Harold Lang, John Kriza, Jerome Robbins (Sailors); Muriel Bentley, Janet Reed, Shirley Eckl (Passersby); Rex Cooper (Bartender).

"The ballet concerns three sailors on shore leave. Time: the present, a hot summer night. Place: New York City, a side street."

-In the original staging, the pas de deux was danced by Janet Reed and Jerome Robbins (as the third sailor, who dances a rumba solo). When Jerome Robbins stopped performing in the ballet, John Kriza (as the easygoing second sailor) danced the the pas de deux. 
-This ballet became the point of departure for the creation of the musical On the Town [M1].

1980, New York City Ballet; 1985, Dance Theater of Harlem; 2002, Birmingham Royal Ballet; 2003, Pennsylvania Ballet; 2004, Royal Danish Ballet, Tulsa Ballet; 2005, Miami City Ballet; 2006, Pacific Northwest Ballet; 2007, San Francisco Ballet.

Jerome Robbins (Christian Science Monitor, May 13, 1944):
     "After seeing Paul Cadmus’ painting, ‘The Fleet’s In,’ which I inwardly rejected though it gave me the idea of doing the ballet, I watched sailors, and girls too, all over town. The gestures are taken from life. Of course they are blown up, theatricalized, but they are based on human values....One thing I wanted to show was good, healthy American energy and vitality, to prove that dancing doesn’t have to be Russian to be strong and vigorous. Not that I have anything against Russians–I’m all for them. It is only that I think American dancing is fully as good."

Arthur V. Berger (New York Sun, April 19, 1944):
     “A ballet has finally been found for those who have passionately desired something to liven up the repertory….The whole production shouts like a billboard poster. There is a sophistication among all the participants to make it evident that they are aware of the blatancy. But little is done to balance it…..Mr. Robbins has an excellent sense of continuity and timing, and he has brought out the best qualities of his cast. But Mr. Robbins has still to master certain elements of taste and imagination.”

Louis Biancolli (New York World-Telegram, April 19, 1944):
     “Not since Agnes De Mille’s Rodeo has an audience taken so heartily to a ballet steeped in heartwarming homespun style. Equipped with some of the freshest gifts around town, the Ballet Theater staff has turned in a real hit, pointing the way to what may still show up as a strictly native chapter in ballet annals.”

Edwin Denby (New York Herald Tribune, April 19, 1944):
     “Jerome Robbins’s ‘Fancy Free’ was so big a hit that the young participants all looked a little dazed as they took their bows. But besides being a smash hit, Fancy Free is a very remarkable comedy piece. Its sentiment of how people live in this country is completely intelligent and completely realistic. Its pantomime and its dances are witty, exuberant, and at every moment they feel natural….If you want to be technical you can find in the steps all sorts of references to our normal dance-hall steps, as they are done from Roseland to the Savoy.”

Robert Jeans (New York Daily News, April 19, 1944):
     “It’s twenty-five minutes of strictly American ballet–and when it was over, the sittees and standees rocked the Temple of Art in raucous approval….Choreographer Robbins, Harold Lang and John Kriza dance the sailor roles expertly. Equally expert are the hussies, danced by Muriel Bentley, Janet Reed and Shirley Eckl. Non-dancing Rex Cooper is perfect as the bartender. He serves the drinks and keeps his mouth shut.”

John Martin (New York Times, April 19, 1944):
     “To come right to the point without any ifs, ands, and buts, Jerome Robbins’ ‘Fancy Free’ is a smash hit. This is young Robbins’ first go at choreography, and the only thing he has to worry about in that direction is how in the world he is going to make his second one any better….The ballet concerns three sailors who pick up two girls and contest for the privilege of not having to be the odd man out. Each of them tries to out-dance the others, and–all of them succeed!….The whole ballet is just exactly ten degrees north of terrific.”

Henry Simon (PM, April 19, 1944):
     “Mr. Robbins has invested this little incident with such ingratiating toughness, such a distinctly American accent, and such infectious high spirits that the audience is constantly either snickering, applauding, or laughing outright.”

Robert Coleman (New York Daily Mirror, April 23, 1944):
     “Jot down Fancy Free on your list of ‘must-sees.’ It’s by all odds the best new ballet of the season. In fact it would be a stand-out in any season….Robbins is likely to have a flock of offers from Broadway’s major musical producers.”

Robert A. Simon (New Yorker, April 29, 1944):
     “This was the début of Mr. Bernstein as a ballet composer and also the première of Mr. Robbins as a choreographer. Both young men made it plain they knew their business. Mr. Robbins’ staging was as expert as Mr. Bernstein’s writing. The responsibilities of a choreographer didn’t interfere with Mr. Robbins’ own able dancing as one of the three sailors, and it might also be noted that the most brilliant solo turn in the ballet was one he devised for Harold Lang, who stampeded the clientele with it.”

Margaret Lloyd (Christian Science Monitor, May 6, 1944):
     “The action unfolds with the compactness, the singleness of purpose, of a brilliant short story. Every step and gesture counts, and moreover, it instantly understood. And it calls for, and gets some, tremendous dancing.”

Fancy Free: Janet Reed, Muriel Bentley, Jerome Robbins, John Kriza, Harold Lang, 1944. (Fred Fehl)

Fancy Free: Jerome Robbins, Janet Reed, 1944. (Fred Fehl)

John Kriza, Harold Lang, Tommy Rall, Fernando Alonso, Janet Reed, Mildred Herman, Muriel Bentley, Rozsika Sabo

“A short ballet in four movements in which there is a constant play between the classic ballet steps and the contemporary spirit in which they are danced.”

-An earlier version, minus the pas de deux, premiered on June 1, 1945, at the Ziegfeld Theatre, New York City, as part of Billy Rose’s Concert Varieties [M2].
-Beginning in 1986, the costumes used were designed by Santo Loquasto.

1952, New York City Ballet; 1959, Ballets: U.S.A.; 1972, Joffrey Ballet; 1977, Royal Danish Ballet; 1977, Pennsylvania Ballet; 1978, School of American Ballet; 1989, San Francisco Ballet; 2001, Boston Ballet.

Jerome Robbins (interviewed by Anna Kisselgoff for a New York Times article on May 21, 1990):
     “I think we’d grown out of what I would call the ‘opera’ stage of ballet.”

Jerome Robbins (speaking of a revival of ‘Interplay’ at the Joffrey Ballet in 1977, Playbill, November 1978):
     “You don’t always get better as you get older. You change–and some things, of course, improve–but sometimes something you made when you were young is awfully good for that time.”

Louis Biancolli (New York World-Telegram, October 18, 1945):
     “From all signs, this new frolic in snappy jazz-drenched idiom is here to stay. The crowd hugged it tightly to itself last night. It’s that kind of ballet–fresh, young, zippy, with a heartwarming mood radiating joie de vivre on a mass scale….Interplay’ is part comedy and part satire, all of it in good fun….In places you’ll recognize Robbins’ Fancy Free style–the linked trios almost tripping themselves up, the slightly sardonic sweeps of gallantry, the pepped-up classicism. You’ll also find jive and toe dancing mingled here in chatty ease. Jerome Robbins is the great leveler of ballet styles.”

Edwin Denby (New York Herald Tribune, October 18, 1945):
     “It is a quick, playful dance suite, smoothly combining classic steps with a few athletic and jazz moments. It is juvenile in atmosphere, expert in construction, sharp in rhythm. In dance continuity it is a big step beyond Fancy Free, though in emotion it is more innocuous. Its weakness as expression is in the superficial nature of the relationships between the dancers….But this is judging the little piece by really serious standards, and it is a proof of its merit that one feels like applying serious standards to a number that seems intended only as a friendly entertainment.”

John Martin (New York Times, October 18, 1945):
     “Those who expect to find in Mr. Robbins’ second ballet anything like a repetition of his first, Fancy Free, are doomed to disappointment. Interplay is a pure abstraction, without story or characterizations of any kind. Indeed, the most important aspect of the work is just this: for in it the choreographer has freed himself from the danger of being typed as a composer of genre, not only in the public mind but also, no doubt in his own….He has employed the basic approach of the classic ballet and its vocabulary to make a slightly jazzy, quite contemporary, American kind of dance.”

Edward O’Gorman (New York Post, October 18, 1945):
     “In its revised version it is better than ever, and it was darned near tops in the first place. The set is naturally bigger and, to my taste, better, having undergone a process of simplification. As it is now, it is simple but not stark, colorful but not flashy….The ballet is a treat for the ear as well as a delight to the eye.”

Robert Sylvester (New York Daily News, October 18, 1945):
     “The Ballet Theatre went back to childhood games and athletics, last night, for an enormously effective and fast modern ballet called Interplay….Utilizing eight youngsters and a bare stage trimmed in spectacular orange, green, red and blue, this newest ballet item runs as fast and true as the good game which it is.”

Arthur V. Berger (New York Sun, October 19, 1945):
     “Jerome Robbins Interplay was like a breath of fresh air. It is what we have been waiting for from our young choreographers, a ballet which does not waste time with people standing around the stage and obvious quips that tarnish after you have seen it a few times….Anything said about ‘Interplay’ must be qualified by he statement that it is a modest effort, about ten minutes long….But it is hard to believe it is so short, so packed with interesting dance movements. I wanted to see it right over again.”

Robert A. Simon (New Yorker, October 27, 1947):
     “It is no small tribute to Mr. Robbins that Interplay gives the impression of just happening rather than of having been staged, and it is danced by eight cheerful, enormously skillful young people who seem to be just kidding around.”

Edwin Denby (New York Herald Tribune, November 4, 1945):
     “Interplay looks like a brief entertainment, a little athletic fun, now and then cute, but consistently clear, simple, and lively….The characters of Interplay seem to be urban middle-class young people having a good time, who know each other well and like being together but have no particular personal emotions about each other….The intellectual vigor, the clear focus of its overall craftsmanship suggest–as Fancy Free suggested in another way–that Robbins means to be and can be more than a surefire Broadway entertainer, that he can be a serious American ballet choreographer.”

Robert Sabin (Dance Observer, December 1945):
     “It is a demonstration on the part of Mr. Robbins that he can be ‘abstract’ with the best of them, when he wishes to. Of course there are touches of that comedic spirit which is a hallmark of Mr. Robbins’ best work. But the gist of Interplay is in its design as movement and as a pattern of rhythmic contrasts.

Albert Goldberg (Chicago Daily Tribune, December 29, 1945):
     “Interplay might have been subtitled ‘The Younger Generation,’ for it enlists ten of the company’s gifted youngsters in a breezy romp that hit last night’s audience squarely between the eyes….Mr. Robbins’ choreography, which tells only such a story as the observer may care to read into it, inherits the exuberance of Fancy Free with a few new wrinkles of its own. The music of Morton Gould invites Americanisms, and in the midst of classic ballet steps, slyly kidded, the dancers suddenly take to handsprings, cartwheels, and a game of leap frog.”

Nora Kaye, John Kriza

-The piece was presented by the American-Russian Friendship Society.

A Woman: Nora Kaye. A Man: Jerome Robbins. Another Man: John Kriza.

“Three insecure people. The scene: A lonely place. The time: The number of minutes the ballet runs, or that many days, weeks, months, or years.”

-Subtitled “A Choreographic Observation.”
-Inspired by the quotation from Ramon y Cajal, “Small inward treasure does he possess who, to feel alive, needs every hour the tumult of the street, the emotion of the theater, and the small talk of society.”

Jerome Robbins (PM, October 24, 1946):
     “I’m seriously minded. I don’t want to stick to being the great American ‘yak’ choreographer.”

John Briggs (New York Post, October 25, 1946):
     “It was a troubled, complex affair with all sorts of Freudian overtones….Mr. Robbins calls his work ‘a choreographic observation.’ It was a fairly gloomy observation and a fresh reminder that we are living in perplexing and chaotic times….It was the sort of thing that propels you from the theatre vaguely disturbed and fully expecting to be run down by a streetcar.”

Edwin Denby (New York Herald Tribune, October 25, 1946):
     “The fact that Jerome Robbins, with four smash comedy hits behind him (two in ballet and two on Broadway), endangered his not yet rooted success as a designer of gay dances by creating the depressing, bitter and not-pap-for-the-audience Facsimile proved that the American choreographer and Ballet Theatre were aware that contrived shadows of past successes could not hope to rival the fresh substance of a new creation. Facsimile was a success, but even if it had been a failure, the validity of its artistic premise could not have been denied.”

Irving Kolodin (New York Sun, October 25, 1946):
     “Robbins is working here with an idea more subtle and challenging than in his previous works, but he makes his points with clarity–no doubt of that–and a keen sense of physical momentum….It was a lapse of aesthetics, however, to have the woman at her moment of desertion, express in audible sobs what the choreography didn’t.”

John Martin (New York Times, October 25, 1946):
     “Not an ingratiating piece, by any means, it nevertheless commands respect and raises its creator several notches in the scale of artistic accomplishment….The form of the composition is dramatic rather than choreographic. Though it contains many intricate and appallingly difficult phrases of movement, it has no sustained line of dance, but achieves its continuity by theatrical means. This is in some respects a weakness….It is all a little overwrought, a little superficial; but in spite of such reservations, it is nevertheless an original, admirably sincere and thoroughly to be respected achievement.”

