{"id":5861,"date":"2018-05-07T15:15:08","date_gmt":"2018-05-07T19:15:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/?p=5861"},"modified":"2018-05-11T11:41:02","modified_gmt":"2018-05-11T15:41:02","slug":"new-york-city-ballet-celebrates-jerome-robbins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/2018\/05\/new-york-city-ballet-celebrates-jerome-robbins\/","title":{"rendered":"New York City Ballet Celebrates Jerome Robbins"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Jerome Robbins’s Circus Polka<\/em>. Ask la Cour cracks his whip and students of the School of American Ballet lay out Robbins’s initials. Photo: Paul Kolnik<\/p><\/div>\n

I lived with Jerome Robbins for six years. (Forgive the startling opener; he was dead at the time, but liked a joke). During those years, I read his diaries and his letters, talked with his family, friends, and those he worked with. Since recovering from writing a book about him and his choreography, I haven\u2019t attended many performances of his ballets. Now the New York City Ballet, for which he was a Ballet Master in Chief, is celebrating the 100th<\/sup> anniversary of this remarkable artist\u2019s life, which began in 1918, when he was born in New Jersey as Jerome Rabinowitz.<\/p>\n

The Gala NYCB performance that celebrates Robbins made a gallant effort to hint at the ease with which he moved among choreographing ballets, Broadway shows, movies, and television specials. Did I say \u201cease?\u201d Ironically, while creating a work was a struggle for him, with many versions lying in the dustbin while he sought perfection, ease was what he wanted: difficult steps made to look as if the dancers were just making them up.<\/p>\n

Justin Peck called his Spring season premiere Easy<\/em> in honor of Robbins, although his own life\u00a0 as the company\u2019s current Resident Choreographer may not be uncomplicated (with fellow former NYCB dancers Craig Hall, Rebecca Krohn, and Jonathan Stafford, he is also part of the Interim Artistic Team that was assembled in the wake of Peter Martins\u2019s retirement).<\/p>\n

Not very easy was the evening\u2019s opener, Robbins\u2019s The Four Seasons<\/em> (1974), which followed a very sweet speech by principal dance Maria Kowroski (it was something of a shock when she said that she was the only current company member who had worked with Jerry on a new ballet). The Four Seasons<\/em> is a big \u201cclassical\u201d work, with a different cast for each section. No excerpts from Vivaldi concertos for Robbins. Instead, the music is later and lusher: the third-act ballet from Verdi\u2019s opera I Vespri Siciliani<\/em>, plus excerpts from the 19th<\/sup>-century composer\u2019s I Lombardo <\/em>and Il Trovatore. <\/em><\/p>\n

Robbins was a relentless student of music, playing recordings over and over until the rhythms and melodies and textures became as familiar to him as, say, those of \u201cHappy Birthday.\u201d What he heard in Verdi\u2019s music was also its Romantic atmosphere. The set is an elaborately gilded frame, and each of the four seasons is ushered onto the stage by a commanding leader (Cameron Dieck, Isabella LaFreniere, Clara Frances, and Preston Chamblee), and they, in turn, have been assembled by Silas Farley as the god Janus. What a demonstration of stately demeanor and billowing cloaks!<\/p>\n

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Daniel Ulbricht as the Faun in Robbins’s The Four Seasons<\/em>. Photo: Paul Kolnik<\/p><\/div>\n

But Robbins, more or less following Verdi\u2019s original scenario, found ways to amuse the spectators, as well as creating ingenious and demanding classical sequences. The eight women of Winter in their white tutus don\u2019t behave like happy residents of the season. When winter winds Joseph Gordon and Ralph Ippolito cup their hands around their mouths and blow at them, the women clump together, hunch over, and rub their unprotected little arms. Indiana Woodward attaches herself to one shivering cluster (they tend to kick newcomers pertly away), but she\u2019s braver than they are and apparently realizes that tossing off rapid echapp\u00e9s and pass\u00e9s and attracting the guys is a better way to keep warm. You can even briefly see a step that imitates skating on ice, like those in Frederick Ashton\u2019s Les Patineurs. <\/em><\/p>\n

Spring is the loveliest of the four sections. After the Winter people have been bowed to and wafted away, four men (Daniel Applebaum, Spartak Hoxha, Lars Nielson, and Sebastian Villarini-Velez) enter to attend Sara Mearns, who\u2019s happy to have them looking after her. I hadn\u2019t noticed before how her fine partner, Tyler Angle, his eyes on her, greets her with a single tremendous leap on a musical climax. It makes you think of spring grass fairly bursting out of the earth (as well as of other more human reactions). Mearns dances, as always, wonderfully. I can\u2019t figure out how, when advancing through space, she makes it seem as if her legs begin at her waist; it\u2019s enough to cow the air.<\/p>\n

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Sara Mearns in the Spring section of Jerome Robbins’s The Four Seasons<\/em>. Photo: Paul Kolnik<\/p><\/div>\n

