Jerome Robbins: Dance Training and Choreography Style Part II

 

While Robbins was working in musical theater, he continued to create works for the concert stage and formed his own experimental ballet company called Ballet U.S.A. In 1969, Robbins left theater work and returned to the New York City Ballet after a ten-year leave of absence. It was a prolific period, and he created twenty-two new ballets in the 1970s alone, including many that are still in the company's repertory, such as The Goldberg Variations and Dances at a Gathering. After Balanchine died in 1983, Robbins continued for a while as artistic director with Peter Martins. Although Robbins officially retired in 1988, he choreographed a solo work in 1994 for Mikhail Baryshnikov called A Suite of Dances. "He would show me one of those combinations that are so his, and so beautiful," says Baryshnikov, "the twists of the shoulder, the open, relaxed steps gradually changing into smaller, more delicate movements."

Robbins's legacy, stresses Nichols, lies not just in the body of work he left behind, but in his contributions to the development of the dance world. "He was constantly working to create a tangible history for dance," says Nichols. Robbins used a percentage of the royalties made from Fiddler on the Roof to support the dance collection at the Library. He played an important role in the founding of the National Endowment for the Arts and set up organizations for dancers' security and health such as the New York City Ballet Emergency Fund. He promoted international dance groups and folk dance and encouraged young choreographers.

Beyond all that, Robbins helped establish a new vocabulary for American dance. "He put a human face and a Yankee accent on classic choreography," wrote critic Clive Barnes for Dance Magazine in 1998. From an exuberant sailor to a stripper with a trumpet, from a New York gang member to a classical soloist, Robbins showcased the movement of Everyman. Robbins said, "The possibilities of the human body are endless. Why not use them all? Why limit ourselves to a set language which, in spite of its good qualities, is no longer fit to express the feelings and problems of today?"

Jerome Robbins: Dance Training and Choreography Style Part I

Robbins, who learned from De Mille as a dancer in Oklahoma!, would go on to make musicals where the leads danced and sang and acted, and the dancing moved the plot as much as the lyrics.

Robbins's innovative approach began with Fancy Free, his 1944 ballet about three sailors on shore leave in New York City during World War II. "What Fancy Free did most impressively," writes dance critic Marcia Siegel, "was to integrate classical and colloquial dances within a context of carefully observed characters. . . . Robbins achieved it for the first time in a contemporary ballet. He gave gesture and the acting of real people the same validity on the concert stage that Fred Astaire gave to dancing in the quasi-realistic milieu of movie romances." Fancy Free was Robbins's first collaboration with the up-and-coming composer Leonard Bernstein, and it played 160 performances in its opening season. The same year, the ballet was transformed into the Broadway musical On the Town and established Robbins and Bernstein as formidable talents in American theater.

In a career that lasted six decades, Jerome Robbins choreographed for Broadway, film, and two major American ballet companies. He developed and choreographed some of the most popular American musicals--West Side Story, Gypsy, and Fiddler on the Roof--and was sent in to rescue shows on the edge of disaster such as A Funny thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Funny Girl. He collaborated with Agnes De Mille, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and George Balanchine, and his protégés, including Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett, would become stars of Broadway.

Gluck-Sandor noticed Robbins's varied talents. "He was eighteen or nineteen at the time. I needed a copy of Hamlet and borrowed his. Besides his notes, the margins were full of music he composed. He was always writing stories. He did wood carving and also drew. He had what you might call a photographic memory. Once he saw something, he could do it backwards."

Robbins was ambitious, and although he danced with the newly formed Ballet Theater and worked in several Broadway shows, he desperately wanted to choreograph. He spent his summers at Tamiment, a resort in the Poconos that was known as a springboard for emerging talent. It was run by Max Liebman, who would go on to produce the television program Your Show of Shows, and brought up entertainers such as Danny Kaye, Imogene Coca, and Carol Channing. At Taminent, Robbins was able to stage his first pieces, among them a version of Thorton Wilder's Our Town, which would go on to Broadway as part of Liebman's Straw Hat Revue in 1939. "Although he received no credit for having choreographed them," writes Long, "he did manage to have his choreographic work presented on a Broadway stage by the time he was twenty." 