Robert Sylvester (New York Daily News, October 25, 1946):
     “It’s the new Bernstein-Robbins-Oliver Smith ballet called Facsimile, which Ballet Theatre made the mistake of offering at the Broadway Theater last night….A minute or so before the finale, after the boys have tied her in a tight knot, dumped her on the floor and then fallen on her head, Miss Kaye raises her voice in agonizing appeal…. ‘Stop!’ she cries plaintively. Ballet Theatre should have listened to her at the first rehearsal.”

Robert A. Simon (New Yorker, November 2, 1946):
     “Dancing is becoming increasingly concerned with psychological matters. Facsimile, according to the program, deals with ‘three insecure people’….The ballet is ingenious and arresting, and it succeeds, because of its compact action, in registering its underlying thought….The three dancers managed their rather difficult roles skillfully, and there was no insecurity or lack of integration in the performance itself.”

Edwin Denby (Dance Magazine, December 1946):
     “Robbins’s new piece, Facsimile, is an earnest satirical image of a flirtation between an idle woman and two idle men….At a momentary stalemate that postpones the climax, the woman stops the action with a hysterical cry. Politely the men stop. Humiliated but polite, the three leave separately and the stage is empty….Robbins has given his characters a spasmodic grasping drive that indicates they are passionately pretentious….Though timid in that more serious sense, the stage craftsmanship of Facsimile is immensely capable….Facsimile is a big step forward by an honest, exceptionally gifted craftsman.”

Facsimile: Jerome Robbins, John Kriza, Nora Kaye, 1946. (George Karger)

Facsimile: Jerome Robbins, Nora Kaye, John Kriza, 1946. (Fred Fehl)

Anton Dolin, André Eglevsky, Rosella Hightower.

-The ballet consists of two sections; a) Minuet and Presto, and b) Waltz.

Jerome Robbins (interviewed by Anna Kisselgoff for a New York Times article on May 21, 1990):
     “‘Pas de Trois’ had humor in it. It had one humorous section, then one lyrical, lovely section that was sort of a post script. It poked fun at ballet conventions.”

Irving Kolodin (New York Sun, March 27, 1947):
     “The focus throughout was the foibles and fancies of dancers with the three principals on the stage all the time, obscuring each other with malice aforethought, and applause as an afterthought. It is no small matter to sustain a whimsy such as this through twelve minutes or so, but Robbins had a new artifice at hand whenever he needed it. Some of the maneuvers may appeal only to the initiate, but if that is true, there were a remarkable number of them present, and laughing, last night.”

Robert Sylvester (New York Daily News, March 27, 1947):
     “Jerome Robbins’ Pas de Trois comes about as close to burlesque as it can in a brief eight minute span….There’s every low comedy feature in it from broad mugging to wobbly knees….It’s amusing enough….The main flaw is that, as a piece of comedy, it’s much funnier in the beginning that it is at the end.”

John Martin (New York Times, March 28, 1947):
     “It is a very amusing and witty little piece, indeed, and it is danced admirably….The moral of his work is that the pas de trios is a mild form of pitched battle no matter how many wreathed smiles are beamed forth as camouflage….It is not only the ‘artistes,’ however, but also the clichés of the ballet that come in for a bit of ribbing, and because Mr. Robbins has a wonderful sense of movement, he has used exaggerated tensions and relaxations to make his points doubly clear. But he is never heavy-handed about it; it all seems perfectly casual and matter-of-fact.”

Walter Terry (New York Herald Tribune, March 29, 1947):
     “Pas de Trois joshes both the ballet and the stars….It is subtle in its overall pattern, for its sustained humor is predicated upon a hint of what dancers are tempted to do while onstage. A quick glance to see what the others are doing, a surreptitious correction of pose, a passing moment of muscular ennui, a hammy gesture to attract attention, the look of sheer terror when the dancer realizes he has forgotten where to go next, these and other secrets which the dancer normally hides are whispered to the audience during the course of Pas de Trois.”

Robert A. Simon (New Yorker, April 5, 1947):
     “Pas de Trois is a sure-handed, and sure-footed, satire on virtuoso dancers. Many familiar tricks are overdone or underdone, so that they are reduced to genial absurdity. Nothing is too obvious, though, because Mr. Robbins keeps his parody controlled. There is also an amiable mockery of the moods of dancers at work.”

Annabelle Lyon, Jerome Robbins.

“Children while playing make a comment on adult’s behavior. In the same way, the child dancer whose imagination is stimulated by stage props improvises his impressions of a professional.”

-The ballet is set to the suite for piano “Music for Children” by Prokofiev, several selections of which the composer later made into a symphonic suite titled “Summer Day.”
-The ballet was created for the American-Soviet Musical Society (Serge Koussevitzky, Chairman), on a City Center program titled “Theatre Music of Two Lands” (U.S.A.- U.S.S.R.). Choreographers also presenting works on the program included Valerie Bettis and Charles Weidman. The production was supervised by Marc Blitzstein.
- Note: Jerome Robbins and Ruth Ann Koesun appeared in the 1947 Ballet Theatre staging.

1947, Ballet Theatre

Jerome Robbins (Boston Herald, December 23, 1947):
     “It seems virtually impossible to dance and to design ballets at the same time–one is bound to suffer, with me it is the dancing. For if my head is full of a ballet as a whole, I cannot seem to get the time to practice the essential hour and a half daily that every dancer should in order to do the best work of which he is capable. I am very critical of my own work, and though, as in the case of ‘Summer Day,’ the dance critics were very kind to me, I knew that two days of work were not nearly enough and that the result was not what it should have been.”

Louis Biancolli (New York World-Telegram, May 13, 1947):
     “Number me among those who laughed loudest over the gay spoofing of Jerome Robbins’ ballet lark, Summer Day….The Robbins novelty was deft in its comic build up, yet almost casual on the surface for the secret here was deceptive nonchalance. The horsing around was backed by terrific technique.”

Howard Taubman (New York Times, May 13, 1947):
     “One can report that the new ballet, witty and playful, won the biggest success of the evening with the audience.”

Robert A. Simon (New Yorker, May 24, 1947):
     “Mr. Robbins and Annabelle Lyon were highly entertaining in their roles as youngsters working out dance patterns, and Ray Lev, who was at the piano during this number, not only played the music poetically but was so much a part of the arrangement that Summer Day was, in effect, a pas de trios for dancers and pianist.”

Robert Bagar (New York Times, December 3, 1947):
     “It would not have been entirely amiss if somewhere prominently displayed last night at the City Center there had been a sign reading, ‘Genius at work.’ For Jerome Robbins, the darling of the balletomanes, the Ariel of the dance, was one of the two who appeared in his own choreography for Summer Day.”

John Martin (New York Times, December 3, 1947):
     “It is a slight work, but an utterly delightful one, brimming with comment that is by no means free from malice, but also touched with tenderness. Using Prokofieff’s piano suite ‘Music for Children,’ Mr. Robbins elects to show how children imitating their elders unwittingly put their fingers on the latter’s weaknesses with devastating accuracy….Mr. Robbins has done his work well; it contains not a single waste movement, it has style and form and charm as well as satire, and in spite of its fragility, bears more witness to the great talent of its creator.”

Miles Kastendieck (New York Journal-American, December 3, 1947):
     “There isn’t much to it, but what there is has a kind of perfection peculiarly Robbins. The audience loved it.”

Walter Terry (New York Herald Tribune, December 3, 1947):
     “During this romp one may detect pointed comments on such prevalent balleticisms as the ballerina’s cloying concern for the beauty of her own line, self-conscious excursions into the realm of pseudo-folk dance, adagio swoons and other activities familiar to the balletomane….To the male role, Mr. Robbins brought his familiar and welcome sense of humor and his considerable skill as a dancer. His dance wit, which finds its trademark in what might best be called the ‘Robbins walk’–purposeful in stride, outwardly innocent but boding mischief at trail’s end–is of the relaxed variety, logical and unforced.”

Robert Sylvester (New York Daily News, December 4, 1947):
     “Jerome Robbins’ new Summer Day is a highly amusing piece of slapstick and satire. Its slapstick is almost as hokey as Fanny Brice’s old ‘Dying Swan’ and its satire is enough to make Anton Dolin holler for his lawyers….While Robbins has brought something of value to the Broadway theatre from ballet in recent years, he is now equipped to bring back something in return from his studies in the rowdy musical comedy field.”

Frances Herridge (PM, December 7, 1947):
     “Summer Day was the sunny spot in last May’s concert of the American-Soviet Music Society, for whom Robbins created it. Polished up a bit and added to the Ballet Theatre’s repertoire, it was the hit of last Tuesday’s program….It remains to be seen how time will treat Summer Day. It hasn’t the substantial workmanship of Robbins’ Facsimile, Interplay or Fancy Free. Spun of ingenious whimsy and easy wit like his recent Pas de Trois, it may well not weather repeated showings. Its spontaneity can easily become forced; its charm, along with its balletic jokes, runs the risk of being over-cute.”

Walter Terry (New York Times, December 7, 1947):
     “Summer Day is a wonderful excursion into the area of adolescent playfulness….Mr. Robbins has woven these dance comments together with seemingly natural but carefully choreographed movements, such as a walk, a yawn, a passing gesture, a glance, and the result is a ballet, or a theatre piece, which presents a refreshing brand of satire. In this case the satire is born of innocence, and when ridicule, devastating comment and frightening honesty emanate from innocence they appear to be inarguable and therefore more potent. Through his child characters in Summer Day Mr. Robbins says much, and says it winningly.”

Douglas Watt (New Yorker, December 13, 1947):
     “An amusing pas de deux that shows what happens when a couple of children get their hands on the stage props of professional dancers. The result is a boisterous parody of all sorts of ballet techniques.”

Claudia Cassidy (Chicago Daily Tribune, January 6, 1948):
     “Summer Day goes right on endearing ballet to those who cherish it doubly because when it looks in a mirror it sometimes sees a whimsical reflection….Onstage come two child dancers, Ruth Ann Koesun and John Kriza, who enliven a practice period by dressing up and emulating their not always impeccable elders….That’s all there is to it except that these are charming children with the relaxed, off-guard quality Mr. Robbins captured in Interplay….Here he suggests it in childlike variation culminating in the budding big brother protectiveness with which the boy scoops up the girl and carries her home.”

Summer Day: Annabelle Lyon, Jerome Robbins, 1947. (Graphic House)

Summer Day: Jerome Robbins, Annabelle Lyon, Ray Lev, 1947. (Graphic House)

Maria Tallchief, Nicholas Magallanes. The Host: Francisco Moncion. First Group: Dorothy Dushock, Herbert Bliss, Kaja Sundsten, Dick Beard, Arlouine Case, Brooks Jackson, Pat McBride, Edward Dragon, Una Kai, Jack Kauflin. Second Group: Rita Carlin, Roy Tobias, Margaret Walker, Walter Georgov, Barbara Milberg, Luis Shaw.

“A ballet in one scene concerning the patterns of adjustment and conflict between two groups, one larger than the other.”

-This was the first ballet Robbins created for New York City Ballet.

Jerome Robbins (New York Times, June 3, 1990):
     “The ballet had a commissioned score. Marc (Blitzstein) wanted to make it very concrete and to have it take place in a department store and have a party between the help. I tried to pull it out of that into something more abstract.”

Louis Biancolli (New York World-Telegram, January 21, 1949):
     “With a forceful score by Marc Blitzstein and choreography by Jerome Robbins, the novelty worked up tense momentum on two levels. On one it was a slick study in shifting classical groups and patterns, based on the Robbins principle of interlocked motion….On the social plane, The Guests was a satiric blast at all forms of class exclusion. The use of masks–to conceal the identity of the unwanted–added a final note of hypocrisy.”

Harriett Johnson (New York Post, January 21, 1949):
     “Though no hint was given in the program regarding its significance, it was obvious that the central idea of the work centered around two different groups of society, one of which was the object of discrimination….Using conventional ballet technique as its means of expression, the work has many poignant moments, but the choreography is not consistently fresh or original.”

John Martin (New York Times, January 21, 1949):
     “It is subtitled a ‘classic ballet’ but it also has a definite social theme, that of intolerance. The guests of the title consist in part of those who wear a glittering cast-mark on their foreheads and are accordingly accepted by the host, and those who have unadorned brows and are not accepted. The conflict is joined in a very neatly contrived Romeo and Juliet romance….It is quite obvious and somewhat overstated. For the most part Mr. Robbins seems more concerned with the topic than with the choreography….There are a few bits of startlingly banal pantomime….On the whole, a disappointing work.”

Robert Sylvester (New York Daily News, January 21, 1949):
     “The highlight of The Guests is the brief but effective solo by Maria Tallchief, to a haunting and lovely Blitzstein strain, and a thoroughly superb pas de deux by Miss Tallchief and Nicholas Magallanes. If The Guests would only build from these choreographic and musical peaks, it would be brilliant. Instead the new ballet trails off both musically and visually.”