The choreography blends formality and the unexpected in various ways, just the next step isn’t always predictable. The four men of \u201cWinter\u201d line up facing us and\u2014perhaps referencing a similar passage in Marius Petipa\u2019s Raymonda<\/em>\u2014 prepare to show off their jumps. But they don\u2019t go down the line one by one. If my memory served, it\u2019s first one, then another, then two, then all. Your eye pops around to guess who\u2019s next. The orientalist atmosphere that Verdi\u2019s music for \u201cSummer\u201d inspired is a kind of sensual laziness. Its six pink-clad women pulse on almost every step, sinking into it and gently rebounding. Teresa Reichlen and Aaron Sanz are nudged into solos, as if these were pleasant features of a conversation. For \u201cFall,\u201d Robbins pulls out all the stops. Eight women with their hair down skip like bacchantes and loll about, while a high-jumping faun (Daniel Ulbricht, who else) urges thema on, and marvelous Tyler Peck and Zachary Catazaro revel together and apart (I\u2019m not sure which version of the original pas deux was performed; Robbins devised one for Mikhail Baryshnikov and Patricia McBride and another for Peter Martins and Suzanne Farrell). The end, of course, brings almost everyone onstage for a grand finale.<\/p>\n

Igor Stravinsky wrote his \u201cCircus Polka\u201d for a dance that Balanchine was devising for elephants in Ringling Brothers\u2019 Barnum and Bailey Circus. Robbins brought nimbler dancers onstage for the Circus Polka <\/em>that premiered during the NYCB\u2019s glorious 1972 Stravinsky Festival. He played the Ringmaster, cracking his whip for squads of smaller and smaller girls from the School of American Ballet. He had known ever since 1951, when he choreographed \u201cThe March of the Royal Children\u201d for the musical The King and I<\/em>, how to enchant spectators by playing on the skills of children not trying to be adults. Invariably an audience for the Circus Polka<\/em>, utters little \u201caws\u201d of approval when the tiniest squad runs onto the stage. Nice little joke: the tiny one who loses her place. Nice bigger joke: The Ringmaster ( Ask La Cour) repeatedly takes the credit and the bows for what the children have done. In 1972, they formed themselves to spell out \u201cI.S.\u201d In 2018, they arrange themselves into \u201cJ.R.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Cellist Ann Kim and Joaquin De Luz in Jerome Robbins’s A Suite of Dances.<\/em> Photo: Paul Kolnik<\/p><\/div>\n

Ease as a desirable quality for a dancer to convey is expressed in a solo that Robbins created in 1994 for Baryshnikov to selected movements from J.S. Bach\u2019s Six Suites for Solo Cello. <\/em>Juxtaposing of one of the world\u2019s most virtuosic dancers with an onstage cellist playing a great composer\u2019s work\u2014and then endeavoring to make a ballet that looked as if it were being dreamed up on the spot\u2014was an endeavor that only Robbins would have attempted. Joaquin De Luz, seated on the floor, watches Ann Kim begin to play. How easily, how slowly he works his way into Bach\u2019s music! He never stops listening to it and investigating how his body might respond, what his arm alone might do. You sense the two artists onstage communicating about what they want to try next. The build into difficult steps is almost unnoticeable. Near the end, De Luz starts repeatedly traveling toward the audience, then backing up and trying a different style or steps. All in all, a triumph for him.<\/p>\n

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Justin Peck’s Easy<\/em>. (L to R): Claire Kretzschmer, Preston Chamblee, Sean Suozzi, Indiana Woodward (crouching) , Unity Phelan, and Harrison Coll. Photo: Paul Kolnik<\/p><\/div>\n

Peck\u2019s Easy<\/em>, colludes with Robbins\u2019s collaboration with Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story<\/em>. I think of it in relation to \u201cCool,\u201d one of the musical’s songs: \u201cBoy, boy, crazy boy,\/ Stay loose, boy.\/ Breeze it, buzz it,\/ Easy does it,\/Turn off the juice, boy.\u201d The music for Easy <\/em>is Bernstein\u2019s jazzy Prelude, Fugue and Riffs<\/em> (arranged for orchestra, with Steven Hartman as its solo clarinetist), nor is there any hint of gang warfare and repressed violence. No plot either. There\u2019s just a sense of teenagers at play, maybe on city streets or in schoolyard. Who wants to be with whom? Who\u2019d like to join some good-looking dancing? Stephen Powers\u2019s puzzling backdrop shows two pairs of legs in sneakers, with terms like \u201ceasy peasy\u201d and \u201churly burly\u2019 posted on them and big black sentences, one of which asks who\u2019s the soloist in a concerto.<\/p>\n

