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Choreographer of the American Dream
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18227 |
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THE ARTS
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10 / 1990 |
2,044 Words |
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Camille Hardy
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Walking through Times Square in the summer, what first catches your eye in the crowd are the groups of three, four and even six trim, white-uniformed American sailors. Times Square may now be subject to urban decay, but to see the bright-faced young men in white dart casually across Broadway is to observe an American tradition in action.
When the curtain rose last summer at the New York State Theater for the New York City Ballet's (NYCB) Festival of Jerome Robbins's Ballets, there were the three sailors in Fancy Free - the choreographer's first ballet - with the same appetite for shore-leave fun that's visible among their sidewalk counterparts a few blocks away. Robins created Fancy Free for Ballet Theatre (later to become the American Ballet Theatre), when he was twenty-six years old. Known all over the world through its incorporation into the Broadway musical and subsequent Hollywood film On the Town, the sassy collaboration with Leonard Bernstein was more than an overnight hit. It signaled the extraordinary gift for translating quintessential America into dance that has been Robbins' legacy to the stage during the succeeding five decades.
Official Flower Boys
At the close of the June festival, Robbins stood at center stage taking bows with the NYCB dancers and some special guests. Paying tribute to the first classical company to hire him, members of American Ballet Theatre had performed an excerpt from Les Noces (created for ABT in 1965), Robbins' savagely beautiful evocation of peasant wedding to Stravinsky's oratorio. A half-dozen artists from the Paris Opera Ballet, presented In the Night, which Robbins staged recently for the Parisian ensemble. Dressed in costumes from every Robbins ballet in the repertoire - including one Chagall monster from the sequence staged for Balanchine's Firebird - NYCB dancers filled the stage, each giving him a white rose. Official flower boys (usually the role for the very youngest male ballet students) were Lincoln Kirstein, who founded the troupe with George Balanchine; Edward Villela, former company principal and current director of Miami City ballet; and Peter Martins, who now heads the New York ensemble alone, since Robbins retired as co-ballet master in chief last fall.
At seventy-one, this "nice Jewish boy from New York City" is unquestionably the greatest living classical choreographer. One of the most potent revelations of the festival was the unmatched richness of the NYCB repertoire to which he has contributed more than fifty pieces. To have all this, and the master workers of the late Balanchine, too, is beyond a balletomane's wildest fantasy.
Silver Lining
NYCB has been home, more or less, to Robbins since 1949, although he was turned away at seventeen by a secretary when he applied for a scholarship at the company's affiliate School of American Ballet. Like the ironies in most heroic American tales, this rejection and a silver lining. Robbins was never shaped in the image of Balanchine; their partnership began after he was formed artistically. He made his debut as an actor with the Yiddish Art Theater, and trained as a dancer in a range of styles. Playing the violin was another discipline he undertook. All these skills meshed in Robins' first choreographic forays in summer stock. By 1938, he was a chorus boy on Broadway. In that capacity, he began to
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