Walter Terry (New York Herald Tribune, January 21, 1949):
     “If The Guests, in its current form is not a great ballet, it is, nevertheless, an absorbing one which adds stature to its young choreographer and which augurs new directions for classic dance….By inflection through movement attack and by shrewd juxtapositions of steps and ensemble actions, Mr. Robbins has invested his classic pas with dramatic purpose. Some gesture, some touches of purely expression movement have, of course, been used to transmit the emotional colorings of the work….There is no story to The Guests. It is, I would say, incident without circumstance; it implies situation without explaining condition.”

Frances Herridge (New York Star, January 23, 1949):
     “Using two opposing groups of dancers, Robbins has worked out a series of movement interactions in the modern ballet vocabulary of Balanchine….The two groups and the lone figure who introduces them are symbolic. What they represent becomes a fascinating puzzle….The two groups can represent any opposing cultures, religions, or peoples. The intolerant host may symbolize social authority, the mores, inflexible public opinion, or perhaps arbitrary dictatorship. It may be a picture of Nazism, of the caste system, or social censure of opposing marriages: Negro with White, Easterner with Westerner, Jew with Gentile. See it yourself and work it out.”

B.H. Haggin (Nation, February 19, 1949):
     “Jerome Robbins, who has produced brilliant comedy seems to want to show he can deal with serious matters too….It includes a pas de deux with some lovely movements; but the invention for the large groups is uninteresting.”

The Guests: Maria Tallchief, Jerome Robbins, Nicholas Magallanes, 1949. (George Platt Lynes)

The Guests: Nicholas Magallanes, Maria Tallchief (in the foreground), 1949. (Fred Fehl)

The Guests curtain call: Nicholas Magallanes, Maria Tallchief, Jerome Robbins, and Marc Blitzstein, 1949. (Fred Fehl)

The Prologue (Four strangers meet and become acquainted): Francisco Moncion, Tanaquil Le Clercq, Todd Bolender, Jerome Robbins. The Seven Ages (They discuss the life of man from birth to death in a set of seven variations): Yvonne Mounsey, Pat McBride, Beatrice Tompkins, Arluoine Case, Robert Barnett, Dorothy Dushock, Val Buttignol, Edwina Fontaine, Walter Georgov, Jillana, Brooks Jackson, Una Kai, Roy Tobias. The Seven Stages (They embark on a dream journey to find happiness): Melissa Hayden, Herbert Bliss, Dick Beard, Shaun O’Brien, Audrey Allen, Barbara Bocher, Joan Bonomo, Doris Breckenridge, Ninette d’Amboise, Edwina Fontaine, Peggy Karlson, Helen Komaova, Barbara Milberg, Francesca Mosarra, Janice Nagley, Moira Paul, Ruth Sobotka, Barbara Walczak, Margaret Walker, Tomi Wortham. The Dirge (They mourn for the figure of the All-Powerful Father who would have protected them from the vagaries of man and nature): Edward Bigelow, Arlouine Case, Jillana, Una Kai, Pat McBride, Yvonne Mounsey, Robert Barnett, Val Buttignol, Jacques d’Amboise, Walter Georgov, Brooks Jackson. The Masque (They attempt to become or to appear carefree): Full Cast. The Epilogue.

“This ballet was inspired by Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2 and the W. H. Auden poem on which it is based. The ballet follows the sectional development of the poem and music and concerns the attempts of people to rid themselves of anxiety.”

-Based on the poem “The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue” by W. H. Auden (1946)

Jerome Robbins:
     “It is a ritual in which four people exercise their illusions in their search for security. It is an attempt to see what life is about.”

Frances Herridge (New York Post, February 27, 1950):
     “In this most ambitious work of his career, Jerome Robbins has done an admirable job of converting into dance terms Auden’s complex poem about four characters in search of life’s meaning.”

Miles Kastendieck (New York Journal-American, February 27, 1950):
     “Like the symphony, the ballet falls into six parts during which four lonely characters seek answers to their questions about life….What gives the work power is Robbins’ gift for mood. Section by section its quality varies.”

John Martin (New York Times, February 27, 1950):
     “This is the kind of production that justifies the City Ballet’s existence….Robbins’ intuition is uncannily penetrating, his emotional integrity is unassailable and his choreographic idiom is lean and strong and dramatically functional. He has a fine theatre sense, can evoke an atmosphere by means that are somehow never definable, and knows how to get from his dancers qualities that perhaps even they themselves are not aware that they possess.”

Walter Terry (New York Herald Tribune, February 27, 1950):
     “Through his choreography Mr. Robbins outlines the life and thought patterns of his four protagonists, three men and a girl….But Age of Anxiety is more than a successful etude. It is an enormously compelling work of art. I cannot offer a synopsis, for it is not a story; it is an experience. The four who guide its course are the frightened souls of an anguished era and we share in their experiences, both real and imagined….It is an emotional experience communicate through dance, through Mr. Robbins’s perceptive and eloquent dance.”

Douglas Watt (New York Daily News, February 27, 1950):
     “The New York City Ballet Company’s most ambitious new production, The Age of Anxiety, proved to be a tiresomely sentimental piece of claptrap….The only time the anxious thing really got going was when Robbins, who himself danced one of the four main characters, and poorly, had his dancers cut loose with a musical comedy pattern. He dropped this quickly, however, lest anybody get to enjoy it too much.”

Doris Hering (Compass, February 28, 1950):
     “Jerome Robbins’ Age of Anxiety is like the proverbial flower growing through a crack in the pavement. It has about it the restlessness and emotional economy of human relationships in a modern city, and yet throughout there keeps rising a persistent and wholly convincing core of faith and simple goodness….Although plenty of knotty psychological and religious ideas were implied in the poem, the ballet, and even the score, Mr. Robbins never lost sight of the fact that he was dealing, above all, with human beings. As a result, his choreography, though highly imaginative, retained its human dimension.”

Bron. (Variety, March 1, 1950):
     “Age of Anxiety is Robbins’ choreography to the new symphony of Leonard Bernstein, the libretto dealing with the current day unrest and man’s problem to find inner peace and security. Piece is serious in theme, unlike the onetime Robbins/Bernstein comedy ballet hit, Fancy Free. Work isn’t completely successful, due to too much weltschmerz. Quartet of dancers who play the protagonists establish their point early that this is the age of anxiety and unrest, and reiteration of this point through repetition of poses and gestures makes for monotony.”

Louis Biancolli (New York World-Telegram, March 10, 1950):
     “The ballet is good fun from beginning to end….Jerome Robbins and George Balanchine have done another superb job of mass choreography here. The group movements swirl all over the stage, and somehow the tang of the outdoors gets into the motion….On all points the Jones Beach ballet is worth a view as the next best thing to a day in the sun.”

Robert Sylvester (New York Daily News, March 10, 1950):
     “The choreography found George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins expertly blending their dissimilar styles and all the dancers apparently having fun at work….It’s a ballet in four parts which touches upon everything from mosquitoes to lifeguards and, of course, a beach full of pretty girls.”

Emory Lewis (Cue, March 11, 1950):
     “Jerome Robbins has chosen to translate W.H. Auden’s obscure poems, ‘Age of Anxiety,’ into ballet terms, and to indicate that, in our troubled world, faith is the answer….Because the theme is itself controversial and unacceptable to many mundane minds, the ballet has a strike against it at the onset….Jerome Robbins has outdone himself in imaginative choreography. Yet somehow the whole thing adds up to disappointment.”

Doris Hering (Compass, March 12, 1950):
     “The ballet itself was a big, lively mixture of Jantzen bathing suits, satin toe shoes, realism and classic movement….But it kept checking itself and slipping back into ballet clichés, as though it were rather afraid to let its hair down all the way….In other words, the material is there. It’s waiting for the choreographers really to develop it. But in the meantime, it was a pleasure to see this large group of handsome, healthy looking young people freed of the tyranny of tights and tutus.”

B.H. Haggin (Nation, March 18, 1950):
     “It is another example of what happens when Robbins’s sharp eye and satiric sense concern themselves with American lowbrow dancing; and it makes one wish that if he feels that as a serious artist he must deal with serious subjects he would deal with them in comedy, of which he is so brilliant a master.”

Ann Barzel (Chicago Sun, March 26, 1950):
     “Age of Anxiety is a profound and complex work….The overall intention is clear, the moods are set immediately, the very patterns of the dances project feeling. There are passages when the stage is full of dancers whose individual steps and group designs are in themselves as stunning as abstract dance aside from any communicative function….Robbins himself is the best of the four anxious characters. He never walks into a pose. There is always an evident inner compulsion for each movement.”

Anatole Chujoy (Dance News, April 1950):
     “In no sense a choreographic retelling of Auden’s Pulitzer Prize-winning poem, Age of Anxiety is a great original ballet and, probably, the beginning of a new period in the creative life of Robbins….Age of Anxiety is a ballet that cannot be described in simple terms, nor can its powerful impact be fully realized from one seeing. Here is a ballet to be seen again and again, a ballet whose profound theme has a way of obscuring at the beginning the wonderful dancing Robbins has devised to carry the theme.”

Doris Hering (Dance Magazine, April 1950):
     “Mr. Robbins has penetrated into that fluid realm where only movement speaks–and what original movement it is! He has found us a rich, intuitive picture of today’s world with its gnawing quest for identity….The ballet concerns four strangers who meet, discuss the life of man from birth to death, embark upon a dream journey, mourn for a universal father-symbol, try to shake off their mutual despair with a gay dance, and finally discover a source of faith and strength each within himself.”

Nik Krevitsky (Dance Observer, April 1950):
     “This work, a definite development or coming of age as a serious artist, on the part of Jerome Robbins, is extremely evocative, beautifully structured, and filled with invention and variety which make it a truly great dance piece. There is a universality in its treatment of the theme, and in the objective portrayal of the four characters, that maintains the strength of the work throughout….Age of Anxiety, built like most Robbins compositions, uses the element of contrasting quality to maintain interest and lend variety to the entire proceedings.”

Age of Anxiety: Robert Barnett (on left) and Jerome Robbins rehearsing dancers, 1950. (Walter E. Owen)

Age of Anxiety: Jerome Robbins, 1950. (Photo uncredited)

Age of Anxiety: Francisco Moncion, Hugh Laing, Tanaquil Le Clercq, Todd Bolender, 1951. (Walter E. Owen)

First Movement–“Sunday”(Allegro): Melissa Hayden, Beatrice Tompkins, Yvonne Mounsey, Herbert Bliss, Frank Hobi, Audrey Allen, Barbara Bocher, Joan Bonomo, Doris Breckenridge, Arlouine Case, Ninette d’Amboise, Dorothy Dushock, Edwina Fontaine, Jillana, Una Kai, Peggy Karlson, Helen Komarova, Pat McBride, Barbara Milberg, Francesca Mosarra, Janice Nagley, Moira Paul, Ruth Sobotka, Harriet Talbot, Barbara Walczak, Margaret Walker, Tomi Wortham, Robert Barnett, Dick Beard, Val Buttignol, Jacques d’Amboise, Walter Georgov, Brooks Jackson, Shaun O’Brien, Karel Shook, Roy Tobias. Second Movement–“Rescue” (Andante): Tanaquil Le Clercq, Nicholas Magallanes, Helen Komarova, Pat McBride, Dick Beard, Shaun O’Brien. Third Movement–“War with Mosquitoes” (Scherzo): Todd Bolender, William Dollar, Roy Tobias, Doris Breckenridge, Barbara Bocher, Peggy Karlson, Ruth Sobotka, Barbara Walczak, Margaret Walker, Tomi Wortham. Fourth Movement–“Hot Dogs” (Allegro): Maria Tallchief, Jerome Robbins, and the company.

“Jones Beach is a magnificent beach-resort within an hour’s drive of New York City. Enjoyed by millions of New Yorkers, it has become the symbol of popular recreational facilities. The gaiety and exuberance of Jurriaan Andriessen’s new symphony reminded George Balanchine of the vivacious nonsense that takes place among the young people at such a resort, and with Jerome Robbins he arranged dances inspired by the beach-games and swimming.” (This programme note taken from performances given at The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, July 1950.)

-Jerome Robbins’ first choreographic collaboration with George Balanchine.
-Premiere dedicated to Serge Koussevitsky.
-Music commissioned by the Royal Government of The Netherlands.

Jerome Robbins (interviewed by Nancy Reynolds for her book ‘Repertory in Review,’ 1974):
     “George [Balanchine] asked if I would help him do the ballet. He said, ‘We’ll do it together.’ And I said ‘Fine. How are we going to do it?’ And we worked it out this way, which was one of the most exciting experiences I’ve had. I was in one room working on one ballet, and he was in another room working on ‘Jones Beach.’ He did about two minutes of the first movement and gave the dancers a break. Then he came into my room and said ‘Okay, now you pick up from where I left off.’ And when the dancers came back again, they ran what they had done, and I just started right there, without any preparation and went on for another two minutes. Then I took a break, and showed him what I had done, and he went on from there.”

Cecil Smith (Musical America, March 1950):
     “A featherweight genre piece, the new work sets forth the trivia of life at the seashore in four sections called Sunday, Rescue, War with Mosquitoes, and Hot Dogs. Most of the ballet is neither very funny nor very attractively provided with movement patterns….Pantomime passages dealing with the attacks of mosquitoes and the consumption of hot dogs hardly constitute landmarks in ballet history.”

