form closer to character dance. In the world of classical ballet, where virtuosity is favored over theatricality, this movement type is usually designated for older members of an ensemble, those perhaps unable to perform at their formal technical heights. Robbins’ choreography–in employing restraint–questions this association.

The opening notes of Other Dances are sharp and direct. The male dancer stamps his foot against the floor; each stamp corresponding to a particular trill of a piano key. In the woman’s variation, the apex of the folk impulse occurs when a ballerina kneels on one leg and audibly strikes the ground in front of her. Watching videos of Makarova rehearsing the role, you can see her complete this movement with the whole of her upper body. It’s as if she’s striking the terrain of the country she left, or, as an act of contrast and defiance, striking the ground of the new country she’s found herself in. Or, perhaps, she’s emulating the stereotype of a strict Russian ballet teacher thwacking a pupil’s leg. Robbins, through the creation of character work on stage, deploys a type of ballet aware equally of its defiance and demands.

Some of the most satisfying parts of Robbins’ choreography, especially to Chopin, are moments in which he’s forced to concede to the score. In lieu of finely planned contortions and tricks, Robbins shows this overwhelm by having his dancers rely on quotidian gestures: running, walking, and occasionally pausing. In Other Dances, the woman halts in front of the piano during her solo to gaze at the pianist. She listens before beginning a series of thoughtful strides upstage. In moments of repose, Robbins often has his female dancers swipe at their costume as a kind of spontaneous response. In these instances, Robbins admits to limits, not only of his choreographic skill, but of the physical ability of his dancers. Even the most trained foot is subject to the restrictions of corporeal form.

George Balanchine, by contrast, endeavored to elide the difference between dance and music. In his ballets, oftentimes set to bespoke scores, the dancer becomes the exact embodiment of the music and the artistic challenge is congruency. It is a demanding approach that takes for granted the gap between these two disparate, yet complimentary, mediums. Robbins, in comparison, appears as the product of awe: so mesmerized is he by the music that he doesn’t dare replicate it. If Balanchine seeks a formalist scheme, an aspirational athleticism, Robbins physicalizes overwhelm and delight. The result of Robbins’ approach is not a lesser artistry, but one concerned with presence. Where Balanchine wanted synchronicity, Robbins sought reaction.

That evening, I was dissatisfied with the performance of Other Dances. Theperformances were too pristine. In a ballet that often feels anticipatory, the dancers emphasized extended limbs and the precision of positions. In adding a level of exaggeration surpassing the notes of the piano, the ballerina (Olga Smirnova) outdanced the score. When the moment of floor striking came, I preempted Smirnova’s lack of engagement and moved in my seat to supplement her interpretation. The performance was beautiful, but in lieu of a dedication to its theatricality, it didn’t feel like Robbins. “You have to become a character,”¹ New York City Ballet Principal Dancer Joseph Gordon told me this past fall. To watch a Robbins ballet is to see the mind of a person unable to conform to the rigid expectations of form.

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The name Jerome Robbins likely evokes associations with the history of New York City theatre and Broadway. General audiences likely know him for his work on productions like West Side Story (both the Broadway production and the film); Gypsy; and Fiddler On The Roof–and his relationships with contemporaries like Aaron Copeland, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and Arthur Laurents. It is, perhaps, a smaller group that knows of his work with New York City Ballet, which he joined first as a dancer and choreographer before becoming its Associate Artistic Director.

Born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz in 1918 in Weehawken, New Jersey,² Robbins’ foray into the arts started early through music lessons and dance classes. Robbins studied ballet and modern dance through the techniques of Isabora Duncan and Martha Graham, whose approaches to movement were in response to ballet. He simultaneously studied acting, with stints in the Yiddish Art Theatre, and took courses in dance composition. Robbins’ first ballet, Fancy Free, (which he created for Ballet Theater, the company he joined in 1938) premiered in 1944, and featured an original score by the newly appointed lead conductor of New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein.³

Although Robbins avoided the draft by confessing to engagements in homosexual⁴ behavior, the war served as the inspiration for Fancy Free. The ballet depicts three sailors out on the town in a New York bar attempting to attract the attention of a group of young women. Balancing the story of multiple interpersonal relationships– between the three sailors and their potential romantic matches– the piece is a jubilant celebration of American youth told through movements that often resemble a 1940s dance hall more than a ballet class. Fancy Free contains many of the tendencies for which Robbins would become distinct: representations of life in New York City, use of ordinary gesture, and the reliance on characters and narrative.

