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Jerome Robbins: Choreographer of the American Dream
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18227 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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10 / 1990 |
2,044 Words |
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Camille Hardy
Camille Hardy is a New York-based critic who publishes and
broadcasts on the arts internationally. |
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' 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
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