Frances Herridge (New York Post, March 10, 1950):
     “Jones Beach is the gayest and liveliest stretch of dancing in many a year….There is never a doubt as to what is happening on stage, although literal movements are ingeniously translated into stylized dance….The big climax is the beach party with Jerome Robbins and Maria Tallchief to lead the group in some of the hottest ballet jive doing.”

Miles Kastendieck (New York Journal-American, March 10, 1950):
     “The world premiere of Jones Beach introduced a work as American as hot dogs and as vital as American youth. It is bright and alive, urgent and athletic, obvious and fun.”

John Martin (New York Times, March 10, 1950):
     “The ballet is credited choreographically to both George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, and though the idea was perhaps Mr. Balanchine’s to begin with, there are also evidences of Mr. Robbins’ collaboration. It is a gay romp, a piece of vivacious nonsense, so full of people and movement that one is tempted to subtitle it Symphony in Sea….Everything that can happen at a public beach except sunburn pops up sooner or later–yes, practically everything.”

Walter Terry (New York Herald Tribune, March 10, 1950):
     “There are thin spots here and there and some passages which appear to have been hastily, even frantically, contrived but they are not numerous and the recreational aspects together with the carefree attitudes of a day at the beach are pleasantly, amusingly conveyed….The ballet is divided into four movements: Sunday, Rescue, War with Mosquitoes, and Hot Dogs….Mr. Robbins and Miss Tallchief were on hand for the finale, which I am inclined to believe represented Mr. Robbins’s major choreographic contribution to the ballet, and they mimed and danced their parts with wit and gusto.”

Jones Beach rehearsal: Jerome Robbins and Maria Tallchief, 1952. (Photo uncredited)

Jones Beach: Nicholas Magallanes, Tanaquil Le Clercq, 1950. (Photo uncredited)

Jones Beach: Tanaquil Le Clercq, Nicholas Magallanes, 1950. (George Platt Lynes)

Jones Beach: Jerome Robbins, Maria Tallchief, 1950. (George Platt Lynes)

The Novice: Nora Kaye. The Queen: Yvonne Mounsey. The Intruders: Nicholas Magallanes, Michael Maule. The Group: Constance Baker, Barbara Bocher, Arlouine Case, Edwina Fontaine, Jillana, Una Kai, Irene Larsson, Barbara Milberg, Marsha Reynolds, Patricia Savoia, Ruth Sobotka, Tomi Wortham.

“There occurs in certain forms of insect and animal life, and even in our own mythology, the phenomenon of the female of the species considering the male as prey. The mantis devours her partner immediately after mating; the female spider kills the male unless he attacks her first and subdues her preying instincts; the Greek Amazons established a cult completely apart from men except for procreation, crippling or destroying their male offspring. The ballet, derived from these sources, concerns such a race or cult…the rites and blood instincts.”

-The intended original title for the ballet (as revealed in promotional material) was The Amazons.

1961, Ballets: U.S.A.; 1984, Pacific Northwest Ballet; 1996, Birmingham Royal Ballet; 1998, San Francisco Ballet; 2001, Stuttgart Ballet; 2001, Dutch National Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet.

Jerome Robbins (Dance Magazine, August 1955):
     “It’s about a tribe of women. A novice is to be initiated. She doesn’t yet know her duties as a member of the tribe nor is she aware of her innate instincts. She falls in love with a man and mates with him. But the rules of the tribe demand his death. She refuses to kill him but when his blood actually flows, her animal instincts are aroused and she rushes forward to complete the sacrifice. Her affection yields to her tribal instinct.”

Jerome Robbins (interviewed by Margaret Mercer for radio station WQXR [New York City], May 19, 1990):
     “I had a recording of ‘Apollo,’ and the flip side was ‘Concerto in D for Strings’….The music had an appealing dramatic nature.. I was studying Greek myths and I came across the story of the Amazons and how one of them fell in l ove with the Greeks who happened to come there, and went against the tribe. That got me thinking….I thought about how the story might fit ‘The Cage’….and then I started it….and I did more research about women’s sects, and the phenomenon of insect life…”

Miles Kastendieck (New York Journal-American, June 15, 1951):
     “Neither the subject nor the ballet is pretty. Through his individuality of style, Robbins has accentuated the preying instinct with sure regular strokes. The atmosphere is charged: the action is tense. Given a dynamic crisp performance, the effect is powerful, even horrifying.”

John Martin (New York Times, June 15, 1951):
     “It is easily the most important work of the season….It is an angry, sparse, unsparing piece, decadent in its concern with misogyny and its contempt for procreation….Its characters are insects, it is without heart or conscience, and its opinion of the human race is not a high one. But in spite of the potency of its negations, it is a tremendous little work, with the mark of genius upon it….The movement is wonderfully conceived, both in its relation to the impulses of the body and in the tautness of its phrase.”

Robert Sylvester (New York Daily News, June 15, 1951):
     “The choreography proves conclusively enough that the way the female destroys the male is by…er…uh…well, maybe you better see it yourself….All in all, The Cage can be accepted as Robbins’ most typical ballet for Nora Kaye since Facsimile.”

Walter Terry (New York Herald Tribune, June 15, 1951):
     “Mr. Robbins’ ballet does not specify the insect, the animal or the human, although attributes of each are indicated in the movements. Rather is his work a primitive ceremonial which celebrates with a certain aloof frenzy this terrifying digression from the accepted social pattern of modern man….Mr. Robbins, in this The Cage, has created a startling, unpleasant but wholly absorbing theater piece. The movements, with few exceptions, are not only pertinent to the theme but they drive its meaning to the fore with passion and clarity.”

Douglas Watt (New Yorker, June 23, 1951):
     “The Cage is a melodramatic novelty, and as such it’s rather effective. Its most novel aspect is the use of Igor Stravinsky’s String Concerto in D for its music. This was a delightful idea, for the nervous and rhythmical picking and sawing of the strings, especially in the final movements, is amusingly suggestive of insect activity–a fact I don’t suppose occurred to anybody before Robbins….A sportive new work, on the whole.”

Nik Krevitsky (Dance Observer, November 1951):
     “Jerome Robbins’ The Cage is a wild, frenzied, violent, unrelieved rite….In this work, which requires more analysis than we have room for at this writing, Miss Kaye is superb in a grotesque movement pattern, exciting for its primitive abandon and archaic movements.”

The Cage: Yvonne Mounsey, Michael Maule, 1951. (Melton-Pippin)

The Cage: Nora Kaye, Michael Maule, 1951. (Walter E. Owen)

The Cage: Tanaquil Le Clercq, 1951. (Photo uncredited)

Diana Adams, Nicholas Magallanes, Jillana, Roy Tobias, Janet Reed, Todd Bolender, Melissa Hayden, Herbert Bliss, Tanaquil Le Clercq, Jerome Robbins, Constance Baker, Barbara Bocher, Doris Breckenridge, Edith Brozak, Arlouine Case, Ninette d’Amboise, Una Kai, Irene Larsson, Marilyn Poudrier, Marsha Reynolds, Kaye Sargent, Patricia Savoia, Ruth Sobotka, Gloria Vauges, Barbara Walczak, Tomi Wortham, Alan Baker, Robert Barnett, Jacques d’Amboise, Walter Georgov, Brooks Jackson, Shaun O’Brien, Stanley Zompakos.

“The ballet has nothing to do with the famous Pied Piper of Hamelin and refers instead to the clarinet soloist.”

Jerome Robbins (interviewed by Nancy Reynolds for her book ‘Repertory in Review,’ 1974):

     “I liked the music…I keep finding that this ballet turned out to be a germinal work for a lot of Broadway choreographers. I kept seeing it pop up in other shows, many of those ideas…It was fun to do. I enjoyed it very much.”

Frances Herridge (New York Post, December 5, 1951):

     “No symbolism, no message, just a wonderful time with the infectious rhythms of Aaron Copland’s ‘Concerto for Clarinet and string Orchestra’….It is clowning in modern jazz. But it’s a good deal more. Its development from nothing, its superb climax, its interplay of groups, make it a significant art work.”

Miles Kastendieck (New York Journal-American, December 5, 1951):

     “Jerome Robbins cut loose at the City Center last night. The world premiere of The Pied Piper found him with his hair down, his tongue out, and his talent rampant. In his way he has created a little masterpiece of fun and foolery, freedom and fashion. The work scored an instantaneous hit….If ever there was a demonstration of what music could do to people, this is it.”

John Martin (New York Times, December 5, 1951):

     “There is no doubt about it, the boy has talent! This is a larger work in the same vein as his ‘Interplay,’ putting together basic elements of both the academic ballet and jazz, with a slightly rambunctious sense of play as the fusing agent. If classicism does not imply too lofty a tone, this is actually a classic idiom in its own terms, and a very responsive one as Robbins employs it….Much of it is hilariously funny, full of absurd and impish invention.”

Arthur Pollock (Compass, December 5, 1951):

     “If, having seen some of the modern ballets that look childish but seem to want to be accepted as profound, you guess that in this one troops of grown-up dancers run around pretending to be rats and infants, you will be guessing wrong. It is simply a ballet in which a lot of animated girls and boys can’t help dancing when they hear a man play Aaron Copland on his clarinet….It is a gem of a ballet, quick and brilliant and comical.”

Robert Sylvester (New York Daily News, December 5, 1951):

     “With it, Robbins reaffirms all the talent and imagination he always shows on Broadway….The new Robbins work has touches of Our Town, touches of Orson Welles, and touches of jazz….At one point Robbins manages to have everybody doing a Charleston, at another he has everybody on the floor, and at still another he has them just jumping up and down for laughs. The whole thing adds up to solid ballet fun.”

Walter Terry (New York Herald Tribune, December 5, 1951):

     “The real worker of magic is Mr. Robbins, whose choreographic inventions, fresh and impulsive, bring music and dancing together in happy association….The movements Mr. Robbins has created actually belong in that great area of dance we call kinetic pantomime….Music is the stimulus but the resulting dance is almost wholly kinetic in its projecting of lyrical beauties and boisterous humors. Some of the action is balletic, but the greater part of it is highly individualistic….Because there is neither a trite movement nor a slothful moment in it, The Pied Piper is constantly surprising, continually refreshing.”

Douglas Watt (New Yorker, December 15, 1951):

     “This brilliant and contagious dance work was presented for the first time last week, with Robbins himself in one of the main parts….The whole production made it seem as if Walt Disney had finally succeeded in creating people.”

Nik Krevitsky (Dance Observer, January 1952):

     “In typical Robbins fashion, this work proved to be fresh, novel, and full of invention; the basic idea itself being a delightful surprise, having little or nothing to do with the familiar legend of Hamelin. If one can bring the far-fetched notion of a happy gang of young people being kinesthetically hypnotized by a clarinetist into the context of the original Pied Piper there might seem to be some relationship….What he has done with the material is completely new, completely engaging, and alive from start to finish.”

Cecil Smith (Musical America, January 1, 1952):

     “Like ‘Interplay’–but, in its initial form, considerably less successful–The Pied Piper is an essay in formal informality….The whole ballet seems thrown together hastily from Mr. Robbins’ stockpile of used ideas, with a minimal number of new ones added in….The short-phrased agitations of Mr. Robbins’ dance figures do not accord with the large intellectual span Mr. Copland seeks to achieve by his studied and architectural deployment of the musical figures.”

Edwin Denby (Ballet, August 1952):

     “I was mortified to see them dancing still in the style of Swan Lake, dancing the piece wrong and looking as square as a covey of mature suburbanites down in the rumpus room. All but one dancer, Tanaquil Le Clercq, who does the style right, and looks witty and graceful and adolescent as they all so easily might have by nature. The piece has a Robbins-built surefire finale, and the public doesn’t even guess at the groovy grace it is missing.”

The Pied Piper: Barbara Bocher, Todd Bolender, Janet Reed, Robert Bennett, Tanaquil Le Clercq, 1951. (Fred Fehl)

The Pied Piper: 1951. (Fred Fehl)

Tanaquil Le Clercq, Nora Kaye, Janet Reed, Roy Tobias, Louis Johnson (guest), Robert Barnett, John Mandia, Brooks Jackson.

“A musical composition of poetic character…a dancing song, a poem of unknown authorship which recounts a legendary or traditional event and passes from one generation to another…”-Webster’s Dictionary, on “ballade” and “ballad.”

Jerome Robbins (interviewed by Nancy Reynolds for her book ‘Repertory in Review,’ 1974):

     “It is about what happens to roles when people aren’t dancing them. There’s that Petrouchka costume waiting on a rack somewhere. Or there’s the role in limbo. Everyone talks about Petrouchka, but it’s only when someone gets into that role that the role comes to life and exists again. Then when that person stops, the role collapses. Roles are endowed by whatever artist it is that happens to dance them. To me, that’s what’s underneath it all. It’s the state of hibernation until something happens.”

Frances Herridge (New York Post, February 15, 1952):

     “The atmosphere of informal fantasy quite obviously cloaks Robbins’ vision of life, and it is a sad, lonely one. But what the characters stand for specifically in the ballet is uncertain….Whatever Robbins’ meaning, the ballet has a stirring end even though elusive.”