Jerome Robbins: Family, Culture and Ancestry Part VI

Dance
Jerry's large circle of relatives-he had twenty-eight first cousins-provided a number of theatrical and show-business influences. Bob Silverman described some of the other dancers in the family. "My father, Jack Silverman, was a professional ballroom dancer and met my mother at Roseland, when it was a big social place where young people went for ballroom dancing, and they paid ten cents, something like that, for a partner. My Aunt Jean [Davenport] used to go there all the time, and Jean was probably the best dancer of the six sisters. My father-don't ask me how it all came about-found himself as a young man living with two other guys, Bing Crosby and George Raft. Now you gotta get this picture. These three were among the shortest men ever born, like Edward G. Robinson, who was also related to the family. The three, Bing Crosby, George Raft and my father, started out as ballroom dancers. Ten cents a dance....So there was this dancing gift, if you will. And Jerry, of course, knew all about this stuff."
    In fact, Edward G. Robinson had been born Emanuel Goldenberg and was indeed related to Jerry's uncle Benjamin Goldenberg, who had married Lena's sister, Mary, before going into the corset business with Harry. At least one of Jerry's aunts, Jean Davenport, visited with Robinson when he was filming one of his early movies along the Palisades. Jean also played the piano for the silent movie houses in and around Jersey City. But she was the only one of the sisters who displayed such musical talent.

Jerome Robbins: Family, Culture and Ancestry Part V

His mother's side of the family represented an ideal of conventional family ties that would remain absent in Robbins' life. Aaron and Ida Rips had raised seven children. Lena had five sisters, Anna, Mary, Jean, Gertrude and Francis, and a brother, Jacob, the eldest, who died of appendicitis in 1926, leaving behind a wife and two children. A second brother was said to have died in infancy back in Minsk. The three eldest sisters, Anna, Lena and Mary, and their brothers had been born in Russia. All of the sisters married and raised families of their own. None of them ever divorced (though two were widowed and remarried). Together, they were an aggressive, formidable matriarchal force. Their tight-knit stability and mutual support were later a source of pride and fascination shared by all of their children, including Jerry. Like their parents during hard times, they took in less fortunate family members and loaned them money, with generosity felt as an obligation. They celebrated holidays together and had seder at each other's homes-though they also marked Christmas with an exchange of gifts, perhaps feeling that doing so would help them assimilate into the non-Jewish world.
    Jerry's cousin, Bob Silverman, pointed out one area where the sisters may have been lacking. "None of them had a sense of humor....You can't say any one of them was witty or verbal. They were all very middle-class Jewish women, busy raising their families, living extremely conventional lives, as the second-generation children often had to do."
    Of the six sisters, Lena was the dominant one. She ruled the roost in her own household and usually prevailed over the others with her strong will and practical intelligence. Sonia suggested that her mother played the role of family martiarch "very much like Ida Rips," and remembered that "in our culture, women had to be strong." According to Silverman, who later became a successful composer and publisher, "Jerry often talked about writing a book or play about the six sisters....Lena was the man in the family. She wore the pants, she made the decisions. When some decision had to be made and the sisters got together, that would have been Lena organizing things like that. When the family got together, it was often at Lena and Harry's place out in Jersey. They had the largest apartment, and they were seemingly making a bit more than the rest of us during those years."

Jerome Robbins: Family, Culture and Ancestry Part IV

  According to friends and family, he made no secret early on that he deplored being Jewish and poor and from what he saw as the wrong side of the tracks, although his family never descended to poverty even in the depths of the Depression. Many decades later, in one scene of his autobiographical Poppa Piece, Robbins depicted himself mocking his Hebrew tutor behind his back. Like many of his peers, he was caught between two worlds, that of the largely conservative Jewish community and that of mainstream America with all of its lures and temptations. Though the latter would win, he would still feel the conflict keenly for the rest of his life.
  During an interview in the 1940s, Robbins remembered the town as "about three blocks deep and nine wide...grubby, ugly and uninspiring." His opinion softened with the nostalgic hindsight of later years. Looking east from 57 Hudson Place, where his parents rented an apartment, the skyline of Manhattan was visible. At night, the lights would beckon, exciting his imagination. Family lore includes affectionate tales of him dancing on the rooftop and giving puppet shows in the front windows of the apartment. "We were the same age," said Viola Zousmer."We were brought up together. At seven years old, we went up on the roof, two kids, and Jerry climbed on the edge of the roof and said, 'Come on, join me. I'm a bird.' I said, 'Oh no, not me.' Seven years old, and he was a daredevil."