In Fancy Free, emotional stakes become the impetus for movement quality. The best example of this interplay comes in the central pas de deux, one of the most breathtaking pieces in all of Robbins’ oeuvre. Featured in this section is a woman clad in a purple costume and the most “romantic” (or strenuously flirtatious) sailor of the lot, who, in the original cast, was played by Robbins.⁵

The pas de deux begins with the woman and sailor seated at the bar. The sailor attempts to impress the woman by miming the use of firearms. The woman rolls her eyes and turns away, only for the score to change in tone from ecstatic pandemonium–mimicking the intensity of the man’s mime– to something melodic. The sailor invites the woman to dance, and she, perhaps out of disbelief at his brazenness,⁶ agrees.

The mastery of this pas de deux lies in both the realism of the characters in the scene and the titillating, human awkwardness of attempted intimacy. The Robbinsian woman is particularly fearless in her alternation between engagement and rebuff. While Robbins emphasizes the woman’s femininity through intricate partnering, this pas de deux is distinct for the agency it grants the woman. She may begin as the object of the sailor’s desires, but she becomes a person equally engaged in the fate of this relationship. “He wanted to see grown ups dancing, not a ‘ballet girl’ or ‘ballet boy’ hiding behind balletic artifice,”⁷ Emily Coates, Yale professor and former City Ballet dancer, said of Robbins.Fancy Free, in centering the real-world dynamics of people, feels like the transposition of Robbins’ theatrical origins onto dance.

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After founding The School of American Ballet in 1934,⁸ Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine started the New York City Ballet in 1948⁹ with the goal of bringing ballet to America. While the art form already existed with companies like Ballet Theater, Balanchine sought to create a company dedicated to his own formal aspirations.

Balanchine trained at the Imperial Ballet School in Saint Petersburg, arguably the source of ballet's unyielding classicism and scrutiny. After fleeing Russia in 1924,¹⁰ Balanchine ended up in France in the orbit of the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, the man responsible for the avant-garde ballet company The Ballet Russe. As a choreographer for the company, Balanchine collaborated with artists like Matisse, Picasso, and composers like Ravel and Stravinsky. In this milieu of experimentation, he explored what would become the basis of his style: demanding, plotless works demonstrating what ballet, as an art form, could become. After Kirstein brought Balanchine to America, he continued to hone his approach in ballets like Serenade, The Four Temperaments, and more classical works like Symphony in C. This quality of movement, now referred to as the “Balanchine Technique,” trains dancers to move more quickly and with greater dexterity and range. Balanchine wanted to increase ballerinas’ flexibility and created ballets, (e.g. his 1957 masterwork Agon) to exemplify this limber strength. If ballet was always a rarefied and demanding pursuit, Balanchine increased the demand, stretching the limits of possibility. Balanchine’s ballets became vessels for his technique. He is often charged with establishing the ballet physique as we know it today: lean, impossibly slender, and at times prepubescent, to most accurately carry off his style. “These were bodies purified and transfigured by the disciplined practice of ballet,”¹¹ says biographer Jennifer Homans. While an innovator, Balanchine’s artistic abstractions still abide by the formalistic expectations of ballet’s origins.

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Balanchine first crossed paths with Robbins when he auditioned, and was rejected, from the School of American Ballet.¹² Ten years later, after seeing City Ballet’s premiere performance at New York City Center, Robbins wrote to Balanchine and asked to join his company. Balanchine heartily agreed.¹³ In her biography Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins, biographer Amanda Vaill argues the invitation to the company was grounded in contrast.

If there was any element of New York’s postwar culture underrepresented among City Ballet’s…ticket holders, it was the theater. Not just the world of “serious” drama but the musical theater as well…. By hiring the thirty-year-old ballet-and-Broadway wunderkind Jerome Robbins, George Balanchine… filled this gap with one stroke.¹⁴

Robbins was brought in to make up for what was lacking in the company, which both filled a much-needed storytelling void and established the two men’s approaches as inherently divergent. Balanchine created within his own framework, while Robbins’ impulse lay somewhere outside of ballet. Once Robbins’ joined the company, his reliance on transposed narrative softened.