John Martin (New York Times, February 15, 1952):

     “Mr. Robbins has given us a Pierrot and Columbine piece that is cute, cloying and self-conscious. It has falling snow, toy balloons, and all the clichés of the degenerated nineteenth-century form of the Italian comedy….Perhaps Mr. Robbins may have had some idea of drawing tragic, or poignant, overtones from their situation, but his sentimental approach to both the music and the movement would tend to contradict such a theory….Oh well; after all, it is he who has given us Age of Anxiety and The Cage, and it is up to us this morning to think on these things.”

Robert Sylvester (New York Daily News, February 15, 1952):

     “Jerome Robbins’ new Ballade ballet is one of the young maestro’s dreamy epics which isn’t quite slow enough to put you to sleep and not nearly lively enough to keep you anywhere near the edge of your chair. It has meaning, no doubt.”

Walter Terry (New York Herald Tribune, February 15, 1952):

     “Ballade is a sweet and touching reminder of wistful feelings close to the heart of each of us. At its close, one does not wish to applaud, for the noise would jar the sharing of a dream….Sweet and tender and nostalgic, but what does it recall? Nothing very specific, admittedly. Robbins has created fresh, unforced, wonderfully simple movements which never actually lead to a neat, tidy, and thoroughly dead resolution. But this might be the true dance symbol of youth, eager to explore many exciting avenues but not interested in arriving at a final destination too soon.”

Albert J. Elias (Compass, February 17, 1952):

     “Mr. Robbins left me completely up in the air on Thursday evening with Ballade, his new ballet….What little pretty dance there is can hardly be taken for its face value when dancers fall into patterns that only make one ask, ‘What is she doing? What is he doing?’”

Douglas Watt (New Yorker, February 23, 1952):

     “Set to Debussy’s ‘Six Epigraphes Antiques,’ it is a precious little thing with a theatrical start and finish and nothing you can put your finger on in between….The dancing is almost uniformly tortured and unattractive, and both costumes and makeup are unflattering to everybody. The balloons are very pretty, however.”

Robert Sabin (Dance Magazine, March 1952):

     “It is a single and serious conception, and although I should be hard put to it to support my judgement with intellectual arguments, it strikes me as a genuine success.”

Rosalyn Krokover (Musical Courier, March 11, 1952):

     “There were chairs, balloons, a sawdust heart and little of interest choreographically to hold one’s attention. Many of the ideas were derivative, and there was little dance invention. Everyone is entitled to an occasional off-night; and this was definitely Robbins.’”

Anatole Chujoy, (Dance News, April 1952):

     “This is a ballet that absolutely demands a program note. The curtain rises on a dim stage peopled by half a dozen figures huddled on chairs against a backcloth. Snow is falling heavily, adding to the melancholy of the scene. A balloon-vendor enters, places a balloon in each inert hand, and walks away. The balloons endow the puppets with life, and each rises to his or her feet with the pull of the balloon….This is a striking opening, but after that Robbins seems completely at a loss.”

Doris Hering (Dance Magazine, May 1952):

     “Jerome Robbins’ Ballade, despite its outward poetic trappings, is not a poetic work. It is a feeble bit of misanthropy whose cute theatrical tricks titillate rather than move.”

Edwin Denby (Ballet, August 1952):

     “I liked it because at the end one girl at least discovers a way out of the trap that Robbins evidently intended to catch all of them in; she wasn’t sure she wanted to get out, but it was clear she could if she chose. I liked the musicality of Ballade very much. And the Aronson décor too, so Debussy and real peculiar.”

Tanaquil Le Clercq, Francisco Moncion.

“Debussy’s music, Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune, was composed between 1892 and 1894. It was inspired by a poem of Mallarmé’s which was begun in 1865, supposedly for the stage, the final version of which appeared in 1876. The poem describes the reveries of a faun around a real or imagined encounter with nymphs. In 1912 Nijinsky presented his famous ballet, drawing his ideas from both the music and the poem among other sources. This pas de deux is a variation on these themes.”

-The ballet appeared among ten pas de deux comprising the ballet Celebration [B37].

1958, Ballets: U.S.A.; 1966, Royal Danish Ballet; 1971, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Royal Ballet; 1972, Royal Danish Ballet; 1974, Paris Opera Ballet; 1975, Hamburg Ballet; 1976, San Francisco Ballet; 1977, Batsheva Dance Company of Israel, National Ballet of Canada; 1978, Australian Ballet, Denver Civic Ballet; 1980, Teatro Alla Scala, Zürich Ballet; 1984, Kansas City Ballet; 1991, Star Dancers Ballet; 1998, Stuttgart Ballet; 1999, Suzanne Farrell Ballet; 2000, Bolshoi Ballet; 2002, Ballet West; 2005, American Ballet Theatre, Miami City Ballet; 2006, Scottish Ballet; 2008, Houston Ballet, Leipzig Ballet, Oregon Ballet Theatre.

Jerome Robbins (interviewed by Nancy Reynolds for her book ‘Repertory in Review,’ 1974): 

     “‘Faun’ came out of a couple of sources. First of all, my fascination with the original....Then one day in class, little Eddie Villella, who was standing next to me and who was just a kid, suddenly began to stretch his body in a very odd way–almost like he was trying to get something out of it. And I thought of how animalistic it was....And then another time I walked into a rehearsal studio and Willie Johnson was practicing the ‘Swan Lake’ adagio with some student girl. They were watching themselves in the mirror, and I was struck by the way they were watching that couple over there doing a love dance, and totally unaware of the proximity and possible sexuality of their physical encounters. The combination of all those things finally put the ballet into my head.” 

Louis Biancolli (New York World-Telegram and Sun, May 15, 1953): 
     “It was beautiful and tender, poetic and restrained, and highly imaginative. I wouldn’t be at all astonished if it is remembered as Mr. Robbins’ most artistic gift to ballet….Mr. Robbins has taken the faun out of Greek mythology and put him to work in a dance studio….One masterly stroke was the added illusion that the audience was actually serving as the fourth wall of the dance studio–that is the wall with the mirrors.” 

Frances Herridge (New York Post, May 15, 1953): 
     “With the keen insight of a psychiatrist, Robbins has sketched an encounter between boy and girl–each so fascinated in his own mirror image that the one is scarcely aware of the other, even in making love….Tanaquil Le Clercq never looked lovelier. Both she and Francisco Moncion, the boy, catch exactly the gaze and manner of people wrapt up in themselves–of dancers charmed by their bodies….Jean Rosenthal’s curtain set makes an ingenious studio.” 

Miles Kastendieck (New York Journal-American, May 15, 1953): 
     “It is a pas de deux basic in ideas, disarming in its simplicity, and compelling in its mood….The ballet is a study in line and slow-motion, relying heavily on its performers to do it justice….It fell to Tanaquil Le Clercq and Francisco Moncion to have the experience. Their ability to capture and sustain did the trick.” 

John Martin (New York Times, May 15, 1953): 
     “There is no dancing in it at all in the sense of continuity of phrased movement, and except for three or four beautifully contrived adagio lifts and their resolutions, there is nothing whatever of choreographic texture. Indeed, the piece contains the absolute minimum of movement of any sort to qualify it in the ballet at category, and that only by a wide stretch of the term.” 

Walter Terry (New York Herald Tribune, May 15, 1953): 
     “Not so many years ago, Nijinsky’s Faun shocked American audiences, for although the participants lived only in myth, they behaved with considerable physical candor. The Robbins Faun is not shocking in the same way at all, but it does invite shock of a different sort, for whether Mr. Robbins intended it or not, his ballet suggests that the dancer is, or tends to be, in love with himself….The idea itself possesses impact and the choreographer has translated it with taste and tenderness, some wry humor and much beauty into the action of dance.” 

Robert Sylvester (New York Daily News, May 16, 1953):
     “Robbins’ new version is imaginative enough and, surely, revolutionary in concept. The ‘rock’ becomes a whisperish cubicle of silk which quivers with every front-row cough and the ‘faun’ becomes a guy with no shirt and rehearsal tights. He awakes to give a gal dancer a few lifts, a few twists and a few strange looks. Then he goes back to sleep again. On a bare floor, yet….Miss Le Clercq was as fragile and liftable as ever. Moncion managed to look fairly dangerous at times. Neither could be arrested for a Mann Act violation.” 

P.W. Manchester (Dance News, June 1953): 
     “With Afternoon of a Faun, Jerome Robbins discards everything except the sensuousness implicit in the music and presents a ballet which, in effect, is both an exposition and an exploitation of the essential narcissism of the dancer…. Afternoon of a Faun has a hypnotic fascination. Before it is half way through we have the feeling that the dancers we are watching have become the reflection, not the reality. It would be difficult to overpraise the performances of Tanaquil Le Clercq and Francisco Moncion who walk, with superb assurance, the tightrope between reality and fantasy.” 

Nik Krevitsky (Dance Observer, June/July 1953):
     “Using Debussy’s music for the title, Afternoon of a Faun, and developing a pas de deux variation on the themes of both the music and the Mallarme poem which inspired it, Mr. Robbins choreographed one of the most sustained studies in focus and one of the most objective boy-girl relationships in all ballet….For simplicity of means, for directness in the handling of the theme, for brilliance of characterization, and for doing a contemporary work within the framework of the music, Mr. Robbins and the collaborators, Miss Rosenthal and Irene Sharaff who did the simple costumes, are to be highly praised.” 

Doris Hering (Dance Magazine, July 1953): 
     “There is a wonderful sense of theatrical rightness in Mr. Robbins’ choice of the antiseptic studio atmosphere, for his story of nascent love vying with narcissism–not only because dancers live in a world of mirrors, but because this particular format allowed him to concentrate on the mood relationship between the music and his own choreography.”

Major Domo: Robert Fletcher. Piccolo and Flutes: Ruth Sobotka, Edith Brozak, Kaye Sargent. Oboe: Jillana. Clarinets: Carolyn George, Roy Tobias. Bassoons: John Mandia, Shaun O’Brien. First Violins: Barbara Bocher, Barbara Milberg, Barbara Walczak. Second Violins: Ann Crowell, Marsha Reynolds, Patricia Savoia. Violas: Irene Larsson, Jacques d’Amboise. Celli: Arlouine Case, Una Kai, Charlotte Ray. Double Bass: Brooks Jackson. Harp: Yvonne Mounsey. Horns: Edwina Fontaine, Jane Mason, Sally Streets, Gloria Vauges. Trumpets: Frank Hobi, Michael Maule. Tuba and Trombones: Edward Bigelow, Walter Georgov, Leon Guerard, Stanley Zompakos. Drums, Cymbals, Gongs, etc.: Todd Bolender, Robert Barnett, William Inglis. 

“In 1945, Britten was asked to write for the British Ministry of Education's documentary film Instruments of the Orchestra (Op. 34). With text by Eric Crozier, the work consists of variations and a fugue on a rondeau from Henry Purcell's incidental music for Adelazar, or the Moor's Revenge by Mrs. Aphra Behn. Each variation is played by a different instrument or group of instruments composing a contemporary symphonic orchestra. Consecutively, the four families of the band–strings, woodwinds, brasses, and percussion– are exploited in characteristic monologues and conversations. Finally, the piccolo initiates the great fugue which recapitulates Purcell’s noble theme.” 

-The ballet sets out to depict the characters of the individual orchestral instruments in dance terms. 

-The ballet premiered on the date of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in a special New York City Ballet coronation night program. 

1956, Royal Danish Ballet; 1977, Boston Ballet; 1994, Pacific Northwest Ballet; 1999, School of American Ballet; 2001, San Francisco Ballet.

George Freedley (New York Morning Telegraph, June 3, 1953): 
     “What might have seemed a mere tour de force, an amusing spoof, became the most delightful addition to ballet repertoire in a long time….What raises Fanfare to more considerable heights is the fact that Mr. Robbins has composed in lyric as well as comic mood. Some of the passages have great pictorial and poetic beauty.” 

Frances Herridge (New York Post, June 3, 1953): 
     “Robbins has done with his dancers exactly what Britten does with his music. Based on a theme by Henry Purcell, the score is a series of variations by different sections of the orchestra with a final fugue by the entire orchestra….The woodwinds, then the strings, the brass and the percussion sections have their turns, as do the dancers who represent the instruments on stage….Robbins creates steps for his human orchestra which aptly suggest the musical sounds.” 

Miles Kastendieck (New York Journal-American, June 3, 1953): 
     “It is a simple, straight-forward work in the step-for-note tradition, smartly contrived and ingeniously sparked with touches of Robbinsian humor. As danced, played, and produced in its colorful costumes, it becomes a triumph of virtuosity.” 

John Martin (New York Times, June 3, 1953): 
     “Mr. Robbins has kept the intention exactly as it was, employing a ‘Major Domo’ to speak the explanatory lines at the side of the stage, and departing from the music only in the fugue….The whole thing, however, is perhaps too literal, even to having pictures of the various instruments on each costume. As choreographer he has simply followed along most of the time, breaking into characteristic comedy mood with the oboes, the tuba and trombones, and the percussion, but employing elsewhere a minimum of invention.” 

Robert Sylvester (New York Daily News, June 3, 1953): 
     “The Robbins work is an imaginative and original treatment of Benjamin Britten’s music for a British documentary film called Instruments of the Orchestra. It is roughly divided into two sections. First, a ‘Major Domo’ introduces various instruments and, as the representative dancers appear, they fit their dancing to sectional music….Once all instrumental combinations are introduced, the Major Domo advises the audience that they will now dance in concert. Britten’s basic themes are then assembled into a musical and choreographic composition.” 

