West Side Story used ballet in another way too. Robbins wrote to Laurents in 1955 about the dialogue, imploring him to sustain the “larger-than-life approach, the balletic approach,” and not to “relax” into a “life like or straight play tempo.” Later, writing to Robert Wise, co-director for the filmed version, he emphasized: “Our approach to the original production was to present it with the same time-free, space-free, image-evocative method of ballet.…I am not talking about the ‘ballet’ or ‘dancing’ but about the concept and style of the whole work which made it so individual.” It was this “balletic approach” and Robbins’s strict attention to form—every move was perfectly calculated and honed—that made the show universal. Nothing was offhand or left to chance, and the production’s crafted perfection and artifice (more real than the real) elevated it out of the ordinary and made it feel timeless, even when it was also grounded in the dirt and grime of inner-city strife.20
Although West Side Story was about gangs, it was also, and above all, about America: about the dark underside of the prosperous 1950s and a country divided against itself—blacks and whites, Catholics and Jews, “Communists” and “God-fearing Americans.” Robbins and his colleagues conceived the show in the early 1950s at the height of Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt for “card-carrying Communists,” “egg-sucking phony liberals,” “pinkos,” and “queers,” and it was produced amid growing racial tensions and the movement for civil rights. Every scene—from Maria’s plaintive aria to the excruciating precision of the knife fight—had the reach and lyricism of the American dream, abruptly cut off by barely controlled, erupting aggression.
Robbins himself was no stranger to these events. He had been harassed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the FBI since the early 1950s. At first he had refused to cooperate, but when Ed Sullivan abruptly canceled Robbins’s scheduled appearance on his popular television show, darkly suggesting that the choreographer’s success might have been engineered by the Communist Party, Robbins panicked. Many of the entertainment industry’s most famous and promising luminaries had already been blacklisted, and the group calling itself Counterattack had recently published a long report, Red Channels, pointing to TV and radio personalities who might be “potential subversives.” Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland made the list, and dozens of actors, directors, composers, and choreographers had been called to testify before Congress. Many of those who refused to cooperate lost their jobs, although Hollywood was much harder hit than Broadway. Robbins fled to Europe but eventually returned and in 1953 surrendered himself as a friendly witness. In an act that would haunt him for the rest of his life, he named names and turned friends and colleagues over to HUAC.
Why did he do it? Robbins, who was homosexual (at times bisexual) and had been a member of the Party from 1943 to 1947, was terrified that McCarthy would cut off his blossoming career—that his American success story would be derailed, sending him back to his Weehawken shtetl and the suffocating world of his parents. He later recalled: “I panicked & crumbled & returned to that primitive state of terror—the façade of Jerry Robbins would be cracked open, and behind everyone would finally see Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz.” Robbins was not the only artist to succumb, of course; Kazan did too, for example. But Kazan believed in the Communist threat: he had no doubt about the significance of the struggle between Soviet Communism and American idealism and with a clear conscience renounced the one in the name of the other, no matter HUAC’s unseemly methods. Robbins, by contrast, was tormented: he knew he had betrayed his friends, his family, his past, himself.21
In fact, his membership in the Communist Party had been a naive step, one he associated, when he thought about it, with his Jewish roots—with the fight against fascism and anti-Semitism, and with a generally progressive, left-wing political agenda. He knew little of the heated debates on the European or American left; this was not his world. What mattered to him in the aftermath of the hearings was that he had allowed himself to be strong-armed into turning his back on the ideals that had heretofore guided his life and art: the fight against “groupthink” and convention, and for freedom and the individual—Petrouchka’s fight. Ironically, naming names had also marked him in the only world to which he really did belong: Broadway and the theatrical milieu dominated by Jewish émigré artists—his people. Indeed, Arthur Laurents, Zero Mostel, and others despised Robbins for his weakness (although this did not stop them from working with him—he was just too good). Forced to choose, Robbins had sided with the wrong America. Desperate to fit in, he had made himself a pariah.
