Memory played a part. When he was just six years old, Robbins’s mother took him to Rozhanka (by then in Poland and renamed Rejanke) to visit his grandfather, a trip that by his own account transported him into a remote shtetl past and left a deep and lasting impression. Other memories came from his grandmother, who spoke Yiddish and kept a kosher kitchen, and came to live with the family. When they moved to Weehawken, New Jersey (Robbins’s father gave up the deli to manage the Comfort Corset company), his parents were active in the Jewish community. Jerry studied the Torah and had a bar mitzvah—although he later recalled his humiliation at being taunted by neighborhood boys for his Jewishness, and his burning desire to say “ ‘that’s it’ to the whole business.”12
His parents were ambitious and eager to give Jerry and his older sister Sonia an education in the arts. His father liked to listen to Eddie Cantor (another Russian Jew) on the radio, and delighted in Cantor’s show biz talent and success. Sonia danced and joined the touring company of Irma Duncan (whose free-spirited style was a direct imitation of her adoptive mother, Isadora). Jerry studied music and was something of a prodigy, performing and composing on the piano by the age of four. Indeed, dance and music were to be his ticket out of his parents’ world. Thus although Jerry’s father loudly objected to his son’s interest in dance—too effeminate—in 1936 Robbins politely turned down a place in the corset factory and began to study seriously in New York.
He took classes in everything: “art dance” à la Martha Graham and Mary Wigman, flamenco, oriental dance, acting, composition (at the politically radical New Dance Group). He studied ballet with Ella Daganova, a Russified American who had danced with Anna Pavlova: he swept her floors to pay for lessons and feverishly recorded ballet steps and combinations in his notebooks. Most important of all, however, was Senia Gluck-Sandor—Sammy Gluck, a Jew of Polish and Hungarian descent—who had worked with Mikhail Fokine, performed on the vaudeville circuit, and studied in Germany with Wigman. Gluck-Sandor had his own small studio and theater called the Dance Center where he presented Russian ballets and his own modern dances on serious themes. He created a ballet about the Spanish Civil War, for example, and a dance about race to poems by Langston Hughes.
Robbins also performed in The Brothers Ashkenazi, adapted from the play by I. J. Singer at the Yiddish Art Theatre, choreographed by Gluck-Sandor (Robbins sang “The Internationale” in a revolutionary crowd), and in the late 1930s he spent summers at Camp Tamiment, another left-leaning and largely Jewish group. There he created a dance to Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” and worked with Danny Kaye on a Yiddish version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado (they called it Der Richtiga Mikado). Back in New York, he danced on Broadway alongside Jimmy Durante, Ray Bolger, and Jackie Gleason—and in shows choreographed by George Balanchine. In 1939, with minimal ballet training but lots of theatrical experience, Robbins changed gears and joined Lucia Chase’s nascent Ballet Theatre. He worked with the Russian ballet masters Léonide Massine and Mikhail Fokine, and Fokine coached him personally in the title role in Petrouchka—a role originated by Vaslav Nijinsky in 1911. Indeed, Robbins had a lifelong interest in Nijinsky, whose Afternoon of a Faun would be the inspiration for one of his most haunting ballets. He tried for years to make a film based on Nijinsky’s life, and like Nijinsky, he was fascinated with Tolstoy.
The role of Petrouchka, the outcast doll at odds with society but desperate to win the love of the pretty ballerina, resonated deeply with Robbins. While working on the part, he made a note to himself that announced the ideas and themes that would guide him for years to come: his Petrouchka would be a “different & ‘strange’ person—mentally & morally—against the proper society conventions. Ballerina must be one you love intensely. Magician and walls are the standards, conventions, & hard uncaring egotism of the proper society.” Vera Stravinsky, who had seen Nijinsky in the role, vowed that Robbins was even more affecting, and it is not wrong to suppose that there was something of a Petrouchka in Jerome Rabinowitz, fighting to get out of his own skin and away from his own past (he changed his name officially in 1944).13
Robbins’s early training thus rested on two pillars: the Jewish theatrical tradition of vaudeville and Broadway which absorbed and encompassed an eclectic array of dance styles, and the narrower but deeper tradition of Russian ballet. The Russian pillar was particularly important, especially Robbins’s sustained contact with the modernism of Stanislavsky and Fokine, both of whom had argued for a realistic, natural theater that would eschew artifice in favor of a style so organic that it would seem (as Fokine said) to spring “from life itself.” Petrouchka’s dancing was classically based, but also ragged, awkward, and asymmetrical, an outgrowth of his tormented life and feelings. Similarly, as we have seen, Stanislavsky’s actors did not declaim, but spoke in normal, even intimate tones. They did not “act,” but searched their own pasts for personal emotional experiences to match those of their characters, thus producing a real, authentic feeling. Stanislavsky and Fokine both did copious research for a performance, immersing themselves in the historical and cultural details of the worlds that they wished to reproduce onstage.