Walter Terry (New York Herald Tribune, June 3, 1953): 
    “Fanfare is courtly but its courtliness is suffused with good humor and peppered with mischief. Not only has Mr. Robbins selected and invented movements and, particularly rhythmic phrasings which appear to be visualized characteristics of the instruments portrayed and the themes allotted to them but he has also found the special brands of fun associated with, say, the tuba, the double bass, or the bassoons. One sees speed and lightness in the dancing of flutes, gliding legate in the celli, soaring in the clarinets, ripples and sweeps in the harp and fine pomposity in the percussion.” 

P.W. Manchester (Dance News, September 1953): 
    “There is so much happy invention in the choreograpohy and it is so good to see the bravely colored pennants hanging from the flies and the crisp, gay costumes of a stage full of dancers that, given judicious programming, Fanfare should be a most welcome occasion for a long time to come.”

Dr. Stahlbaum: Frank Hobi. Frau Stahlbaum: Irene Larsson. Clara: Alberta Grant. Fritz: Susan Kaufman. The Maid: Jane Mason. Parents: Carolyn George, Patricia Savoia, Dido Sayers, Sally Streets, Bruce Cartwright, Alan Howard, Brooks Jackson, Shaun O’Brien. Children: Wynne Abrahamson, Susan Armbruster, Roberta Brawer, Carol Cincibus, Carolyn Dyer, Mia Glover, Ellen Gottesman, Susan Kovnat, Barbara Kushner, Berit Spant, Malvina Trilnick. Grandparents: Ann Crowell, Stanley Zompakos. Herr Drosselmeier: Michael Arshansky. His Nephew (The Nutcracker): Paul Nickel. Harlequin and Columbine: Gloria Vauges, Kaye Sargent. Toy Soldier: Roy Tobias. Mouse King: Edward Bigelow. Mice: Allegra Kent, Tania Makaroff, Janice Mitoff, Robert Barnett, Walter Georgov, George Li, John Mandia, Richard Thomas. Soldiers: Francine Amdur, Zina Bethune, Elaine Carbone, Carolyn Davis, Diane Drogin, Linda Edwards, Judy Friedman, Nancy Goldner, Bessie Huang, Deborah Langman, Baayork Lee, Jane Lian, Alice McKenzie, Melinda Ratzger, Linda Shapiro, Karen Siegal, Persephone Vlassopoulos, Sheila Weidberg, Margot Yanitelli. 
The Snowflakes: Jillana, Irene Larsson, Barbara Bocher, Edith Brozak, Arlouine Case, Ann Crowell, Barbara Fallis, Carolyn George, Una Kai, Barbara Milberg, Charlotte Ray, Patricia Savoia, Dido Sayers, Ruth Sobotka, Sally Streets, Barbara Walczak. The Sugar Plum Fairy: Maria Tallchief. Her Cavalier: Nicholas Magallanes. The Little Princess: Alberta Grant. The Little Prince: Paul Nickel. Hot Chocolate (Spanish Dance): Yvonne Mounsey, Herbert Bliss, Barbara Bocher, Edith Brozak, Ruth Sobotka, Barbara Walczak, Walter Georgov, John Mandia, Richard Thomas, Stanley Zompakos. Coffee (Arabian Dance): Francisco Moncion, Carolyn Dyer, Mia Glover, Barbara Kushner, Berit Spant. Tea (Chinese Dance): George Li, Janice Mitoff, Gloria Vauges. Candy Canes (Buffoons): Robert Barnett, Irene Dumont, Judy Friedman, Reina Gottesman, Vera Makaroff, Marlene Mesavage, Victoria Simon. Marzipan Shepherdesses (Mirlitons): Janet Reed, Barbara Fallis, Allegra Kent, Jane Mason, Kaye Sargent. Mother Ginger: Edward Bigelow. Mother Ginger’s Polichinelles: Wynne Abrahamson, Roberta Brawer, Carol Cincibus, Nancy Goldner, Susan Kaufman, Susan Kovnat, Diana Priffer, Malvina Trilnick. Dew Drop: Tanaquil Le Clercq. Candy Flowers: Jillana, Irene Larsson, Arlouine Case, Ann Crowell, Joyce Feldman, Carolyn George, Janice Groman, Una Kai, Tania Makaroff, Barbara Milberg, Charlotte Ray, Patricia Savoia, Dido Sayers, Sally Streets. The Sugar Plum Fairy: Maria Tallchief. Her Cavalier: Nicholas Magallanes. 

“Act One, Scene 1: Christmas party at the home of Dr. Stahlbaum, Nuremberg, ca. 1816. Scene 2: The battle between the Nutcracker and the Mouse King. Scene 3: The White Forest and the Snowflake Waltz. 

Act Two (Konfituerenburg–The Kingdom of the Sugar Plum Fairy), Scene 1: Entrance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, Divertissements, and Apotheosis.” 

Jerome Robbins staged the battle between the toy soldiers and the mice (Act One). 

Jerome Robbins (interviewed by Nancy Reynolds for her book ‘Repertory in Review,’ 1974): 
     “I also choreographed the mice originally in ‘The Nutcracker.’ George [Balanchine] asked if I’d come in and help him with the ballet. So I did that whole battle.” 

Frances Herridge (New York Post, February 3, 1954): 
    “George Balanchine’s recreation of The Nutcracker is a truly great stage experience….This is no mere vision of sugar plums that dance through Clara’s head on Christmas Eve, but a whole world of fantasy–glorified and magnified–yet somehow contained on the modest stage of the City Center….Leon Barzin conducts with a rhythmic sensitivity that makes him seem one of the dancers.” 

John Martin (New York Times, February 3, 1954): 
     “The whole thing is done in beautiful taste, and with a warm evocation of the drab and leisurely days of 1892, when the piece first came to the stage in Russia….Karinska’s costumes have their usual chic….Her subtle color sense has taken hold of the tones of Mr. Armistead’s candy-box décor….But it is not much of a ballet, and all the genius in the world can never make it one. There is no dancing to speak of until the last scene, there is no story line, and no characters to develop….On the whole it is a loving and imaginative resurrection of a decidedly mediocre work.” 

Robert Sylvester (New York Daily News, February 3, 1954): 
     “New York City Ballet last night produced the most spectacular ballet in the history of American ballet companies.” 

Walter Terry (New York Herald Tribune, February 3, 1954): 
     “The skyscrapers seemed to disappear, the roar of the subway was hushed, surly looks vanished as New York, or a small part of it at any rate, was transformed into a fairyland of music and smiles and glorious magic. The magician responsible for this brief and delightful dream world was George Balanchine, whose new, evening-long production of The Nutcracker was given its first performance last evening at the City Center….Maria Tallchief, as the Sugar Plum Fairy, is herself a creature of magic, dancing the seemingly impossible with effortless beauty of movement, electrifying us with her brilliance.” 

Anatole Chujoy (Dance News, March 1954): 
     “In The Nutcracker Balanchine affirmed once again that ballet is not only dance, but is a synthesis of dance, music, poetry and painting, and that all its component parts are fused together to produce a new art form which we call ballet….It is not an empty phrase to say that American Ballet has come of age….Above all stands Balanchine himself, the master magician….Without losing a thread of the past he has brought the present a shade closer to the future, when ballet in the United States will assume its proper and rightful place in the scheme of our cultural life.” 

Edwin Denby (Center, March 1954): 
     “There are many special pleasures. One of them is the novelty of watching so much pantomime; the more you watch, the odder becomes the difference it makes in a classic ballet, and the more interesting….Stylized pantomime is quite another thing. It invents a dancey movement that intentionally half-resembles or suggests something else. Light touches of it are in the amusing mouse-and-soldier sequences set by Jerome Robbins.” 

First Movement: Patricia Wilde, Herbert Bliss, and Corps de Ballet. Second Movement: Jillana, Jacques d’Amboise, and Corps de Ballet. Third Movement: Yvonne Mounsey, Todd Bolender, and Corps de Ballet. Corps de Ballet: Barbara Fallis, Carolyn George, Barbara Milberg, Patricia Savoia, Robert Barnett, Shaun O’Brien, Richard Thomas, Stanley Zompakos. 

“In 1942 Prokofiev was living in Nalchik in the eastern Caucusus. Drawing material from the rich, strange, and poignant folk music of that region, he composed his second string quartet. He described it as ‘the combination of the least known varieties of the song with the most classical form of the quartet.’ The first movement follows the sonata form of exposition, development, and recapitulation. The second is an adagio based on a Caucasian love song. The final movement derives from a loosely knit series of wild and free Caucasian dances.”

John Martin (New York Times, February 20, 1954): 
     “It is actually a fantasia on Israeli folk themes. Though it is on point and uses the basic idiom of the academic ballet, it is essentially a reproduction of one of those pastoral festivals the young dancers used to present for us in the early days of the Israeli republic….In general it is charmingly composed, with its accent chiefly on ensemble formations.” 

Walter Terry (New York Herald Tribune, February 20, 1954):
     “Jerome Robbins’ Quartet, is the distinguished young choreographer’s first non-nervous work….In Quartet, the impatience of jazz is absent, the fear of conflict is missing, sudden anger and frightened innocence are not to be seen. In place of these nervous conditions, which provided his previous ballets with magnificently effective dramatic urgencies, there is, in Quartet, serenity….It is unhurried in manner, although it is generally lively, and, I fear, it is without a dramatic center. It simply unfolds from no place in particular and goes nowhere, but the mere process of unfolding pattern after pattern has been realized charmingly and affectingly.” 

Frances Herridge (New York Post, February 23, 1954): 
    “This is quite a different Robbins from the creator of Age of Anxiety, The Cage, and The Pied Piper. It is Robbins in a gentle, lyric mood, neither bitter, nor prankish, nor intellectual….Quartet is not as brilliant as the others, nor as startling. But it is a truly lovely work….It has no story line, but follows closely the moods of the music.” 

P.W. Manchester (Dance News, April 1954): 
     “Robbins has tried to weld together the technique of the classic ballet with what he has seen of the folk dances of eastern Europe and Israel during his various sojourns in those countries….The result is neither here nor there, and Quartet emerges as a nebulous work which is neither folk nor ballet but an uneasy mixture of the two.”

Tanaquil Le Clercq, Todd Bolender, Yvonne Mounsey, Robert Barnett, Wilma Curley, John Mandia, Shaun O’Brien, Patricia Savoia, Richard Thomas, Edith Brozak, Ann Crowell, Constance Garfield, Una Kai, Allegra Kent, Joan Van Orden, Francia Russell, Gene Gavin, Walter Georgov, Arthur Mitchell, Richard Rapp, Roland Vasquez, Jonathan Watts.

“One of the pleasures of attending a concert is the freedom to lose oneself in listening to the music. Quite often, unconsciously, mental pictures and images form, and the patterns and paths of these reveries are influenced by the pure music itself or its program notes, or by the personal dreams, problems and fancies of the listener. Chopin’s music in particular has been subject to influential ‘program’ names such as the Butterfly Etude, the Minute Waltz, the Raindrop Prelude, etc.”

-The ballet’s original subtitle, “A Charade in One Act,” was later changed to “Or, The Perils of Everybody.” 
-The original staging included a mazurka solo toward the end of the ballet, danced by Tanaquil Le Clercq (described in Robbins’ choreographic notes as “the only serious moment during which a girl danced very nostalgically and tentatively”). It was taken out of the ballet in 1956, after she was no longer able to dance it.  
-Ballets: U.S.A. presented a revised version at the company’s New York debut on September 4, 1958. The original staging included Waltz, Op. 64, No. 1 in D flat Major, also known as the “Minute Waltz.” It was eliminated when Robbins re-staged the ballet Ballets: U.S.A. Other scenes removed at the same time were; a subway sequence; a dance for four men in pajamas; a scene using blackouts set to music; and a second muder scene. 
-Beginning in 1971, the New York City Ballet production used scenery by Saul Steinberg (originally designed for the 1958 Ballets: U.S.A. staging) and lighting by Ronald Bates. The 1975 staging at the Royal Ballet (London) used a scenic frontcloth designed by Edward Gorey.

1958, Ballets: U.S.A.; 1975, Royal Ballet; 1979, Australian Ballet; 1981, Zürich Ballet; 1986, School of American Ballet (excerpt); 1987, San Francisco Ballet; 1992, Paris Opera Ballet; 1994, National Ballet of Canada; 1999, Royal Danish Ballet; 2002, Stuttgart Ballet; 2003, Dutch National Ballet; 2004, Kansas City Ballet; 2005, Pennsylvania Ballet; 2007, Houston Ballet, Tulsa Ballet.

Jerome Robbins (Dance Magazine, December 1959):
    “‘The Concert’ is my personal expression of an analogous experience, one which limits our field of imagination by means of certain special musical titles. In listening to a piece of music everyone interprets it in accordance with his state of soul, his preoccupations, and in so doing he adds to its realization and fulfillment.” 