As if in part to redeem himself and reestablish his place, in 1964 Robbins directed and choreographed Fiddler on the Roof. The idea for the musical came from Jerry Bock (music), Sheldon Harnick (lyrics), and Joe Stein (book): like Robbins, they were all children of central European Jews (Stein had grown up speaking Yiddish in the Bronx, and Bock recalled his grandmother’s Russian and Yiddish folk songs). Together they set out to create a musical based on the stories of Sholem Aleichem, whose turn-of-the-century Yiddish-language stories had come—especially for American Jewry—to stand for a lost tradition and heritage. When Robbins joined the team he cabled a friend: “I’M GOING TO DO A MUSICAL ON SHOLEM ALEICHEM STORIES WITH HARNICK AND BOCK STOP I’M IN LOVE WITH IT IT’S OUR PEOPLE.”22
For Robbins the show turned into a personal pilgrimage. He threw himself into research about Jewish life—his parents’ life—in turn-of-the-century Russia and central Europe: he read books, attended Jewish weddings and Orthodox services, and even recruited his old teacher, Senia Gluck-Sandor, to play the rabbi. He spoke to the cast at length about his trip to Rozhanka as a child and confided to Harnick that his goal was “to give those shtetls that had been wiped out in World War II … another life onstage.”23
He tried to get Marc Chagall, another Russian émigré Jew, to design the sets, but settled instead for the Russian-born artist Boris Aronson. Chagall’s whimsical fiddler, however, stayed in Robbins’s mind: it became the show’s central image and an icon for the tradition it tried to depict. Robbins was acutely aware of the danger of slipping into sentiment, and he subjected the team to his usual blistering critiques (they called him “Reb Robbins”): “I had to discover,” he explained, “how the show was going to be different from something called, say, ‘The Rise of the Goldbergs.’ The difference was that fiddler, sawing away on the roof. In a very real sense, that fiddler is my own.”24
Fiddler was a huge success. It played in New York for eight years (tallying over three thousand performances) and was later staged in more than twenty countries. If audiences loved it, however, some critics were less convinced. The writer Irving Howe (Irving Horenstein) complained that Fiddler was an act of self-indulgent nostalgia, all too typical of contemporary American Jewry. Robbins, he said, had hopelessly “prettified” Aleichem’s story and the Jewish heritage: “Anatevka … is the cutest shtetl we’ve never had.” He took offense at the “papier maché pogrom” and the ridiculous rabbi “played strictly as a lampoon” who could be seen (in contradiction to the customary separation of the sexes) “hopping around with a girl.” It was true that Robbins had radically altered Aleichem’s story; in the original, as the scholar Yuri Slezkine has pointed out, there is no pogrom at all, and the idea of escaping to the new world is dismissed—Tevye knows that being a Jew means permanent homelessness and exile. In the musical, by contrast, Tevye responds to the pogrom that ends the first act by packing his bags for New York. Fiddler may have been Robbins’s “great Jew opus” (an expression he later used in another context), but it was also—and this was the point—an American fairy tale.25
After Fiddler Robbins changed course. He left Broadway, turning away from theater, drama, and the socially driven stories and themes that had preoccupied him for so long. In 1969 he returned to the New York City Ballet, where he would work for the next twenty-four years, and to Balanchine—master of the storyless, abstract ballet. It was a dramatic shift. Robbins said t
hat he made it because he was tired of commercially driven collaborations and wanted to work with classical music and trained dancers on his own terms. But one senses that he was also caught up in a complicated reaction to changes in American culture and society: the 1960s.
In 1966 Robbins had started the American Theater Lab, an experimental workshop funded by the NEA to develop new ways of fusing music, drama, and dance. At first glance, this might sound like the old Robbins, breaking down the barriers between ballet and musical theater. But it was not. Robbins thought of the lab as a ballet studio: a place where he could work with a small group of artists without the pressures and limits imposed by plot, book, lyrics, and a coherent narrative line. He was interested in nonverbal, nonlinear, and purely visual media, and the “time-free, space-free, image-evocative” worlds that ballet had first shown him. Robbins hired nine actors and dancers, and for two years they worked intensively. It was all process and ideas—no performance was ever planned or required.
