Fifty-three years ago this month, the curtain went up on Fancy Free, the first ballet by a twenty-five-year-old dancer from New York named Jerome Robbins. There had never been anything quite like it. At a time when classical dance in America was still dominated by foreign-born performers, choreographers, and impresarios, Fancy Free dealt with a contemporary American subject (three sailors on shore leave in Manhattan), featured the jazz-flavored music of a contemporary American composer (Leonard Bernstein, fresh from his conducting debut with the New York Philharmonic), and made convincingly idiomatic use of the steps of American popular dance.

The premiere of Fancy Free, which received 25 curtain calls, made Robbins a star overnight. Eight months later, he and Bernstein joined forces again for On the Town, a musical, based loosely on the same ballet, which ran for 463 performances and was filmed by MGM. Within a few years, Robbins had become both the most powerful musical-comedy director on Broadway and the most famous ballet choreographer in America. In 1969, he left Broadway to become co-ballet master-in-chief of George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet (NYCB), where he remains active to this day. His latest ballet was premiered in January, and a revival of West Side Story (1957, music by Bernstein) incorporating his original dances is now touring the East Coast.

Robbins’s name is often linked with that of Bernstein, and indeed the two had much in common beyond the shared triumphs of their youth. Like Bernstein, Robbins was Jewish, homosexual, and involved in radical politics, going so far as to join a Communist group during World War II. (In 1953, six years after having broken with the party, he named the members of the group to the House Un-American Activities Committee [HUAC].) Both men moved freely between the worlds of high and popular culture; both also regularly produced “serious” works which were dismissed by many critics as shallow and pretentious. And both, despite their critics, were vastly successful with audiences of all kinds: no American artists working in the field of high culture have been better known to the public at large.

But Robbins’s fame, unlike that of his flamboyant collaborator, is based solely on his work, not his life. He rehearses behind closed doors and rarely gives interviews; no book has yet been written about him, and while he is known to be a demanding taskmaster, dancers’ memoirs have typically been circumspect in commenting on his character. He has never discussed his homosexuality publicly, or commented on his still-controversial decision to “name names.”

Critics have long been sharply divided over Robbins. Some, including most notably the New Yorker‘s Arlene Croce, believe him to have been at his best on Broadway and in such lighter dances as Fancy Free and Afternoon of a Faun (1953, music by Debussy). For these critics, his more ambitious later efforts, like Dances at a Gathering (1969, music by Chopin) and The Goldberg Variations (1971, music by Bach), while not without interest, cannot bear serious comparison to the ballets of his colleague George Balanchine, the foremost choreographer of the 20th century. Yet Robbins also has his staunch supporters, among them the New York Post‘s Clive Barnes, who has called him “the greatest American-born classicist.”

Which—if either—of these views is correct?

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The director of West Side Story was born Jerome Rabinowitz in New York in 1918, the second child of parents who had come to America to escape the pogroms of Russia and Poland. After growing up in New Jersey, and spending a year as a chemistry major at New York University, Robbins dropped out of college to study dance and acting. Between 1937 and 1940 he appeared in the choruses of four Broadway musicals and performed summers at Camp Tamiment, a socialist-owned resort in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains, alongside the comedians Imogene Coca and Danny Kaye.

In 1940 Robbins joined Ballet Theater (now American Ballet Theater). There he studied with Eugene Loring, who had collaborated with Aaron Copland in 1938 on Billy the Kid, among the first ballets on an American theme, and with the English-born choreographer Antony Tudor, famed for such “psychological” dances as Pillar of Fire and Undertow. He also learned the title role of Petrushka from Michel Fokine, who had originated that famous ballet for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Robbins’s appearances as Petrushka in 1943 were favorably noticed by critics, clearing the way the following year for him to choreograph a dance of his own in which he could also star. The result was Fancy Free.

From the first entrance of the three sailors, who come cartwheeling on stage to the sound of four rim shots on a snare drum, Fancy Free offered a synthesis of ballet and popular dance which was astonishingly self-assured—especially for a twenty-five-year-old novice—and which, a half-century later, remains as fresh and vital as Leonard Bernstein’s superb score. At the same time, Fancy Free was very much a theater piece: the story is told through pantomime, and each of the performers is clearly differentiated as a character.