Louis Baincolli (New York World-Telegram and Sun, March 7, 1956):
     “The work is an ingenious piece of spoofing that could stand trimming….Funniest of all last night were the moments when the dancers were just straight-faced fluffing turns, falling out of line, solemnly trotting back. This is one ballet company that can untangle any snarl of its own making and tidy up the wildest confusion with bland casualness….Those places were superb last night–the abrupt and casual fade-outs, the poker-faced apathy in the midst of chaos, the filing in and out of idle figures.” 

Frances Herridge (New York Post, March 7, 1956): 
     “Robbins never overplays a joke or mimics in bad taste–but always with a light touch that is as affectionate as it is sensitive….Altogether, it is a sparkling charade, endearing and enjoyable.” 

Miles Kastendieck (New York Journal-American, March 7, 1956):
      “Though Chopin undoubtedly flipped in his grave, the audience howled and howled.” 

John Martin (New York Times, March 7, 1956): 
     “According to the program note, it is a take-off on fanciful sobriquets such as ‘The Minute Waltz’ and ‘The Butterfly Etude,’ together with all the other personal ‘interpretations’ read into music by a concert audience. Actually the piece is a kind of nightmarish revue, in which a series of characters maintains the same relationships through an endless sequence of different situations….It starts out to be quite the funniest ballet that has been seen in modern times, but too much soon gets to be enough, and before it comes to an end it has knocked itself out by its sheer persistence.” 

Walter Terry (New York Herald Tribune, March 7, 1956): 
     “Things got off to a fine beginning when Tanaquil Le Clercq, stirred to the depths by the music, launched herself into a whirlwind of action, with hair lashing, her face and her feet trying desperately to keep pace with the music until complete collapse struck her….In spite of its empty episodes, The Concert is certainly worth salvaging, for its best scenes are as funny as anything to be found in the theater of dance.” 

Douglas Watt (New York Daily News, March 8, 1956): 
     “Taking a dozen assorted piano works by Chopin, Jerome Robbins has allowed the music to carry his fancy far and wide, somewhat in the manner of his delightful Pied Piper. The new ballet is overlong and uneven, but much of the time it is both funny and oddly touching….There is really no adequate way in which to describe Robbins’ exhilarating creation. You’ll just have to see for yourself.” 

Arthur Todd (Dance Observer, April 1956): 
     “Programmed as ‘A Charade in One Act,’ it is a mad and often hilariously amusing satire….There is a most inventive use of a sort of processional for the ensemble with the opening and closing of umbrellas making an exciting stage picture. However, there are one or two slapstick sequences and several black-out skits that over-extend the whole idea and just don’t come off at all. Cut to at least half its length, all of this could be great fun, although, at that, it might be more at home in a Broadway theatre than on a ballet stage.” 

B.H. Haggin (Nation, April 28, 1956): 
     “The Concert, described in the program as a charade, is actually a series of vaudeville and revue sketches….In some instances the effect is achieved with dancing; in a few it is not. 

Richard Buckle (Sunday Times [London], September 20, 1959):
      “It is a ‘New Yorker’-ish joke (with pretty drops by Steinberg) about what goes on in people’s minds at a Chopin recital. Much of the joke is in the dancer’s deadpan reaction to the farcical situations they get into….The thing about Robbins is that he has a mind and he has a touch. He dreams up something titanic, but he dishes it out to you with a light hand, real cool. To have ideas, to invent; to have theatre sense, the know-how; and to be reticent withal, seeing when to stop; surely this is greatness.” 

Doris Hering (Dance Magazine, May 1956): 
     “The only serious utterance in The Concert was relegated to Tanaquil Le Clercq, who had a lovely introspective Mazurka solo with folding extensions and soft pawings of the floor. More than Balanchine himself, Mr. Robbins understands Miss Le Clercq’s dancing body….One aspect of the New York City Ballet that remains constant is its good breeding. In its essence, ballet is a theatricalization of social gesture. And the New York City Ballet dancers, perhaps because of Balanchine, never forget this….They are part of a pattern as orderly and as gracious as the courtly atmosphere that originally gave rise to ballet.” 

1. Entrances: Group Dance: The Company. 2. Statics: Patricia Dunn, Jay Norman, Tom Abbott, Robert Bakanic, John Mandia, James White. 3. Improvisations: The Company. 4. Passage for Two: Wilma Curley, John Jones. 5. Theme, Variations, and Fugue: Wilma Curley, Patricia Dunn, Gwenn Lewis, Erin Martin, Barbara Milberg, Beryl Towbin, Joan Van Orden, Tom Abbott, Robert Bakanic, John Jones, John Mandia, James Moore, Jay Norman, James White

“There has always been a tremendous amount of popular dancing in America. At this time its vitality has reached a new high, developing and expanding in form and style from the major and basic contributions of the Negro and Latin-American. Because of a strong unconscious emotional kinship with those minority roots, the teenagers, particularly, have popularized these dances. Feeling very much like a minority group in this threatening and explosive world, the young have so identified with the dynamics, kinetic impetus, the drives and ‘coolness’ of today’s jazz steps that these dances have become an expression of our youth’s outlook and their attitudes toward the contemporary world around them, just as each era’s dance had significantly reflected the character of our changing world and a manner of dealing with it. N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz is a formal, abstract ballet based on the kinds of movements, complexities of rhythms, expressions of relationships, and qualities of atmospheres found in today’s dances.”

-The first U.S. performance took place at the Alvin Theatre, New York City, on September 4, 1958.

1969, Harkness Ballet; 1974, City Center Joffrey Ballet; 1982, American Ballet Theatre; 1993, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre; 2005, New York City Ballet.

Jerome Robbins (Globus [Dubrovnik], September 6, 1959):
     “The American youth likes to dance. Maybe that’s characteristic of the whole nation, which I wanted to show with N.Y. Export: Op. Jazz. I would like to show to the outside world different techniques, styles and theatrical patterns which are specific for the development of dance in America….I think that the most important thing with this group is the fact that such a restricted number of dancers was able to master very different techniques and styles, which is even difficult for more numerous dance groups.”  

Howard Taubman (New York Times, June 9, 1958):
      “The content of Mr. Robbins’ choreography is on two levels. Superficially he has used the vocabulary of the jazz age movement with delightfully amusing effect. But there is more to it; tension and conflicts that stir young people’s lives and color their emotions are caught with compassion….It is a successful distillation of the things West Side Story tried to say. It is allusive rather than literal and all the better for that.”

Louis Biancolli (New York World-Telegram and Sun, September 3, 1958): 
     “Here were the pseudo-primitive posturings, the make believe voodoo pairings, the low rumbling rhythms spreading like a hypnotic trance.” 

John Chapman (New York Daily News, September 5, 1958): 
     “A lithe and able young company perform these Robbins inventions very well, I guess and the inventions themselves look more or less like a choreographic collaboration between Mary Wigman and Walter Camp. Robbins says these dances–which are done in sneakers–represent the balletic tendencies of modern American youth.” 

Robert Coleman (New York Post, September 5, 1958): 
     “It’s a mélange of rhythms such as you’re likely to find in dance halls, rehearsal studios and at jam sessions. It’s aimed at both the chi-chi and hepcat sets.” 

Frances Herridge (New York Post, September 5, 1958): 
     “They might be the teenagers from West Side Story, the underprivileged city kids, and Robbins has caught their moods, their relationships and their lives as reflected in the music….It is a brilliant, haunting work, full of taut, offbeat movement that explores the jazz medium with new depth. And it is intelligently danced by a fine little group.” 

Miles Kastendieck (New York Journal-American, September 5, 1958): 
     “What it achieves is an extension of what Robbins created in Pied Piper. Its generic quality and its mood come through sharply. For some reason some of the movement appeared a bit dated just as though Robbins saw his youth in retrospect.” 

John Martin (New York Times, September 5, 1958): 
     “He has developed stunning phrases directly out of the music, and has given them an undertone of human reality through the relationships of his dancers….Both the rhythmics and the dynamics of the material are lively and full of simple but no less than inspired invention, and the five sections of the composition build steadily and inevitably into a genuine work of art….Jay Norman, Patricia Dunn, Wilma Curley, John Jones and Tom Abbott should be noted especially, but all of them dance as if they knew how good a work Mr. Robbins has made for them.” 

Walter Terry (New York Herald Tribune, September 5, 1958): 
     “Here is a stunning theater work combining the discipline of ballet training with the jazzy movement idioms of today’s teenagers….N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz is a ritual of youth, not of delinquents but of the young whose boundless energies, occasional lostnesses and desperate desire for identity find outlet and form in these athletic, tense, partly humorous, surprise-laden actions of dance….The surface alone is magnificent theater but the ingenious patterns, the wonderful tricks, the urgent pace of the work, the moments of shy tenderness take on extra beauty if one realizes that here, wordless, is the voice of youth.” 

Whitney Bolton (New York Morning Telegraph, September 6, 1958):
     “N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz is a tremendous feat of fast, expert choreography in the realms of today….Florence Klotz’ superbly right costumes mate with the scenic work of Ben Shahn, the Robert Prince score draws in all of the elements and the dancers do the rest. Don’t shrink away, since this is not the danced outcry of the evil, delinquent, or vicious, but is the outcry of today’s lost youth, some lost, some poised, some sad, some glad, some merely bewildered. Spry forms, hot rhythms, gusts of humor and a general air of total youth make this a fabulous item.” 

Winthrop Sargeant (New Yorker, September 13, 1958):
     “Aside from an energetic finale, subtitled ‘Theme, Variations, and Fugue,’ in which his dancers cut loose with some real popular dancing in the sidewalk manner, it seemed to consist mostly of fist-shaking and glowering at the audience, and it constantly reminded me of what, twenty years ago, used to be called ‘the dance of social protest.’” 

Richard Buckle (Sunday Times [London], September 21, 1958): 
     “Sure, Jerome Robbins’s Opus Jazz belongs to what an Italian critic described–in the démodé slang common to us layabouts and camp-followers–as ‘il mondo hot,’ but it also belongs to ‘l’epoca atomica’ and is an epic of our time….Opus Jazz is about the young of today, and addresses those mistrustful creatures in their own language….While the kids present themselves defiantly to us, crying ‘This was us. We did it. Take us or leave us or drop dead.’” 

Doris Hering (Dance Magazine, October 1958): 
     “N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz seemed suddenly to be the work of a supremely gifted choreographer who is, in a way, delaying his artistic maturity. The element of self-challenge in the more memorable of his earlier works has been set aside for structural manipulation.” 

Harry Bernstein (Dance Observer, November 1958): 
     “Speaking directly to the ‘shook-up’ generation, Robbins turns the well-worn idiom of contemporary jazz-dancing into fresh impact and makes of it a conveyor for piercing shocks of recognition. He communicates very well indeed, the inability to communicate among an alienated young generation caught between a world they never made and the horrifying premonitions of utter rootlessness….The praiseworthy company of dancers fulfilled Mr. Robbins’ conception with devastating intensity.” 

Clive Barnes (Dance Observer, November 1959): 
     “N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz hits audiences all over the world with an explosive force not because it is a wonderfully exciting dance spectacle (which it is), and certainly not because we sober-sided squares…are able to ‘indentify’ ourselves with American teenagers, but because the ballet converses the spirit not just of a specific generation but of the whole age in which we live.” 

Joan Van Orden, Tom Abbott, Erin Martin, Gene Gavin, Beryl Towbin, James Moore.

“Georges Auric is probably best known popularly as the man who wrote the haunting waltz in the film Moulin Rouge (1952). The present composition, a witty and inventive work for three wind instruments, is divided into three movements marked ‘Decide,’ ‘Romance,’ and ‘Final,’ and is danced by three girls and three boys.”

Jerome Robbins (Dance Magazine, October 1960): 
     “I had never really wanted my own company, but the chance to experiment with what I wanted to do was too attractive to resist. I found some absolutely wonderful dancers, all young and versatile, and suddenly I had a company…I think we showed them something abroad. A French critic called us ‘a lesson in discipline and individuality.’ Those two words are pretty much what I believe in.” 

Louis Biancolli (New York World-Telegram and Sun, September 3, 1958):
    “The picture of an oboe, bassoon and clarinet played by clownish figures in top hats on step-ladders was only momentary amusing. As the double sets of three swirled around below, they became increasingly unfunny.” 

John Chapman (New York Daily News, September 5, 1958): 
     “3 x 3 is aggressively cute. An oboist, a clarinetist and a bassoonist, wearing Ted Lewis top hats, sit on stepladders and play some stuff by George Auric, while three boys and three girls dance.” 

Robert Coleman (New York Post, September 5, 1958): 
     “It’s a pert harlequinade stepped by six dancers in semi-practice clothes, against a setting notable for multi-colored balloons. It’s played by a trio of Mad Hatters right out of Lewis Carroll, astride high stepladders yet.” 

Frances Herridge (New York Post, September 5, 1958): 
     “We can skip over the new curtain raiser. It’s called 3x3, obviously because it has three musicians on high stools, and for three short sections they do some cute Harlequinish prancing.” 

Miles Kastendieck (New York Journal-American, September 5, 1958): 
     “3 x 3 delighted the audience with its humor and ingenuity. Its patterns are typically Robbins, reminiscent of Pied Piper.” 

