Jerome Robbins, the Experimentalist
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Version 0 of 1. It’s easy to forget that the choreographer Jerome Robbins was often an experimentalist. Robbins is rightly celebrated as the creator of memorable and popular ballets, as a master of Broadway musicals and as a show doctor of legendary skill. But not all Robbins works were successes; he needed to take risks. With New York City Ballet staging 20 of his works for the “Robbins 100” centennial this month — with more to follow next season — we have the chance to reassess this complex, mold-breaking artist. The company is in the second week of its Robbins season, and it’s moving to see how vividly the dancers are rising to the challenge offered by a choreographer who died, in 1998, before all but one of them joined the company and before some of them were born. They’ve been groomed since childhood to dance the style and ballets of George Balanchine; but Robbins requires valuably alternative standards. The revivals so far have included three difficult, important, problematic pieces: “Les Noces” (1965), “The Goldberg Variations” (1971) and “Dybbuk” (1974). They’re all worth arguing about, and well worth seeing. “Dybbuk” was last performed here in 2008; though it doesn’t belong in regular repertory, a revival every 10 years should do us all good. Robbins, gay and Jewish amid the conformist orthodoxies of Western ballet, often pushed the art form where it had not gone. His views of community and gender relations particularly tested the norms at City Ballet because that company was and is the house of the Russian-born and heterosexual Balanchine. Even though Balanchine’s choreography had a few examples of same-sex partnering and all-male ensembles, Robbins sometimes pursued this with far greater dance exposure and emphasis. Some of Robbins’s perceived failures were dear to his heart. One such was “Dybbuk,” a dance distillation of “The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds,” S. Ansky’s play, first performed in 1920, about possession and exorcism, steeped in Russian Jewish culture. (It has inspired operas and films. Even the British choreographer Frederick Ashton considered turning it into a ballet.) Robbins, when he felt his first version didn’t succeed, tried a second, “The Dybbuk Variations” (also 1974), then a third, “Suite of Dances (from ‘The Dybbuk Variations’)” (1980). After his death, though, it was the original that was revived. It is a baffling, unsatisfactory, memorable piece. The marvelous costumes, by Patricia Zipprodt, make dramatic juxtapositions of pale and black hues, especially on sleeves; when characters suddenly acquire lines of hanging red strands on their arms, like plumage, the impact is high voltage. Especially for the male corps, Robbins provides a range of special arm movements — now extended while the dancers spin across the stage, now undulating while they stand — and he makes an explosive series of male solos. Robbins tells no story, but his action is so strangely eventful that the lack of plot explanation is an obvious problem. Yet the work’s sense of ritual, mystery and spiritual anguish add up to some knotty conundrum that haunts me. Robbins himself was haunted by his most notorious act, naming names to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953. “I betrayed my manhood, my Jewishness, my parents, my sister,” he wrote in a later diary; “I can’t undo it.” No, he couldn’t, but “Dybbuk,” like the more explicable and surefire “Fiddler on the Roof,” is one of the works in which, making amends to his Jewishness, he opened up its traditions for us. “The Goldberg Variations” is an accumulation of experiments on Robbins’s part. A series of history games, it juxtaposes baroque and modern in successive variations with changing results. He often pares his dance lexicon back to pedestrian movement and to a radically understated version of ballet. And he tests gender norms, with some strikingly relaxed examples of male-male and female-female partnering that anticipate those of right now. The most profound experiment is in the way he tests how these things can fit Bach’s famous 90-minute score. Although Robbins’s dances don’t add up organically — and the costume designer Joe Eula’s changes of attire feel like a superimposed concept — they help us to hear the exploratory nature and astonishing economy of Bach’s score. In “Les Noces,” Robbins follows quite closely the scenario of Stravinsky’s 1923 dance cantata. “Noces” means “wedding,” and this marriage is an arranged one. After centuries of ballets and other works about happy-ever-after nuptials, here is a work in which bride and groom are the least willing people onstage. At the end, while solemn bells sound, everyone else bends as if having completed their mission, but the central couple are locked together in imagery that suggests their sexual union is harsh and involuntary. The bride, holding a shape as if in mid-jump, seems a cousin of the Chosen Maiden in “The Rite of Spring,” tragically fulfilling the collective will. Few Stravinsky scores are more incisive or thrilling: This is scored for four solo singers, a choir (Musica Sacra in the current performances), four pianos and percussion. Its premiere occurred in France; Stravinsky approved both Russian and French versions of the sung (sometimes shouted) texts. Since the fashion is now for Russian — and since few understand Stravinsky’s partly archaic words — I wish supertitles were employed. Robbins’s ballet is good but suffers by comparison to the superlative 1923 choreography by Bronislava Nijinska, which, with greater force, makes bride and groom yet more passive and the social units far more shatteringly machine-like. (It remains in repertory with the Royal Ballet. There have been scattered American revivals in recent decades.) Still, Robbins’s ending is all his own and reveals his compassion. You sometimes hear claims that Robbins’s work is misogynist. Though he occasionally shows women behaving badly (and men, too, as in “Fancy Free”), I disagree. The heroines of “Noces,” “Dybbuk,” “Goldberg” and many other Robbins ballets aren’t exalted or glorified; they express a particular sympathy on his part. He didn’t sublimate; he showed how things are for humans in this world. |