In New York, Stanislavsky’s ideas became the foundation of a distinctly American style of acting associated with Elia Kazan and Marlon Brando. Robbins was deeply involved in this world from the outset. His teacher Gluck-Sandor collaborated with the Group Theater and with Kazan, and when Kazan and Cheryl Crawford went on to found the Actors Studio in 1947, Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift (Robbins’s lover at the time) studied there. So did Robbins. Crawford would be one of the original producers (she later left the project) of West Side Story (1957), and Robbins first had the idea for the musical while working with Clift on how to perform Romeo and Juliet in a here-and-now, “our generation” style. Robbins incorporated into his own work the Actors Studio probing focus on intention and would become known for his tough scrutiny of the source and motive of a movement—it had to be real, not fake or put on. He was also drawn to the Studio’s experimental and workshop approach, with its emphasis on improvisation and collaborative brainstorming.
Not surprisingly, Robbins’s early work was marked by an intense preoccupation with style—with how movement grows from the ways people live and the things they believe. He did voluminous research for his dances and created movement that seemed so right you hardly noticed that the characters were dancing. He began in 1944 with Fancy Free, for Ballet Theatre. It was a landmark production—American, vernacular, and jazzy—and the first collaboration between Robbins and Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990). They were both twenty-five years old and the connection was immediate: like Robbins, Bernstein was the child of immigrant Russian Jews, and he too aspired to create a distinctly American style of musical art.
Fancy Free was about sailors on shore leave in New York City, but it was no Hollywood lark: the country was at war and Robbins wanted to get at the unvarnished experience of these young men. In preparation for the ballet, he went to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and spent time on the USS Wisconsin. The choreography was technically demanding but appeared relaxed and casual, like a ballet slang: double turns in the air ended in splits, and there were cartwheels and fast-paced comic sequences. Bernstein’s brassy, jazz-tinged score caught the urgency and energy—the American sound and look—that he and Robbins were after. One critic gratefully noted the ballet’s lack of “coy showing off of ‘folk’ material” that had characterized “native” ballets such as Billy the Kid.14
Fancy Free was such a hit that Robbins and Bernstein developed it for Broadway with the writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green. It opened the following year as On the Town. The show was even tougher and more politically charged than the ballet: the team worked on the script during the D-day invasions (Comden’s husband was serving overseas) and they tried to capture the giddy but tense exuberance of young sailors whose night on the town might be their last (a tone completely lost in Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra’s sunny Hollywood film). But that was not al
l: the Japanese American dancer Sono Osato was cast as the lead all-American girl (her father was interned at a camp out west), and black dancers and singers mixed with the white performers onstage.
On the Town was a huge success and Robbins’s career took off. He lived a double life between Broadway and the ballet stage, thus establishing a pattern which would drive his creativity for at least two decades. On Broadway he choreographed dances and directed a streak of high-profile shows. But he was also dead serious about ballet, and though Robbins may be best known for his Broadway productions, we should not be deceived: not only did he began his career at Ballet Theatre and spend over thirty years with NYCB, but in between, while he was working on Broadway, he also founded his own ballet company, Ballets USA, which toured Europe and the Far East. Ballet—not just the steps, but everything it stood for—was the cornerstone of his art.
