Jerome Robbins: his life, his theater, his dance

Dance Magazine, Nov, 2004 by Doris Hering

Jerome Robbins: His life, His Theater, His Dance By Deborah Jowitt. New York: Simon and Schuster. 2004 619 pages. Illustrated. $40.

Contradictions, contradictions. Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz became Jerome Robbins because he was ashamed of his Jewish name. But his directing and choreography for the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof celebrated life in a Polish-Jewish village.

Robbins was more homosexual than heterosexual. But he wanted to marry, or thought he did.

During the "Red Scare" in 1953, he was summoned to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He named possible Communists he wasn't even asked about.

In rehearsal, he demolished dancers' egos and slashed newly made costumes. Yet there was a nucleus of dancers and creative collaborators who wanted to work with him no matter what.

Deborah Jowitt, author of this absorbing biography, never allows herself to sink into the mire of gossip or hearsay; nor does she take undue advantage of her access to the mounds of diaries, correspondence, audiotapes, videotapes, and photographs that Robbins accumulated. Throughout, she keeps her balance and lets Robbins keep his.

The core of the book lies in Jowitt's keenly observed descriptions of the action in each ballet. One can picture exactly what the dancers are doing and what makes this action unique. II is a structure that only a perceptive writer like Jowitt, who has spent third-seven years with The Village Voice, could build.

Here are the initial images, ranging over forty years: from Fancy Free, his first work in 1944 for American Ballet Theatre (then Ballet Theatre): "The first man to be seen through the bar's side window flips out of a cartwheel to jump straight up and beckon to his buddies over the heads of an imaginary crowd, and they, in turn, cartwheel to join him. The men's dancing gives us a deeper look at them: their easy unison, the bounce in their walk, the way they take a wide stance and slowly raise their gaze, leaning back as if trying to take in the enormousness of the skyline."

Here, twenty-five years later, is Dances at a Gathering, his masterpiece for New York City Ballet: "The dancers in the ballet are themselves ... but they are also members of a community that lives in Chopin's music, especially in the mazurkas of his ancestral Polish homeland, with their lusty downbeats and tautly lilting second beats. However, Robbins' steps suggest Poland only in the way the music does: in a rhythm, a fragment of melody, a folk gesture transformed by creative intellect. There are heel-and-toe steps; feet stamping; heels clicking together.... But these mingle with classical steps that have been eased to look natural and unposed."

And in 1984, Antique Epigraphs: "The dancers make an attitude turn on pointe look as if they were sailing on invisible wind. Three women holding bands, entwining, have the chasteness of young girls frolicking on a beach; two lift another in a leap. Robbins' vision of this sisterhood of women ... is idealized. Young, lithe, gracious, and gentle, they inhabit the danse d'ecole as if it were a convent with all its windows open to the sun and salt air."

The individuality, the difference from one to the other that pervades his ballets, also gives uniqueness to the Broadway shows he choreographed and sometimes directed. In groundbreaking productions like The King and I, Peter Pan, West Side Story, Gypsy, and Fiddler on the Roof, Jowitt's impressions of how they looked and sounded is enhanced by descriptions of how they were made. It was not always a glory tale, but the results were brilliant.

Because of his admiration for George Balanchine, Robbins left ABT early in his career and spent the bulk of his serious creative life with NYCB. As a performer, he was used with great insight by Balanchine. Few dancers, for example, have equaled his portrayal of the rebellious youth in Prodigal Son. Balanchine was also generously constructive when asked for opinions of Robbins' works in progress: and the speed and discipline with which the older man staged his own works set an example that Robbins tried to emulate.

Few choreographers have Robbins' range. He was comfortable with tragedy, as in West Side Story; he experimented relentlessly with abstraction, as in The Goldberg Variations; and The Concert proved that he could make genuinely funny dances whose humor stemmed directly from the movement. As director Gerald Freedman observed, he displayed a "continuous and restless search for the truth. The right gesture--the absolute essence."

In her postlude to the book, Jowitt enlarged upon Freedman's remark with, "Out of that struggle to find himself he created art that made an enormous contribution to theater and dance almost worldwide. In the course of it, sadly, he left many associates angry and wounded, cursing him even as they called him a genius." How persistently Jowitt probed her contradictory subject, and how fairly she presented him.