An early Robbins’ work, Afternoon of A Faun, set to the music of Debussy, is a work of homage to Nijinsky’s seminal 1912 ballet of the same name. In Faun, Robbins reimagines Nikinsky’s yearning for a nymph in the context of a ballet studio. A young man falls asleep and dreams of a woman. They dance together and, using the audience as a mirror, express desire in prolonged gazes. “He coached us to drop the more ornamented aspects of our ballet training, to be real: really look at the person you're dancing with,” said Coates.¹⁵ The ballet utilizes Nijinsky’s story of passion but distills it into a mood between two people and thereby loosening the ballet’s original plot. But Robbins still is demonstrating a human exchange on stage. Next to the sleek Balanchine ballets, Robbins’–who was simultaneously choreographing for the theater– reliance on association might have appeared less sophisticated. However, this tendency could also have been apocryphal: unable to dismiss himself from his theatrical tendencies, might they have become his sole outlet by which to create?

Despite Balanchine’s fondness for Robbins, growing tensions prompted him to leave New York City Ballet in 1956.¹⁶ He would go on toestablish his own company, BALLET USA, where he created works like New York Export Opus Jazz, and Moves: a ballet performed in silence, later embraced as an homage to the postmodern dance in New York City. If Fancy Free dramatized New York City, Opus replicates it. The dancers wear sneakers and pants and dance a demonstration of 1950s New York City life.

In 1969,¹⁷ after a thirteen year absence and amidst internal turmoil in the company, Robbins returned to New York City Ballet. It is during this period at New York City Ballet–which included the death of Balanchine and Robbins’ appointment as co-Artistic Director alongside former dancer Peter Martins– that Robbins’ demonstrates the height of his relationship to music. Two works in particular, Dances at A Gathering and Goldberg Variations, show a departure from external narrativization and the introduction of a joint examination of movement and score. Perhaps time spent away from creating under Balanchine allowed Robbins to grow into his own tendencies, creating works that shone in the difference of his approach.

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Dances at A Gathering began as a duet set to Chopin. But, after immersing himself in the music, Robbins continued to add music and dancers until the piece grew to a cast of ten: five men and five women. The ballet is an hour-long piece examining the dynamics amongst the cast, distinguished only by the colors of their costumes. Each color responds differently depending on its company, creating an underlying social ecology amongst the dancers.

Choreographed to over 18 pieces of Chopin music, Robbins’ choreography corresponds to composition type. The mazurkas display a folkish flair. Much like in Other Dances, arms are crossed and heels click together. In the waltzes, movements are slow and sweeping. In the section to Waltz Op. 34 No. 2, three women– the Pink Girl, the Lilac Girl, and the Blue Girl– dance as a trio. When the score requests it, moments are supplemented by jumps or pauses. The three women, in their variety of pairs, smile as they dance, alternating between teaching and observing one another.

Waltz, Op. 42, danced between the Yellow Girl and The Brick Boy, is fast and virtuosic. As they waltz together, the man often lifts the woman to capture a moment of musical exclamation. Later on, the brick boy does a cartwheel. In a quieter moment, the dancing begins to slow only to be met again with a quickening pace. The two continue their antics, waltzing and devouring the stage. The last we see of The Yellow Girl are her perfectly pointed feet sticking out from the side of the stage. It’s not hard to superimpose a story onto this section. The two dancers chase one another, at times with uncontainable joy. What is this if not a demonstration of courting?

All of the colors in Dances have perceptible arcs. The Pink Girl appearing in two contrasting pas de deuxs with two different men, demonstrates first the choice to leave a longtime relationship (Scherzo No. 1 danced with the Mauve Boy) and then the opportunity to revel in the possibility of a new one (Étude in E Minor danced with the Brick Boy). Unlike the Purple woman of Fancy Free, this woman represents a trace of a feeling more than a full person. If Fancy Free is pictorial representation, perhaps a Max Beckmann portrait, Dances is a Frankenthaler soak stain: its container is less important than the density of its hue. Faun also explores human emotion, but the impulse of Dances is made of nothing but its composite materials. The subject matter comes directly from its score.

The last section of Dances, to Nocturne, Op. 15, No.1, comprises the least amount of actual dancing. The majority of Dances are moments in groupings and pairs, which show the dancers observing one another. By the end of the ballet, the dancers cease watching and arrive on stage to look past the stage’s proscenium: a moment of collective contemplation. They all survey, and even when the score becomes more menacing, they stand still. This type of wistful peering has since been replicated by countless choreographers, most notably Justin Peck, who often has his young dancers pass the time gaping at the audience. But without the robust anthropological examinations that the audience has just witnessed– and to which Robbins was so often inclined– Peck’s reliance comes across as vacuous. Dances is the product of deep consideration, a distillation of the score’s essence into comprehensible exchanges. These individuals can stare because of all that has occurred. As Vaill puts it,

Of course he resisted reductive, literal interpretation, because that limits meaning; but anyone with Robbins’s interest in ritual knows that the power of ritual gestures and figures derives from their connotations.¹⁸

At the end of Dances, the cast splits, the women on one side and the men on the other. They bow to each other, acknowledging and thanking each other for their dancing.