Many of Robbins’s early ballets have been lost, but people who were there say they were often dark and almost Tudor-like in tone, and pictures confirm this. Consider, for example, Facsimile (1946), choreographed to music by Bernstein for Nora Kaye and Hugh Laing. “Scene: a lonely place.” Action: kissing, seduction, rejection, a tangle of bodies pressing toward violence until Kaye shouts “Stop!” and they all abruptly leave the stage. Or The Guests, created in 1949 to music by the American composer Marc Blitzstein. It was about the included (dancers with a dot on their forehead) and the excluded (dancers without): a dotted man and undotted woman fall in love and struggle to escape the social conventions and blind prejudices that contrive to keep them apart. The following year came The Age of Anxiety (1950), to the poem by W. H. Auden, again with a score by Bernstein: a disturbing emotional landscape full of hurdles and obstructions, with ominous men in fencing masks and a collapsing black-hooded figure on stilts. Morton Baum thought it captured “the basic emotions of a whole generation.” The sociologist David Riesman wrote about the “lonely crowd”; Robbins put it onstage.15
A year later, Robbins created one of the ugliest and most disturbing ballets of all time. The Cage is a twenty-five-minute orgy of savage female insects who stalk, kill, and feed on male intruders with explicit sexual pleasure. It is as relentless and driving as Stravinsky’s score, and also as poignant. At the beginning of the ballet, a baby bug (the Novice, originally performed by Nora Kaye) is born. She is initiated, and learns to walk, move, and murder in the way of the tribe. Robbins teaches us their language, which is not bug-like but based on movements of aggression and fear, woven into a small vocabulary of classical steps. Bodies clutch over in self-protection, eyes darting. Movements of throwing up, strangling, and feeding mesh with wide echappés, lunging arabesques, and hammering bourrées. The Novice falls in love with an intruder. They dance a yearning pas de deux, a love song that strains to soften the bastardized, brutalized vocabulary. But finally instinct and the group prove stronger than love, and she ritually cuts his throat. Then she finishes him off by kicking and stomping, with the dead body (center stage) jolting and flailing under the force. The ballet ends with a frenzied group feeding and an orgasmic thigh-rubbing satisfaction.
The Cage is one of Robbins’s great ballets. When it opened in 1951, critics were appalled by its ferocity. (The Dutch government at first banned it as “pornographic.”) Robbins was amused by the public response. “I don’t see why some people are so shocked by The Cage,” he quipped. “It is actually not more than the second act of Giselle in a contemporary visualization.” Classical ballet, with its soaring lyricism, is a language of affirmation and human possibility: Giselle continues to love until death. Robbins certainly used that formal language, but he cut it down, twisting and circumscribing its syntax. The Novice can only yearn; she does not have the vocabulary to love, and we feel the lack intensely.16
In 1953 Robbins made his own version of Afternoon of a Faun, the ballet originally choreographed by Nijinsky in Paris in 1911. Robbins’s ballet, to Debussy’s score, is a pas de deux between two dancers in practice clothes set in a ballet studio; the audience is the fourth wall—the studio mirror that the dancers gaze into. The ballet begins with the man, in tights and bare chest, stretching languidly on the floor as if he were just waking. The girl enters. They dance, together and apart, at the barre and in partnered phrases: the movement is simple and sensual but coolly lacking in outward emotion. The dancers do not interact, but instead watch themselves in the mirror, studying their own forms as they dance together. At one point they stop and she is sitting on the floor in profile, knees tucked, eyes glued to the mirror. He turns to look at her and kisses her cheek: she watches it happen and then slowly lifts her hand to touch the spot. She turns to him and their eyes momentarily meet but her gaze returns to the mirror. She soon leaves the room, walking languidly on pointe, and he lies on the floor, where he began.
This dance (like Nijinsky’s) has often been read as a study in narcissism. But this misses an important point. What Robbins captured was the cool, analytic concentration of dancers as they perform movements that are also paradoxically sensual. What we see is not self-love (Narcissus gazing admiringly at his own reflection) but an intensely detached and depersonalized form of intimacy and eroticism. The dancers are close—but their feelings arise from their dancing, from being in the studio together but apart, rather than from any sexual or social encounter. For the audience the effect is disorienting: we are observing an intensely private moment, but we are also inadvertently engaged in it. It is through us that the dancers see themselves and each other, and they look at us—through us—with disarming directness. Robbins later said that he had been inspired by seeing a dancer in the studio stretching, and indeed Faun was the first of many ballets he would create that would take practice sessions and the way dancers work as a springboard for a newly informal kind of dance.