Robbins let himself go. He experimented with ancient Greek theater and Japanese Noh techniques; he brought in Robert Wilson, whose work with brain-damaged and deaf-mute children and interest in theatrical ritual dovetailed with Robbins’s own growing fascination with memory, retelling, and looking back—and with distilling experiences into pure form. He read and corresponded (and took hallucinatory mushrooms) with the classicist Robert Graves, and strove to create a “tribal ceremony” in which audience and actor would be locked in sustained concentration. There was a political aspect to the work too: Robbins was obsessed with John F. Kennedy’s assassination and made the actors read the Warren Commission Report (all of it). They staged scenes from the report as a Japanese tea ceremony; then practiced the ceremony in unison; then did it in complete silence and stillness, enacting the entire scene in their minds only.
What all of this had to do with ballet became apparent in 1969 with Dances at a Gathering, choreographed for the New York City Ballet to music by Chopin. Dances is about young men and women who come and go, join and part, dance and hold hands, in a lush, nostalgia-tinged atmosphere. It says: we will be lovely, clear, natural, and in love. We are ourselves, involved in our memories, but we are also a group or community of sorts. The ballet begins quietly with a solo male dancer tentatively touching the earth and trying out movements, lost in thought. What follows is a full hour of pure, lyrical dancing by six couples—no plot, no props, no bravura steps or posing. The ballet ends with all of the dancers onstage in a moment of repose, friends who have been together for some time and have nothing more to say. They are just there, together, and they look up at the sky.
Dances is so right as a ballet that one hardly notices its achievement. The dancers are ordinary people—not peasants, aristocrats, or ballet characters of any recognizable kind. They are self-conscious and seem to be turning their steps over in their minds as they move, giving the dances a detached, retrospective feel. Robbins told the performers, “It’s a place that you’re coming back to years later that you danced in once. And you go in, and you’re recalling …” He advised them to move as if they were marking their steps, remembering how they felt and sketching them in their bodies as dancers typically do when they are tired or rehearsing on their own, rather than dancing with full-out performance energy: “Easy baby, easy.”26
The effect is disarming: the audience is brought close up, in a quiet and confiding way. We are drawn in, not to any particular drama but to the details of the movement, which is fine, smooth, and lyrical. When the first dancer enters and touches the floor we have the feeling that we are eavesdropping. Robbins once explained that the music “was like opening a door into a room and the people are in the midst of a conversation,” and the dances have the same private feel. There is nothing of the grand or ceremonial phrasing of Petipa, and also nothing of Balanchine. In Dances at a Gathering, Robbins whittled the elevated, deeply aristocratic poetry of ballet into a simple, intimate prose. He had made ballet look as informal and natural as a stroll down Broadway.27
But not an Astaire and Rogers stroll. Indeed, Robbins described Dances as “hippyish,” and dancers who worked with him on the ballet in 1969 were aware of its flower-child feel. Many were young and the ballet seemed to them (in true sixties style) to be about them—to capture some essence of who they were. Robbins also said that it was a rejection of the downtown New York avant-garde dance scene, with its overly earnest emphasis on fragmentation and everyday movements (walking, running, sitting) and its emphatic “No” to everything from virtuosity to the artifice and elitism of classical ballet. Robbins was interested in the avant-garde and attended performances but finally threw up his hands. “What’s the matter with connecting, what’s the matter with love, what’s the matter with celebrating positive things? Why—I asked myself—does everything have to be so separated and alienated; so that there is this almost constant push to disconnect? The strange thing is that the young people—what you might call and I use it in quotes, the ‘hippy’ world—is for love. Is that bad?”28
But if Dances had a hippyish feel, it was no paean to the youth movement. Indeed, compared to other ballets at the time it was strikingly classical and old world, tied back to Chopin and the nineteenth century. The hippest ballet of the era was perhaps Astarte, created in 1967 by Robert Joffrey: it was a multimedia quasi-Indian ballet with film, strobe lights, Day-Glo unitards, and a soundtrack incorporating music by Country Joe and the Fish, Moby Grape, and Iron Butterfly, with a raga thrown in for good karma. Broadway was moving into a similar state of dissolution, trapped between the hard sexual cynicism of Bob Fosse and the me-generation indulgence of Hair (1967) and later Jesus Christ Superstar. (Robbins: “I’m not crazy about what happened since they took the New Testament and made a musical of it.”) The pure lyric faith of Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering stood in stark contrast.29
In retrospect, however, Dances at a Gathering also signaled a danger. Robbins was becoming increasingly interested in the internal worlds that could be revealed by distilling feelings and ideas into pure classical forms. Watermill (1972), seemingly so different from Dances at a Gathering with its slow, Eastern feel and lost-in-time motif, was really just an extreme version of the same impulse. Robbins cast the athletic Villella, a paragon of energy, virtuosity, and abandon, as a man caught in an excruciating, slow-motion memory trance. For an entire hour, Villella barely moved. Robbins’s fascination with minimal but essential movements, with time suspension and non-narrative structures (he was also still experimenting with drugs), had led him to an excruciating dead end. He never did that again. Instead he went back to the more generous model of Dances at a Gathering and started over. And over. He went on to make many—too many—beautiful ballets in the mold of Dances at a Gathering: In the Night (1970), Other Dances (1976), Opus 19/The Dreamer (1979), A Suite of Dances (1980), Brandenburg (1997).
