Still Youthful at 100 by Jerome Robbins
2019; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 12; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/thr.2019.0018
ISSN1939-9774
Autores Tópico(s)Diversity and Impact of Dance
ResumoReviewed by: Still Youthful at 100 by Jerome Robbins Jay Rogoff (bio) Jerome Robbins, Still Youthful at 100 The New York City Ballet ended its brief 2018 summer season at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center with a gala celebrating the centennial of American ballet and Broadway choreographer Jerome Robbins, who died in 1998; the gala itself ended with Something to Dance About, a half-hour medley of dances assembled by Warren Carlyle from Robbins’s many Broadway musicals. Framed by Leah Horowitz’s singing of “Neverland” from Peter Pan (1954) and “Something Wonderful” from The King and I (1951), a dozen numbers hurtled by (“Something to Dance About” itself, from 1950’s Call Me Madam, curiously not among them), rarely lingering long enough to make an impression. In one exception, “All I Need Is the Girl,” from Gypsy (1959), Ashley Bouder flirtatiously persuades Andrew Veyette she is the one; in another, West Side Story’s “America” (1957), Sara Mearns happily kicks at the moon, even though her moves, not to mention her blond hair, lack the necessary Puerto Rican sizzle. Although Robbins’s Broadway dances deserve a place alongside his ballets (NYCB already has his 1995 West Side Story Suite in its repertory), Carlyle’s mashup is wrongheaded in just about every way but as a fashion extravaganza, with 124 costume changes. The numbers cleverly melt into one another, but without context. In 1989, when Robbins assembled the revue Jerome Robbins’s Broadway, Jason Alexander provided narration explaining each dance’s significance for its show, and also took part in some of the numbers. The 15 dances unfolded luxuriously over more than two hours and offered a kind of history of a generation of the American musical, from On the Town (1944) to Fiddler on the Roof (1964). With its speed, however, Something to Dance About relies on our recognizing the snippets of song and dance and providing the context ourselves, likely bewildering audience members younger than 50. More important, Carlyle’s medley ignores three keynotes of Robbins’s work for both Broadway and ballet stages. First, Robbins continued the innovation of Broadway choreography that began with George Balanchine’s for On Your Toes (1936) and continued with Agnes de Mille’s for Oklahoma! (1943), in which dances reflect and advance the musical’s dramatic situation. Without that context, you can’t understand the dances. Second, he created musicals about real people, often living in real, contemporary American situations—World War II sailors on shore leave in On the Town, New York street gangs in West Side Story—so that Peter Pan’s “Neverland” introduces the dances misleadingly. No one could call Robbinsland “miles beyond the moon” or “not on any chart”; even when he ventured to feudal Siam or Russian shtetls, he had a clear vision of how real people might behave there, and how dancing might express their deepest emotions and truest identities. Robbins wanted everything, even in his fantasies and period pieces, to unfold in the here and now; as his note for his 1969 Chopin piano ballet, the brilliant Dances at a Gathering, insists, “The dancers are themselves dancing with each other to that music in that space.” [End Page 135] The third keynote involves character. The bits of dances that come and go invite us to admire the choreography, but Robbins always demanded that choreography exceed formal design and expressiveness to reveal character. Carlyle’s isolation of dance moments, without any sense of who the people are and what they represent, runs entirely antithetical to what Robbins aimed for in his musicals. Although Tiler Peck and Daniel Ulbricht unleash a snazzy Charleston, from 1945’s Billion Dollar Baby, we don’t know why they exude such exuberance; similarly, we glimpse a few seconds of West Side Story’s “Dance at the Gym,” but it simply pushes a button, a meme rather than something fully felt or witnessed. The numbers remain but one-dimensional flashes of Robbins’s genius. Character in Robbins’s Broadway choreography necessarily emerges from the given musical’s dramatic situation. The drama’s needs inform the dance, which further develops both the characters and the plot. This strategy has become such a...
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