Jerome Robbins in winter
A New York dance diary, Part I

Keeping up with the dance scene in New York is hard enough when you live there. When your visits are sporadic, as mine have been since decamping from Manhattan to Maui thirteen years ago, it's impossible. In February, though, I hung around long enough for a deep plunge into the winter segment of the New York City Ballet's 75^th-anniversary season.

The six programs I caught featured fourteen repertory pieces and two new works by seven choreographers. For a change of pace, there were field trips to the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, at New York University, for Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's one-woman Goldberg Variations (spoiler alert: a bummer), and to the Joyce Theater for a high-octane triple bill from Twyla Tharp Dance, including two premieres.

After an autumn residency dedicated exclusively to City Ballet's founding choreographer George Balanchine, the winter sequel brought further treasures from his catalogue but gave special emphasis to Jerome Robbins, the company's other founding choreographer. These will be the focus here. A later post or two will bring commentary on additional Balanchine revivals and hits of more recent vintage by various hands. (My impressions of the two novelties—Tiler Peck's Concerto for Two Pianos, set to music of Francis Poulenc, and Alexei Ratmansky's Mahler-scored Solitude, a lament for Ukraine—are already out there in Musical America.) And as a coda to all that, there will be reflections on Tharp and Baroness De Keersmaeker. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

A Robbins triptych

The Robbins catalogue runs to some five dozen ballets as against Balanchine's 400-plus. Renowned in the 40s and 50s as much for his work on Broadway as for American Ballet Theatre, he set his seal on City Ballet nearly two decades later, most conspicuously with two masterpieces on the grand scale: the hour-long Dances At a Gathering (1969) and the 75-minute Goldberg Variations (1971), set to the music of J.S. Bach. For whatever reason, neither figured on the winter schedule, though Dances At a Gathering is due in the spring.

The chief tribute of the winter residency was the all-Robbins program consisting of the sailors-on-shore-leave hit Fancy Free (1944), the ballroom romance In the Night (1970), and the wildly theatrical neo-Renaissance pageant The Four Seasons (1979).

The fleet's in (again!). Jacqueline Bologna and Harrison Coll in Fancy Free, the hit ballet that begat the Broadway hit musical On the Town.

With its jazzy yet symphonic Leonard Bernstein score blowing alternately hot and cool, Fancy Free was just the ticket for wartime ballet fans with sons under fire in far-flung corners of the globe—so much so, that it set the stage for On the Town, which opened on Broadway before the year was out. (Wheels turned fast back then.)

For decades, the high jinx of the cart-wheeling, strutting threesome vying for the attention of female passersby in and around a sleepy waterfront bar on a hot summer night have seemed all but surefire. Yet at the February 3 matinee, with Daniel Ulbricht, Harrison Coll, and Sebastián Villarini-Vélez in their dress whites giving their phenomenal all, Fancy Free left me hungry for the broader canvas, superior story-telling, irresistible song, and all-around full Monty of On the Town, with Bernstein's dazzling showtunes, Comden & Green's whip-smart lyrics, and lots more dancing by a full cast and ensemble.

Dances at a smaller gathering. Indiana Woodward and Joseph Gordon in the proper, self-possessed first of In the Night's four nocturnes.

In the Night, conversely, was deeply satisfying. One of several pendants to Dances At A Gathering, this one presents three couples in four Chopin nocturnes. The pair in the first nocturne—Indiana Woodward and Joseph Gordon—is proper, self-possessed, and rather mannered. Their counterparts in the third nocturne—Tiler Peck and Gilbert Bolden III, mutually enraptured—are their diametric opposites, breathless and flamboyant.

The most magnetic couple is the second—Emilie Gerrity and Tyler Angle—who at the peak of their pas de deux freeze into an ideogram of midnight, the ballerina held upside down in midair, her pointed toes fixed at twelve o'clock, leg flat against leg like the legs of a compass in its case. Time stops for breath, then a flicker over the length of one leg starts it flowing again, the inamorata is smoothly righted, gravity reclaims her, and the reverie unspools to its conclusion. A fourth nocturne for the entire cast concludes the ballet.

Brrr! David Gabriel gives Erica Pereira the shivers at the wintry top of The Four Seasons, set to music of--wait for it!--Giuseppe Verdi.

The Four Seasons, the dance interlude from Verdi's very grand, very French opera Les Vêpres Siciliennes, puts on display Robbins's command of sheer spectacle—and let's not forget Santo Loquasto, whose sets and allegorical costumes are as colorful and flattering to the dancers as they are witty.

Sara Mearns and Chun Wai Chan excelled in the Spring pas de deux, which is the poetic heart of the piece. The concluding Fall bacchanal found Andrew Veyette faltering in the bravura solo originally choreographed for Mikhail Baryshnikov and then rechoreographed (quite differently) for Peter Martins, but there were fireworks and panache galore from Unity Phelan in the ballerina part and Daniel Ulbricht's ebullient Pan.

Robbins à la carte

On mixed bills, Robbins was represented by the moody Opus 19/The Dreamer (1979), danced to Sergei Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major, and The Concert (Or, The Perils of Everybody): A Charade in One Act (1956), which spoofs the same susceptibility to Chopin Robbins was to glorify beginning in the late sixties.

The ballet belongs to its dreaming male protagonist, originally Baryshnikov, on February 15 the singular Taylor Stanley, a sensual sculptor of the dance whose style is fastidious, even feline, with phrasing that is scrupulous yet supple, jétés that soar, and silent, cushioned landings.

The Dreamer. Taylor Stanley, in white, a sensual sculptor of the dance. Unity Phelan, on pointe, the object of a quest not to be defined.

Though the ballet tells no explicit story, the principal role traces a vivid arc beginning in the Dreamer's quest for an undefined something that materializes in the person of the ballerina, here Phelan, again in splendid form. The strangely antagonistic central pas de deux is the stranger for the Dreamer's posture of self-abasement. In the final sequence, his choreography mirrors that of the opening, but with halting, fractured accents that speak of distraction and loss. Stanley's introverted, harmonious way with the steps sounded the full range of the implicit enigmas.

As Stanley to The Dreamer, so Harrison Coll—in a quite different key—to The Concert, which unfolds like an album of New Yorker vignettes come to life. And who will deny that Robbins had exactly such associations in The décor, complete with one museum-quality show curtain that is rung up at the top of the show and a second one to ring down at the end, is by that publication's Golden Age star with a pen, Saul Steinberg. Among the fleeting images, by turns whimsical and absurd: a forest of umbrellas, a flight of killer butterflies (shades of Giselle), a corps de ballet of girls who, hilariously, can't count, unceremoniously borne away, eventually, like so many department-store mannequins (shades of Coppélia or Tales of Hoffmann).

Robbins gives the onstage piano soloist (on this occasion Elaine Chelton) a snooty entrance—the first clue that everyone in the so-called charade is the still center around which his or her universe of Chopin-induced fantasy revolves. The Concert as a whole, however, revolves like a spiral nebula around just one of these personages: an average Joe under the thumb of his disapproving culture-vulture of a wife.

Like the rest, this figure spins fantasies, too. In his dreams, he clobbers his old lady to elope off with a younger one who isn't so different (check out their matching pink powder-puff hats). You'd think that the retro stereotypes of seven decades ago might strike a sour note today, but you'd be wrong. A cigar-chomping Harlequin in Harold Lloyd's glasses, both husky and bouncy, Coll had the house in the palm of his hand.

Photos by Erin Baiano.