This was a quality not normally found in classical dance, where dramatic characterization is typically subordinated to the sweep and flow of unselfconscious, directly presented movement. But pure dance classicism had gone to seed by the mid-40’s, and was sorely in need of renewal. George Balanchine, as it happens, was then engaged in just such an undertaking, but Robbins had yet to dance in any of his neoclassical ballets; his own imaginative world was still circumscribed by the angst-ridden dance drama of Tudor and the decadent “classicism” of the Russian émigrés who dominated Ballet Theater. Robbins’s straightforward theatricality thus came as a breath of fresh air, and few were inclined at the time to reflect on its possible limitations.

During the next decade and a half, Robbins made a dozen more ballets, ranging from the high-strung Age of Anxiety (1950, music by Bernstein), described by the choreographer as “a ritual in which four people exercise their illusions in their search for security . . . an attempt to see what life is about,” to The Concert (1956, music by Chopin), a brilliantly effective set of comic sketches which illustrate the idle fantasies going through the minds of various people attending a piano recital. While some of these dances had more or less explicit libretti—most notoriously The Cage (1951, music by Stravinsky), which tells the story of a tribe of insect-like women who kill the men with whom they mate—others dispensed altogether with plot, a tendency seen as early as Robbins’s second ballet, Interplay (1945, music by Morton Gould), and further encouraged by his first encounter and subsequent close association with Balanchine, the reigning master of “abstract” ballet.

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In 1948, Robbins saw a New York City Ballet performance of Balanchine’s Symphony in C (music by Bizet), then as now one of the company’s signature pieces. He wrote to the older choreographer, and Balanchine, already an admirer, immediately hired him as a dancer and choreographer, appointing him associate artistic director the following year.

By his own account, Robbins was deeply impressed by Balanchine’s ability to fill his plotless ballets with “the most extraordinary encounters and events”—so deeply impressed, indeed, that in testifying before HUAC in 1953, he claimed to have broken with the Communist party in part because its repudiation of “bourgeois formalism” in art was incompatible with Balanchine’s neoclassical style! Yet Robbins also remained uncomfortable with pure classicism, and it is significant that not long before he joined NYCB he had attended the Actors Studio, then run by the director Elia Kazan. There he had studied “the Method,” whereby actors (his fellow students included Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift) were taught to analyze in psychological and sociological terms the characters they portrayed. From then on, Robbins would use Method-derived techniques in working with dancers.

It is thus no coincidence that Robbins’s ballets, even the plotless ones, typically emphasize situation over movement. A characteristic example from the 50’s is Afternoon of a Faun, a pas de deux set in a dance studio with a boy and girl staring mutely into the studio mirror as they dance together, preoccupied more with the beauty of their individual bodies than with the possibility of mutual attraction. In describing Faun, Robbins himself has invoked imagery more typical of a theatrical director than of a choreographer: “I always thought the girl had just washed her hair and just had on new toe shoes and a new clean practice dress and came into the studio to preen and practice.”

Interestingly, Afternoon of a Faun makes no reference to popular dance steps, and is recognizably “American” only in the lightness of its touch. It is as if Robbins, having first made his mark with a frankly popular dance like Fancy Free, now felt the need to establish his legitimacy with a classical work set to the music of a European composer. This foreshadowed his mature style, in which the techniques and preoccupations seen in the ten-minute-long Faun were to be writ increasingly large.

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By 1954, however, Robbins’s commitment to ballet had also temporarily lessened. For the next decade, picking up from his success ten years earlier with On the Town, he devoted most of his creative energies to Broadway.

Not that On the Town was the only musical in which he had been involved; other early successes included The King and I (1951). But starting in 1954 with Peter Pan, his adaptation of James Barrie’s play, Robbins radically enlarged his responsibility for the shows with which he was associated. His credit now read, “Entire Production Directed and Choreographed by Jerome Robbins.” And this was not just a matter of billing, but a statement of principle. More than anyone else active on Broadway in the 50’s and 60’s, Robbins sought to create something not unlike the Wagnerian ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk, a totally unified theatrical experience. According to Sheldon Harnick, the lyricist for Fiddler on the Roof:

When Robbins takes over a show, it’s his vision in every department. He drives the set designer crazy, he drives the orchestrator crazy, he has a total vision of what he wants. He presses you and presses you on every point, no matter how trivial, until it isn’t trivial any more.

Robbins was no less driven in his dealings with performers, and some of the tales of his backstage behavior during his years on Broadway are appalling. Yet the results of his bullying were memorable, especially in the three musicals for which he is best known: West Side Story, in which Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was recast as a clash between New York street gangs; Gypsy (1959), the story of the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee; and Fiddler on the Roof (1964), the musical-comedy adaptation of Sholem Aleichem’s tales of ghetto life in czarist Russia. In these shows, the theatricality which in his ballets of the 50’s often seemed at odds with an uncertainly grasped classicism found its perfect expression. Even the tough-minded Arlene Croce has called Gypsy “a masterpiece of poetic theater and radical design.”