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After taking on the task of a singular composer in Dances, Robbins turned to Bach, whose Baroque style lends itself to even more precise choreographic directive. Robbins chose The Goldberg Variations, for a ballet of the same name which premiered in 1971.¹⁹ While Dances relies on a broad sweep of Chopin, the tinkering and experimentation of Goldberg– an exercise in theme and variation– is done within the entirety of one score. The ballet lasts an hour and twenty-four minutes.

Part I of the ballet begins with a couple dressed like members of the court of Louis XIV, the birthplace of ballet. After a simple series of steps, the couple disappears and a cast of dancers dressed in modern practice clothes appear. The dancers carry out an exploration of the ballet’s initial mood through the score’s interwoven parts. Part II introduces a new cast and initiates the ballet’s mid-way change: the costumes will continue to change until the dancers are dressed like the initial couple, inhabitants of the French court. When the original couple returns at the end, they are dressed in modern practice clothes and dance to the same section of music that began the ballet.

The mood of Goldberg– attentive and pert– is steadier than Chopin. The conceit of the ballet– perhaps more than its physical movements– shows Robbins’ exploration of context. While pairings still explore interpersonal exchange instead of emotionality, Goldberg is about the labor of creating. Arlene Croce, the former Dance Critic of The New Yorker,dismissed the ballet at its premiere, calling it “90 minutes of hard labor.”²⁰ But Robbins’ interest in labor is precisely what distinguishes Goldberg. Demonstrating the demands of this intricate score– the pianist is again on stage– through the acknowledgement of its creation shows Robbins’ conceptual progression as a choreographer and the potential influence of the artistic world outside of ballet. The 1970s saw the introduction of postmodern tendencies in dance. For the generation that followed the trailblazer Robbins worked with (e.g. Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer), dance became an exploration of the labor inherent in creation.

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I was aware, the evening I saw Smirnova’s performance, that part of my frustration was how much she didn’t resemble New York City Ballet principal Tiler Peck, a dancer who– because of her Balanchine training– enacts Robbins with ease. Robbins’ tension within New York City Ballet is why I continually return to him: he is a lens through which to understand the company.

There is more to be said of Robbins’ work outside of ballet, which included projects with members of the avant-gardeincluding Robert Wilson and Maria Irene Fornes; Robbins’ founded the American Theatre Lab as a laboratory for experiments in “total theater”²¹—“a place for Jerry to experiment with the images he saw in his mind without worrying about what they would look like onstage”²²—that made no attempt to be fidelitous to any form, let alone ballet.

It would be too easy to hold Robbins and Balanchine forever at odds. Balanchine’s ballets are not without sentiment. A masterwork like Serenade elicits deep feeling, even if it is one of awe rather than identification. Balanchine always held great admiration for Robbins. In a New York Times piece written for Robbins’ one hundredth birthday, former dance critic Alastair MacAulay argues that Balanchine’s 1972 ballet Duo Concertant– a duet to a Stravinsky piano piece with a piano is onstage– was directly inspired by Robbins, seen chiefly in its “pronounced informality and spontaneity.’²³ Perhaps Robbins couldn’t see it, but Balanchine knew the strength of their differing approaches. Robbins created for the company what Balanchine could not.

Robbins’ ability to infuse being into an artform that eschews it is his great gift. Ballet so often privileges execution over being. When I watch Robbins' ballets, I see a person attempting to be known through his work. I see the battle of an artist unable to defeat his own instincts. I see someone who loves an artform and wants badly for it to love him back. Robbins wanted to assimilate into the rigors of the form, but what he produced far surpassed any benefit conformity might have afforded.

In the penultimate scene of Goldberg, the whole cast is on stage together, now dressed in shimmery Rococo get-ups. They work together to assume the ballet’s final group pose, some women balanced on the shoulders of their male counterparts, while others rest on their knees. Their bodies are angled away from the audience in a formation that almost looks like a class picture. We’ve sat with these dancers and watched them change as they assume every possible pairing and movement this score affords. Listening to this last section this past winter, I thought of a birthday party, and then a graduation: cycles of life, change, and maturation. These are concepts for story, notions that lend themselves to characters, lines, and dialogue, but for Robbins, these were ideas for ballet too.