The six engaging dancers\u2014Preston Chamblee, Harrison Coll, Claire Kretzschmar, Unity Phelan, Sean Suozzi, and Indiana Woodward\u2014are costumed individually and vividly by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung. They form alliances casually. Maybe the men take turns lifting one another. Maybe two women dance the same steps. The atmosphere is, well, easy; the dancers come and go or stay and watch one another. And the dancing is easygoing. Sneakers rather than pointe shoes, feet often flexed or relaxed, some steps low to the ground. At times, too, there\u2019s a looseness to the movement, so it looks like spontaneous behavior. The ballet ends with a familiar joke. Coll is left along onstage, wondering \u201cwhere\u2019d they all go?\u201d Spotting them offstage, he rushes for the wings, hurls himself into the air, and is caught by their invisible hands.<\/p>\n

Easy <\/em>is a homage to the Robbins-Bernstein collaboration. It isn\u2019t, to my mind, one of the hugely gifted Peck\u2019s best works, but its appropriateness and the dancers’ verve and commitment elevate it.<\/p>\n

The also new Something to Dance About<\/em> is another sort of homage\u2014this one celebrating Robbins\u2019s Broadway career. All the choreography is supposedly his, but the direction and staging are by Warren Carlyle, a choreographer noted for his work on Broadway and television. The project, splendidly lit by Mark Stanley, is hugely ambitious. The music by Bernstein, Jule Styne, Richard Rodgers, and Jerry Bock has been arranged by Rob Berman and orchestrated by Jonathan Tunick. Ten featured dancers (nine of them principals), plus ten men and ten women, many with multiple costume changes. Carlyle has duplicated Robbins\u2019s choreography where possible, created transitions, and filled in gaps\u2014weaving in, overlapping, and briefly layering material from seven different shows: On the Town<\/em>, Gypsy<\/em>, West Side Story<\/em>, The King and I<\/em>, Billion Dollar Baby<\/em>, Funny Girl<\/em>, and Fiddler on the Roof. <\/em>The expert singer, Jessica Vosk, delivers some of the songs, while moving close to the dancers and seeming to cajole them or egg them on.<\/p>\n

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Ashley Bouder and Andrew Veyette in a scene from Gypsy\u00a0<\/em>in Something to Dance About<\/em>\u2014a medley of Jerome Robbins’s choreography, directed and staged by Warren Carlyle. Photo: Paul Kolnik<\/p><\/div>\n

Sometimes you get a tangy taste of the original numbers\u2014say, three male and three female principal dancers kiting around, as a small horde of On the Town\u2019<\/em>s sailors accumulates. Or a quick taste of West Side Story<\/em>\u2019s \u201cDance at the Gym,\u201d the skirts of the women\u2019s red dresses (by Toni-Leslie James) flaring. These partygoers frame Lauren Lovette and De Luz, slowly approaching each other as Maria and Tony, before those two yield to another pair: Peck in a bouffant gown polkaing with Taylor Stanley and other couples in \u201cShall We Dance\u201d from The King and I. <\/em>Other excerpts slide by before you\u2019re sure what they are: for instance, Mearns and Woodward in Siamese attire, as, I presume, Eliza and the Angel, walking over the strip of blue cloth representing ice in the The King and I<\/em>\u2019s \u201cSmall House of Uncle Thomas\u201d <\/em>Or Peck and Ulbrecht briefly leading a Charleston from Billion Dollar Baby.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>Gaudiness is balanced by simplicity. Andrew Veyette and Ashley Bouder mostly chat in \u201cAll I need is the Girl\u201d from Gypsy.<\/em> Four men in black give us a glimpse of the slow, squatting-down \u201cWedding Dance\u201d from Fiddler on the Roof. <\/em>As a whole, Something to Dance About<\/em> is both stunning and confusing. I\u2019m glad that the superb dancers of the New York City Ballet, many of whom couldn’t have seen all the shows that Robbins choreographed, got a taste of them in their own bodies.<\/p>\n

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Something to Dance About,<\/em> the final image. In the light (L to R): Andrew Veyette and Ashley Bouder; Chase Finley, Daniel Ulbricht, and Taylor Stanley, with Sara Mearns behind them; Lauren Lovette and Joaquin De Luz; Jessica Vosk; Tyler Peck; Indiana Woodward; and, just behind these last, four male dancers from Fiddler on the Roof.<\/em> Photo: Paul Kolnik<\/p><\/div>\n

The ending brought tears to my eyes. The cast assembles onstage, costumed for all the works, and, as a photograph on Robbins\u2019s smiling face appears in the proscenium arch projected on the backdrop, Vosk sings another song from The King and I<\/em>: Lady Chiang\u2019s words to Anna about the king she\u2019s serving:<\/p>\n

“He will not always say what you would have him say<\/p>\n

But, now and then he’ll say something wonderful.<\/p>\n

The thoughtless things he’ll do will hurt and worry you,<\/p>\n

Then, all at once he’ll do something wonderful.”<\/p>\n

Indeed. Happy 100th <\/sup>Jerry. Wish you\u2019d been here.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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