Why, then, did Robbins abandon the musical-comedy stage after Fiddler? Having previously had the opportunity to make ballets precisely to his satisfaction, he may have found it galling to have to deal with commercial-minded Broadway producers. More importantly, though, the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk was by definition evanescent. None of Robbins’s Broadway shows has ever been revived successfully in anything approaching its original form. Even where the dances survive, as in West Side Story, their surrounding theatrical context has been lost.¹ Only in ballet would it be possible for him to create unified theatrical works which could have a lasting life in repertory.

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In 1969, after a thirteen-year absence, Robbins returned to New York City Ballet with Dances at a Gathering, a work for ten dancers set to eighteen piano pieces by Chopin. This work—the definitive realization of the artistic vision toward which he had been striving since he joined NYCB twenty years earlier—marked the beginning of his major phase as a ballet choreographer.

In this ballet, a group of young men and women meets under a blue sky and dances in ever-changing combinations for an hour. Some of the variations are lyrical, others comic. At one point, five dancers strike snapshot-like poses to the music of Chopin’s C-major Mazurka, op. 7, no. 5; in another dance—set to the F-minor Waltz, op. 70, no. 2—a girl flutters flirtatiously around three boys who successively ignore her, after which she shrugs and runs offstage. Though the work is long, the scale of the individual variations is intimate and there are no full-ensemble dances. At the end, the dancers gather together—the only time they all appear at once—and gaze at a threatening cloud as it crosses the horizon. They then bow to one another and pair off, and the curtain falls.

“There are no stories to any of the dances in Dances at a Gathering” Robbins has said. “There are no plots and no roles. The dancers are themselves dancing with each other to that music in that space.” But Dances, while plotless, is not neo-classical: the dancers are strongly characterized, both individually and collectively (it is clear from the staging that they “know” each other), and the work as a whole embodies an overarching dramatic situation. Robbins described that situation to Edward Villella, a member of the original cast:

When you walk out on-stage, you’re actually beginning the ballet. You look around. It’s as if it’s the last time you’ll ever dance in this theater, in this space. And this is your home, the place you know.

Dances at a Gathering, then, is a dance about dancers—an approach first employed by Robbins in Afternoon of a Faun and recurrent in most of his later ballets.

Unsympathetic critics have applied the word “cute” to Dances at a Gathering, not only because it avoids direct classical statement but because Robbins makes effective use of certain obvious theatrical tricks. (Many of the variations, for example, end with an eye-catching lift as the dancers make their exit.) Others have been troubled by the ballet’s length—at 63 minutes, it is twice as long as most one-act ballets—and by the final, solemn tableau, which in a bad performance can seem embarrassingly heavy-handed.

Yet the actual dance content is for the most part very beautiful, and Robbins’s knack for characterization is, as always, uncanny. As the great dance critic Edwin Denby has perceptively written:

Robbins’s genius in focusing on a decisive momentary movement—almost like a zoom lens—makes vivid the special quality of each dance. . . . You see each dancer dance marvelously and you also see each one as a fascinating individual—complex, alone, and with any of the others, individually most sensitive and generous in their relationships.

The result is a ballet which occupies an uneasy middle ground between neoclassicism and dance drama. Its virtues, as well as its problems, would be reflected in all of Robbins’s subsequent work.

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Between 1970 and 1990, when he retired from the company, Robbins produced ballets regularly for New York City Ballet. The most ambitious of these, The Goldberg Variations, uses a large cast to imaginative but uneven effect. More consistently successful are those which seek to please rather than impress, including In the Night (1970, music by Chopin), Ma Mère I’Oye (1975, music by Ravel), Piano Pieces (1981, music by Tchaikowsky), and I’m Old Fashioned (1983, music by Morton Gould). While these works differ greatly in tone, they have two things in common: none is a pure-dance ensemble piece in the manner of Balanchine, and all are in some sense “about” dancers (or a particular style of dance). Ma Mère l’Oye, for example, makes ingenious use of costumes and set pieces borrowed from other dances in the NYCB repertory, and I’m Old Fashioned is a tribute to Fred Astaire (a clip from one of Astaire’s films is shown at the beginning and end).