Ballet was also behind West Side Story, which opened in 1957 with music by Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, sets by Oliver Smith, and a book by Arthur Laurents. At first Robbins had imagined a Romeo and Juliet story of rival Jewish and Catholic families on New York’s Lower East Side (working title: East Side Story). As the brutal gang confrontations in New York and Los Angeles escalated and hit the news, however, the setting shifted: West Side Story focused on Puerto Rican and Polish gangs on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The Puerto Ricans were the new Jews: immigrants with culture and manners, unlike the Poles, whose behavior is far more crass and thuggish.
West Side Story was a summation of everything Robbins knew and cared about. Here was a show that brought the serious themes of his ballets to a popular forum; a show about a community divided and the ways that prejudice, violence, and clannish allegiances destroy individual lives; a show that used the disciplined forms of classical ballet to forge a raw street vernacular. It reached down to vaudeville and up to opera (Bernstein liked to call it “an American opera”). But above all it was an American tragedy, rooted in real social problems. Nothing was glossed: the show did not even end with the customary rousing dance finale—instead audiences were left with a stage strewn with dead bodies.17
In preparation for rehearsals, Robbins immersed himself in the culture of gangs and turf warfare: he hung around New York’s barrio and attended a high school dance in a troubled Puerto Rican neighborhood; he even managed to watch the beginnings of a real rumble in downtown Manhattan. “Those kids,” he wrote to a friend, “live like pressure cookers. There is a constant tension, a feeling of the kids having steam that they don’t know how to let off.” On another occasion, he attended a dance in Brooklyn where rival gangs met: he studied their dances closely, noting the form but also the feeling behind the movement, and recorded his astonishment at “the sense they gave you of containing their own world. Not arrogance exactly; but a crazy kind of confidence.”18
Drawing on his earlier work at the Actors Studio and techniques used by Brando and James Dean, Robbins assaulted his cast with a barrage of newspaper articles and exposés of gang warfare: “Read this: this is your life.” The Jets and Sharks
were forbidden to socialize offstage, and Robbins pitted them against each other by ruthlessly exposing personal, sometimes painful events from their private lives. (After hammering away at Mickey Calin, who played Riff, Robbins finally cornered him and demanded: “Do you hate me?” “No sir,” Calin responded. “Well,” Robbins shot back, “before you go onstage tonight, I want you to think of something to hate.”) He even organized workshops in which Jets and Sharks played Nazis and Jews in a concentration camp. He watched Rebel Without a Cause (featuring Natalie Wood, who performed Maria in the film of West Side Story), and it is no accident that Riff, the leader of the Jets, has something of the twisted, pent-up energy of a Dean and Brando—or that Bernstein also wrote the score for On the Waterfront (1954), in which Brando starred.19
Perhaps the best and most representative dance in West Side Story is “Cool,” the controlled, imploding, easy-does-it dance of the Jets. In this dance, Robbins uses the physical discipline of ballet to pull in and “cool” the raw, violent energy of the street. The Jets walk, stalk, run, and occasionally explode into a jump, a tour, or a pirouette. To move that fast, to go from walking to a full extension kick or tour en l’air “like a pistol shot,” as Robbins described it, is like accelerating from zero to sixty in a matter of seconds. The thrust required is enormous. The only way is to mass the energy inside, to concentrate it at the body’s core, and then to release it out in a single explosion. Ballet trains the body in this kind of precision and restraint, although—and this was the key—most of the performers in “Cool” were not in fact ballet-trained (Calin was a former stuntman). Robbins gave them the precepts without the pretense—they looked like tough street kids even when their steps were classically derived. “Cool,” moreover, does not look like ballet because Robbins cuts movements short and pulls them sharply back to the low crouch of the street. A blasting jump is reined in before it reaches full height. This changes the entire character of the movement. The energy appears excessive, barely contained, grounded. Cool, not balletic.
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