Jerry's Kids
Bostick, Natalie
Jerry’s Kids A celebration of Jerome Robbins and the New York City Ballet season. BY NATALIE BOSTICK A collection of photographs of Jerome Robbins hung in the lobby of the David H. Koch...
...The NYCB website quotes Balanchine: “Classicism is enduring because it is impersonal...
...position...
...The film adaptation of West Side Story would sear an association into the popular imagination: dance, New York, youth...
...Born Jerome Rabinowitz in 1918, Robbins grew up in Weehawken, New Jersey, and was, for a time, expected to take over the family corset manufacturing business...
...But in so doing he ensured that he would always be compared with George Balanchine...
...When Robbins returned from Broadway to the New York City Ballet in 1969, his fi rst ballet for the company was Dances at a Gathering...
...The company performed Susan Stroman’s charming Double Feature, which I would recommend to parents with children old enough to read the title cards that limn the two-hour ballet...
...Ten years after Robbins’s death there are only a handful of dancers in the company who knew him...
...I look forward to the next...
...BY NATALIE BOSTICK A collection of photographs of Jerome Robbins hung in the lobby of the David H. Koch Theater for New York City Ballet’s Spring Season...
...you could see her interacting with conductor Fay?al Karoui...
...At times, the dancers simply walk around, which gives the ballet a modern but approachable feeling, and gives the characters dimension...
...Not all his ballets are masterpieces, but the Robbins oeuvre is a welcome antidote to the inwardness and bodyconsciousness of contemporary ballet— and, dare I say it, to the intellectualism of many of the Balanchine ballets...
...It was almost too sad for a Celebration...
...B built...
...This season, each Robbins program began with a fi lm tribute...
...Fluid and physical, Mearns is also one of the most musical dancers in the company...
...The elegant Amar Ramasar was best in The Goldberg Variations, as was Gonzalo Garcia in Brahms/Handel...
...Her rubato solo in the Spring section of The Four Seasons was a delight...
...In one, a young Robbins demonstrates a dance step for the fi lming of West Side Story...
...It’s unfortunate that, for many balletomanes and critics, New York City Ballet will forever be the house that Mr...
...Robbins liked to watch dancers in rehearsal, when they were dancing for themselves and the movement quality was gentler...
...The dance vocabulary of Part I is revelatory...
...Cameron Grant— what a treasure he is to the company— played the Bach delicately...
...A mobiusstructured rumination on dance and dancers, it has a distinctly American feeling...
...An onstage screen showed rehearsal videos and still photographs of Jerome Robbins and his collaborators to Chopin mazurkas...
...At the conclusion of I’m Old Fashioned, she was the only lead dancer who adapted to the Rita Hayworth mood on which the role was modeled...
...Ten years after his death, NYCB presented a Jerome Robbins Celebration as part of its Spring Season, and with 33 ballets and four major revivals, added considerable ammunition to the Robbins supporters in the audience...
...Relationships evolve as dancers change partners, going from groups of two to three to fi ve...
...trim and intense, he’s dancing in front of tenements that soon would be razed to make way for Lincoln Center...
...But the Robbins Festival announced Sara Mearns as the company’s best young dancer...
...The performance I attended was beautifully danced...
...A feeling of real loss settled over the audience, who sighed at the sight of Leonard Bernstein at his piano, cigarette hanging from his mouth...
...That program, as well as “American Fare” (Interplay, Ives, Songs, and I’m Old Fashioned), was one of the treats of the Robbins Celebration, showcasing his themes of community, memory, and ritual...
...Natalie Bostick is a writer in New York...
...And Robbins would go a long way in establishing New York as the dance capital of the world...
...The men at NYCB are sometimes unfavorably compared with the men at American Ballet Theatre, where the repertory is “hunkier...
...More worrisome, there is no one to take his place...
...Instead, they tour the world as choreographers-for-hire...
...With Jerome Robbins went a great era in American theater...
...Like Dances at a Gathering, there are moments when the dancers form an onstage audience for one another...
...She was excellent in all the Robbins ballets, perhaps a result of her early training with Robbins specialist Patricia McBride...
...Christopher Wheeldon left and Alexei Ratmansky declined a position as resident choreographer with NYCB...
...There were many great performances from the City Ballet men this season: Charles Askegard, partnering Wendy Whelan in In Memory Of . . . , Andrew Veyette in The Goldberg Variations, and in a solo in the otherwise dull Oltremare, Joaquin De Luz in “Divertimento” from Le Baiser de la F?e, Nikolaj H?bbe (now director of the Royal Danish Ballet) appearing as a guest artist in Watermill, and Tom Gold, who is leaving the company this year, as Jimmie Shannon in Double Feature...
...Some notable performances from the women this season included Yvonne Boree as the Girl in Pink in Dances at a Gathering, Ashley Bouder as Mabel in Double Feature, Rebecca Krohn in Moves, Kaitlyn Gilliland in Watermill and Piano Pieces, and Wendy Whelan in In the Night, In Memory Of . . . , and The Cage...
...Damien Woetzel, whom many see as a possible successor to Peter Martins, retired...
...his understated artistry will be missed...
...Although his shows marked significant advancements in theater dance, it was only fi tting that the New York City Ballet would become artistic home to Robbins, a man who dreamed of presenting “American kids dancing” to the world...
...Today, few choreographers are willing to commit to one city, to one group of dancers...
...Robbins uses pedestrian movement and often only indicates the ballet technique: Women walk onto demi-pointe, pirouettes are done in coup...
...That existential turmoil, combined with his relentless ambition to experiment with (and broaden) his art, transformed the American theater, where he is known for West Side Story, Gypsy, and Fiddler on the Roof—among many others...
...She can fl y across the stage (Brahms/Handel) or be introspective (Piano Pieces), demonstrating a sensitivity to the material beyond her colleagues’ abilities...
...This season it appeared on the “Defi nitive Chopin” program, along with Other Dances and The Concert...
...An autodidact and exacting taskmaster—he once complained to a dancer in rehearsal that her hair was arriving late on the count—Robbins struggled for years with his success and his identity as a Jew, homosexual, and informant to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee...
...Family, rehearsal, and performance shots, they plotted the extraordinary life story of Robbins, from his religious ancestors in Poland to his adopted family in the theaters of New York...
...If you don’t share that philosophy, well, you’re a Robbins man...
...The range of NYCB’s Robbins repertory, shown in 10 beautifully curated all-Robbins programs, is staggering: From experimental work (Moves, Watermill) to the technically virtuosic (Two and Three Part Inventions, Seasons) to the contemplative (A Suite of Dances) and comic (The Concert), there is a humanist spirit running through them all, guided by a director’s sense of why and where...
...But the ballet that looks best on the company right now is Robbins’s epic, The Goldberg Variations...
...There were some non-Robbins highlights to the season as well...
...An Alexei Ratmansky premiere did little for me but seemed to titillate the opening night audience...
Vol. 13 • August 2008 • No. 44