Throughout the second half of the 80’s, Robbins’s choreographic output dwindled, and most of his new dances were obviously minor efforts or pièces d’occasion. The chief exception was Ives, Songs (1988, music by Charles Ives), a reminiscence of childhood and adolescence set in World War I, around the time of Robbins’s birth; its valedictory overtones, while affecting, are uncomfortably blatant. He returned to Broadway the following year with Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, a virtuoso retrospective consisting of scenes and dances from ten of his musical-comedy productions. The juxtaposition of these two events suggested to many that Robbins’s long career had at last neared its end, and it came as no surprise when in 1990 he announced his retirement from NYCB.

No new ballets came until 1994, when Mikhail Baryshnikov premiered A Suite of Dances, a solo work set to excerpts from Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites. Later that same year, students of the School of American Ballet (founded by Balanchine and closely associated with NYCB) did 2 + 3 Part Inventions, a piano-accompanied dance also set to the music of Bach. Rumors began to circulate that these works were studies for a major ballet, and the rumors proved true this past January when NYCB premiered Brandenburg, a dance for two solo couples and a corps of sixteen set to Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto and individual movements from three of the other Brandenburgs.

At first glance, Brandenburg appears to be the missing link in Robbins’s output. A large-scale ensemble piece structured along classical lines, it contains no implied relationships, and the dancers are not individually characterized. But a closer look reveals that it is also merely the latest in Robbins’s long series of dances about dancers—specifically, a corps of Robbins-style dancers performing a “neoclassical” ballet which incorporates all the choreographer’s signature moves (down to the cartwheels first seen in Fancy Free). No more a direct dance statement than Dances at a Gathering, Brandenburg is a theatricalized portrayal of neoclassicism, and one which, for all the fetching grace and fluidity of its complex ensembles, is to George Balanchine’s Symphony in C as West Side Story is to Romeo and Juliet.

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That Robbins should suffer by comparison with his mentor, Balanchine, is no shame: what choreographer would not? But comparisons between the two men, while inevitable, nevertheless obscure the fact that their sensibilities are vastly different. Balanchine was the ideal type of what the playwright Friedrich Schiller called the “naive” poet—the wholly natural genius unburdened by romantic self-consciousness. Robbins, by contrast, is a no less ideal example of Schiller’s “sentimental” poet, beset by ideas, intensely aware of his alienation from the natural world, forever seeking redemption through his art.

The irony is that Robbins has long admired and aspired to Balanchine’s “naivete.” Everything he has said about his art makes that clear, from his statement that the dancers in Dances at a Gathering “are themselves dancing with each other to that music in that space” to the revealing remark he made to the dance critic Deborah Jowitt in 1974:

Essentially what I care about is working; that’s what I feel my job is. I don’t want to fall into profundities and artistry and surround everything with whipped cream. I work, only instead of being a plumber, I’m a choreographer. I like my job.

Not surprisingly, then, Robbins’s most successful ballets are those in which he operates as a craftsman, shunning what Arlene Croce has called “the pursuit of cosmic bellyaches.” Profundity is his weakest suit, angst a close second. It is in striving for “naiveté” that Robbins loosens the bonds of his sentimentality and most closely approaches the direct expressiveness of pure neoclassicism; his failure to free himself altogether from those bonds has prevented him from becoming an artist of the first rank.

But how many artists of the first rank have there been in 20th-century dance? The list proves unexpectedly short: Balanchine, Paul Taylor, and possibly Merce Cunningham and Frederick Ashton. And judged by any standard other than the most exalted, Jerome Robbins ranks very high indeed. Not only is he the sole American-born ballet choreographer to have created an oeuvre of demonstrably long-lasting interest, but his fusion of classical and vernacular movement set the tone for American dance—modern as well as ballet—from the 70’s on.

In this respect as in others, it is finally more appropriate to compare Robbins not to Balanchine but to his old friend and collaborator, Leonard Bernstein, with whom his name will always be linked. For the positions of the two men in the hierarchies of their respective domains have proved over the years to be strikingly similar: though never attaining the indisputable greatness after which they so passionately sought, both gave pleasure their whole lives long, left behind distinguished and memorable works of theater, and have earned permanent places of honor in the annals of American art.

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¹ The only commercially available record of a Robbins-directed musical as originally produced is the videocassette of the 1960 NBC telecast of Peter Pan (Good Times Home Video 7001), starring Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard, which gives a clear impression of what the show looked like in the theater. In addition, Robbins meticulously restaged his dances for The King and I for the 1956 film version. The films of West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof, alas, are unevenly cast, grossly exaggerated caricatures of the original stage productions. (Robbins’s choreography was not used in the films of On the Town and Gypsy.)

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