Jerome Robbins: Family, Culture and Ancestry Part II

The neighborhood at the edge of Carnegie Hill and what is now Spanish Harlem was then largely Jewish. More than fifty other families lived in the building, all of them immigrants representing the stratified Jewish world of Europe, with Germans at the top and Russians, Poles and Hungarians at the bottom. Harry's younger siblings, Samuel and Ruth, also lived in the apartment and worked in the deli, as would Harry's future wife, Lena, and her sister, Jean. Harry would prove himself an able provider, but by the time Jerome was born, the inherited dream of success had magnified beyond anything his lower middle-class father might have imagined. Like many of his generation, Jerry would embrace the idea of putting as much social distance as possible between himself and his origins.

 At the age of twenty-four, Harry Rabinowitz had married Lena Rips, who lived just across the river in Jersey City. The nuptials took place on February 9, 1911. Cousin Viola Zousmer recalled, "Lena was my mother's best friend and introduced her to Harry. My mother's name was Honey Zousmer. My mother and Jerry's father were first cousins." Lena, the bride, was two years younger than her husband, and, according to relatives, she soon proved herself opinionated and outspoken on all domestic matters. She was also ahead of her husband in education, having graduated from high school and spent two years at a college in Des Moines, Iowa, and unlike her husband, she spoke English with perfect diction. On June twenty-seventh of the following year, Lena gave birth to their first child, Sonia.

The marriage made for a large extended family with strong ties to the Old World and the old ways. The Rips clan had immigrated from Minsk in the early 1890s and settled in the largely Jewish, Hudson City district of Jersey City, an area known as "the Heights." The family was devoutly Orthodox. Lena's father, Aaron Rips, worked as a cutter in the garment trade and later owned a candy store. He was also a founder of the local synagogue, Congregation Mt. Sinai. Lena's mother, Ida, helped establish the first Hebrew school in the district. She was a member of Hadassah and first director of the Hebrew Home for Orphans and Aged. Jerry's cousin, Jack Davenport, recalled that Ida "was one of the driving forces and founders of the Sherman Avenue Talmud Torah. Grandma Ida Rips was the energy and drive in the Jewish community in Jersey City."

Jerome Robbins: Family, Culture and Ancestry Part I

He was born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz on October 11, 1918, exactly one month before the end of World War I. He came into the world at the Jewish Maternity Hospital (later incorporated into Beth Israel Hospital) at 270 East Broadway, in the heart of Manhattan's Lower East Side immigrant neighborhood. At the time, the Rabinowitz family lived in a large apartment house at 51 East Ninety-seventh Street, at the northeast corner of Madison Avenue. The birth could have taken place at nearby Mt. Sinai Hospital, but Jerome's mother and father, Lena and Harry Rabinowitz, favored a Jewish hospital that provided kosher food and Yiddish-speaking doctors.

  From his earliest days, Jerome was called "Jerry" by family and friends, and according to his sister, Sonia, his middle name, Wilson, reflected their parents' patriotic enthusiasm for the current President. The family name meant literally "son of a rabbi" and was never one that Jerry liked; it marked him as the son of Jewish immigrants, a stigma that he resented in his youth and which he identified with his parents, especially with his father, who retained a thick Yiddish accent and the habits of the Old World.

  Harry (originally Chane) Rabinowitz was born September 11, 1888, and emigrated from his native Russia in 1904 while still a teenager, traveling first to England and then to America. His departure had required subterfuge in order to avoid serving as cannon fodder in the Russian army. Robbins' sister recalled that their father "managed to escape the draft in Russia by being declared dead...which he would have been if he had been drafted." Harry's father, Nathan Mayer Rabinowitz, made his living as a baker, a trade that he passed on to his children. His wife, Sara Luniansky Rabinowitz, had apparently died relatively young. As an elderly widower, Harry's father remained behind in the village of Rozanka, a tiny rural community in the province of Vilna near the shifting Russian-Polish border. As was common for such impoverished Jewish families, the Rabinowitz clan emigrated one at a time. The first to leave was Harry's oldest brother, Julius, who established himself in Manhattan and later arranged passage for the others-first Harry, and eventually two more brothers, Samuel and Theodore, and their sister, Ruth.
    The Rabinowitz siblings were part of the great wave of Jewish immigrants who came to this country to escape the pogroms and outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence that were occurring throughout Eastern Europe. The world of the shtetl was one of privation and miseries endured. A familiar adage of the shtetl was the heartfelt lament, "If God lived here, His windows would be broken." For a poverty-stricken community increasingly under siege, religious faith served as both a solace and essential bond. But in the New World, faith was coupled with a practical ambition for material success, a dream now at least within reach for the uprooted Rabinowitz family.