A Suite of Dances is illustrative of the problem. It began in 1974 as The Dybbuk, a new Robbins-Bernstein collaboration. At first the idea of working together again seemed natural. The two artists had done some of their best work together, and both had since left Broadway for classical venues. Bernstein was flush from his gigantic Mass (rock band, brass band, and full orchestra in the pit) in 1971, and from the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (“I’m no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is yes”). This time they worked together at the New York City Ballet on a ballet based on S. Ansky’s Yiddish drama The Dybbuk. Bernstein composed a big (too big) score; Robbins switched into his old mode, making the dancers read Ansky’s play and talking to them about the Kabbalah. He experimented with masks and props. After the premiere, however, Robbins was still unhappy with his choreography and set about reducing, cutting, and stripping away all hints of the drama that had inspired the collaboration in the first place. He finally gutted the narrative and made it another ballet about ballet. In 1980 he renamed it A Suite of Dances and left it.
Was he lost? Many people said he was; they argued that
he had bowed to Balanchine’s genius, tried to imitate the Russian ballet master’s abstract dances and never stood straight, tall, and dramatic again—that he stopped being Robbins and became a second-rate Balanchine instead. But this opposition between abstract and dramatic ballet can be misleading. It is true that Robbins’s ballets were increasingly plotless, but it hardly follows that they therefore resembled Balanchine’s. Really, they could not have been more different. Balanchine was famous for changing steps in his ballets to suit the needs of his dancers. His dancers, in turn, were famous for embroidering, embellishing, and playing with the steps that he gave them. Not so with Robbins, who was notoriously rigid. Every step was a crucial piece in the whole, and he would become enraged when even a hop or a skip was missed or out of place. He created multiple versions (A, B, C…) and then frantically changed his mind at the last second, hissing to the dancers as the orchestra tuned, “Change to version C, version C!”
These differences are marks of more than personal style. When the curtain went up on a Balanchine ballet, one did not see a ballet; one witnessed a group of dancers making their way through a living, shifting labyrinth of split-second choices, calculations, mistakes, regrets, adjustments, and consequences. It was alive and unpredictable. The rehearsal was for learning the pattern and knowing the limits, but when the curtain rose it was up to the dancer to take on the complexities of the ballet. Some dancers made more interesting guides than others, which is why who was dancing mattered terribly. Balanchine created ballets for dancers to live in, and when everything worked, they ran free.
Robbins’s ballets (especially Dances at a Gathering and its progeny) are tightly wrought, diamond-cut, and polished: beautifully crafted worlds under glass. The best Robbins dancers were precise, evocative, and lyrical; they found drama in restraint, in care, in self-awareness; and they worked very, very hard to make the artifice of ballet appear organic and natural, as if “from life itself.” Even Robbins’s sophisticated musicality is smooth as marble; spontaneity has little place. His ballets are rituals, which derive their power from deliberation and planning, and Robbins was notorious for demanding long rehearsal periods to perfect every last move. Before he died, he systematically filmed what he could of his oeuvre, as if to preempt the imprecise memories of dancers. Every step counted.
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