John Martin (New York Times, September 5, 1958):
     “3 x 3 actually gets the evening off to a questionable start….Set to a little woodwind trio of Georges Auric, which Mr. Robbins follows faithfully in mood as well as form, it feels less like ‘Ballets: U.S.A.’ than perhaps ‘Ballet: Roland Petit.’” 

Walter Terry (New York Herald Tribune, September 5, 1958):
     “3 x 3 is a light and amusing piece for three boys, three girls and three musicians….It is easy, clever and lively and if the word did not have such wishy-washy connotations, I would say it was ‘cute.’” 

Whitney Bolton (New York Morning Telegraph, September 6, 1958):
     “3x3 makes no great pretensions, but softly and wisely grasps the audience.” 

Winthrop Sargeant (New Yorker, September 13, 1958):
     “…a curtain-raiser whose most spectacular feature was a trio of members of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians–an oboist, a clarinetist, and a bassoonist–wearing Ted Lewis-type top hats and gigantic tail coats, and perching above the stage on ten-foot stepladders while a group of youthful dancers performed below them…” 

Walter Sorell (Providence Journal, September 14, 1958):
     “Undoubtedly, the music has misled the choreographer into staging something that seems to be a weak imitation of his own inimitable genius.” 

Irving Kolodin (Saturday Review, September 20, 1958):
     “The enlivening humor of Robbins’ response to the engaging score of Auric is never so involved with technical elaborations that the dancers are over-extended. A general sense of lightness was much enhanced by placing each of the musicians on a separate perch atop a ladder at stage rear, with bunches of gaily colored balloons serving as décor.” 

Doris Hering (Dance Magazine, October 1958): 
     “It was one of those childhood fantasies to which Mr. Robbins has returned intermittently throughout the years, and each time with less conviction and more embellishment.” 

Harry Bernstein (Dance Observer, November 1958): 
     “3x3 had many brisk and insouciant dance patterns suggesting the quixotic play of adolescence.”

Erin Martin, Michael Maule, Lawrence Gradus, John Jones, James Moore, William Reilly, Doug Spingler, Jamie Bauer, Gwenn Lewis, Jane Mason, Barbara Milberg, Christine Mayer.

1. Entrances: Pas de Deux: Erin Martin, Michael Maule, and The Company.  
2. Dance for Men: Lawrence Gradus, John Jones, James Moore, William Reilly, Douglas Spingler.  
3. Dance for Women: Jamie Bauer, Gwenn Lewis, Jane Mason, Barbara Milberg.  
4. Pas de Deux: Jamie Bauer, Jane Mason, Lawrence Gradus, Douglas Spingler, Christine Mayer, William Reilly.  
5. Finale: The Company.

“A ballet in silence about relationships…between people–man and woman, one and another, the individual and the group. Whether a ballet tells a story or concerns itself with pure dance, its form is determined by the web of music on which it is composed according to the interpretation of the choreographer. The score conditions, supports, predicts, and establishes the dynamics, tempos and mood not only for the dance, but also for the audience. The music guides the spectators’ emotional responses to the happenings on the stage and creates a pervasive atmosphere for reaction. Moves severs that guidance and permits the audience to respond solely to the action of the dance; to become aware of the potential of gesture and respond directly to the curiosities of movement; and to be released from the associations evoked by scenery, costumes, and music.”

-The company was presented as part of a United States Department of State tour. 
-The first U.S. performance took place at the ANTA Theatre, New York City, on October 8, 1961.

1967, City Center Joffrey Ballet; 1969, Batsheva Dance Company of Israel; 1973, Netherlands Dance Theatre; 1977, San Francisco Ballet; 1984, New York City Ballet; 1985, London Contemporary Dance Theatre; 1993, Paris Opera Ballet.

Jerome Robbins (New York Times, September 20, 1967): 
     “I wanted the audience to concentrate on movement. I wanted to do two things: one, an exploration of movement that the audience can only interpret as movement. Two, I wanted to write a ballet about relationships between people–man and woman, one and another, the individual and the group.” 

John Martin (New York Times, July 19, 1959): 
     “Jerome Robbins’ new ballet without music seems to have caused quite a sensation at its premiere in the Spoleto festival of Two Worlds earlier this month. Il Messagero of Rome pronounced it a ‘masterpiece by a great genius–a turning point in the dance. And it went on to call Mr. Robbins ‘the great maestro who can proudly claim to have taken from the hands of the great Russian teachers the scepter of choreographic supremacy of the contemporary world. Wow!” 

Trudy Goth (Dance News, September 1959): 
     “Moves is full of shifting moods and choreographic invention showing Robbins at his best. It is superbly danced by the company and it is evident that much work and iron discipline has gone into it for there is a rhythmic entity in spite of the lack of a given musical pattern….Both choreographer and dancers knew to perfection how to capture an audience without décor or costumes while maintaining perfect silence for nearly half an hour.” 

Richard Buckle (Sunday Times [London], September 13, 1959):      “The absence of music and the odd mixture of movements, classical, modern and naturalistic, combine to bounce us out of the theatre into a fresh awareness far removed from our usual level mood of evening apathy.” 

Frances Herridge (New York Post, October 9, 1961): 
     “The group of 14, dressed in studio leotards, move in silence with seeming spontaneity. Each member appears to wait for some inner impulse to drive him, whether in a mood of romance, play, fear, wonder. Yet the same impulse takes hold of the group so that they act together as an artistic whole, and not as a crowd of individuals. It is striking and varied and incredibly done–pure movement made into stimulating theater, which like so much of Robbins catches the lives of youth.” 

John Martin (New York Times, October 9, 1961): 
     “As for Moves, there is little to be said in praise….In essence it is a throw-back to the modern dance–the German modern dance, more specifically–circa 1930….Besides the general formlessness that results from Mr. Robbins’ venture into abstraction, he has punctuated his style with realistic gesture from time to time and given it an air of commonness. Here and there he has invented some ingenious passages, but his essential material is repetitious and familiar.” 

Norman Nadel (New York World-Telegram and Sun, October 9, 1961): 
     “In Moves, the function of music has been taken over by the dance itself. Mood, rhythm, rhythmic variation, dynamic change–all of this is present, even though there is no sound in the theater. The eye sees what the ear expects to hear….The total effect is one of ballet newborn; of disciplined movement that is self-contained, engrossing and eloquent.” 

Jim O’Connor (New York Journal-American, October 9, 1961): 
     “While this was a formal abstract ballet founded on cadence and dancers in motion, it was performed at breakneck speed. It’s effect on the audience was breath-taking.” 

Walter Terry (New York Herald Tribune, October 9, 1961): 
     “It is a marvelous creation. Even without a musical base, it has rhythm, pacing, even silent melodies of action, for the rhythms here are born of instinct, impulse and imitation as the figures move in response to their own secret feelings, in echo to the actions of others, in compulsion to the electric touch of a hand or the meaning of a glance….But there are sounds in it, the sounds of dance, for breathing in various cadences of excitement can be heard and so also can the brush, stamp, tap of feet.” 

Whitney Bolton (New York Morning Telegraph, October 10, 1961):
      “The opening event is Moves, which is by all measurement a tour de force, but a delightful and exciting one, never yielding to the temptation merely to startle, but at all times totally within the compass of dance….It is a daring and tremendous moment in modern ballet and every moment of is a perfection….Imitation of others, leadership of others, group work, all combine in a ballet that is excitingly new and fresh.” 

Harry Bernstein (Dance Observer, December 1961): 
     “It seems that the choreographer in his new ballet has attempted a further thematic extension and exploration of the ‘shook up’ generation which he so ably articulated in his N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz. But while Opus Jazz has at its core motivation which leads to kinetic reality, Moves is aimlessly arid and devoid of inner compulsion….Mr. Robbins’ use of movement here is eclectic, to say the least, and his mixture of the abstract and th literal does not add up to any consistent style, nor does it benefit the overall architecture of the piece.” 

Doris Hering (Dance Magazine, December 1961): 
     “The work was done in silence, and it is phenomenal the way the dancers had been trained to absolute rhythmic awareness of each other….The structure of Moves made a full, neat circuit. The human relations–the identity of the sexes–remained as inconclusive as at the outset.”

John Jones, Howard Jeffrey, Christine Mayer, William Reilly, Jamie Bauer, Muriel Bentley, Geralyn Donald, Fern MacLarnon, Kay Mazzo, Charlene Mehl, Helena Petroff, Francia Russell, Lawrence Gradus, Douglas Spingler, Robert Thompson. 

“A ballet concerning happenings, attempts, and recoveries.”

Jerome Robbins (Time, July 21, 1961):
    “‘Events’ is not ‘Les Sylphides’; it is light years away from the serenest of classic white ballets. If it has any theme, it is simply the fantastic confusion that the ordinary day holds for everyone–the total effect of reading the morning paper….It is not like my other work. Otherwise I wouldn’t want to do it.”

(New York Times, July 14, 1961) 
     “The world premiere of Jerome Robbins’ abstract, sociological ballet ‘Events’ was received with wild enthusiasm by a Festival of Two Worlds audience here last night. Rome critics termed it a ‘truly great masterpiece of twentieth century ballet’….Events, said Gino Tani, critic of the influential Il Messagero of Rome, ‘is another undisputed masterpiece by this American genius.’” 

(Times [London], July 18, 1961) 
     “Robbins has distilled something potent and frightening: a world of day-to-day events in which every cloud has an atomic lining. The threat of nuclear war hangs heavy over the entire ballet: other events involve the colour bar (or rather the Americans' ambivalent attitude towards it), the superstitions of religion, the tensions of daily life, the difficulties of personal communication….Robbins has filled it masterfully and there is no hint of pretentiousness in anything he does….a ballet which for all its apparent pessimism has also a humanism that sends one away from the theatre more excited than depressed.” 

Richard Buckle (Sunday Times [London], July 23, 1961) 
     “Events might be described as a tragic rhapsody on modern life. It has elements in common with La Dolce Vita, though it deals with less orchidaceous characters, and it is probably the most intelligent ballet I have seen. By this, I only mean that the ideas projected to us in the course of this storyless work are not theatrical clichés but the products of an original mind.” 

Muller (Daily Mail [London], August 2, 1961) 
     “This work attempts to show us in choreographic terms racial conflicts, the imminent threat to humanity, a nuclear explosion, the development of a race of mutations, and mankind’s chances of survival….Whatever he does, Mr. Robbins shows an élan, a driving vitality, that is unmatched in the world of ballet today….He is the living embodiment of the eternal equation: Energy plus Imagination plus Discipline equals Art. And each of these factors Mr. Robbins has propelled to a level of genius.” 

Alexander Bland (The Observer [London], August 6, 1961) 
     “In his new work Robbins has tried to take in almost the whole panorama of modern life as he sees it–society, sex, and finally the Bomb. To sandwich all this into twenty minutes is a big enterprise–too big as it turns out. The attentive eye can take in at least some of the messages as they flash by like animated ideograms. But there is no time to experience them. We watch, we admire, but we are not involved.” 

Harriet Johnson (New York Post, October 18, 1961) 
     “The Ballets: U.S.A. troupe made headlines with the world premiere of Events last summer at the Spoleto Festival in Italy. Since then it has been widely heralded as expressing the kaleidoscope of confusion that descends on us each day after encountering the newspaper. And its crass phantasmagoria gives a cross-section of slaughter in the brain cell while moving in print from nes of the 50 megaton bomb to the latest murder in the subway underpass….Ben Shahn’s décor varied from a set of countless windows rising vacantly like a city of specters, to a spiderweb of protons and neutrons.” 

Miles Kastendieck (New York Journal-American, October 18, 1961) 
     “Robbins’ latest skirmish with frenzy, frustration, and fumbling left a half-finished feeling probably intended but hardly artistically statisfying….Events is a series of moods induced by Robert Prince’s music….They magnify everyday events occurring for the most part before a backdrop suggesting cliff dweller claustrophobia….At the start the choreography recalls both Age of Anxiety and Pied Piper immediately. Then, as the work progresses, if that is what it does, the impression grows that Robbins’ is marking time while he indulges in sociological gyrations.” 

John Martin (New York Times, October 18, 1961) 
     “Events is substantially another session with the Jets and Sharks, this time gone completely paranoid, both gangs. They slouch and twitch and roll in morbid self-pity until at last the atom bomb gets them….It is an ugly work, visually, psychologically and philosophically….A wealth of careful workmanship, however, has been expended upon it. It introduces and develops and recapitulates themes, and builds with formal skill. It also contains some difficult movement, largely derived from the contemporary jazz vocabulary, and the company performs it with expertness. But its tone is vulgar and its social attitudes specious.” 

Walter Terry (New York Herald Tribune, October 18, 1961) 
     “Events is a strong, frenetic and depressing theater piece. It is depressing–and purposely so–because it views today’s living as pretty much of a rat-race. At the close, there is a gesture indicative of that sought-for ray of hope but before we reach this point, Mr. Robbins has reminded us that lassitude, discontent, sheer terror, purely animal seduction, discrimination and nervous aimlessness are part of today’s pattern of living….Events was superbly danced, with Glen Tetley as guest artist, dancing with technical skill and fine dramatic force in a role he had created when Events was given in Europe.” 

Douglas Watt (New York Daily News, October 18, 1961) 
     “Events is in what might be called Robbins’ sentimental-modern vein, a style that overlays his longest dance piece, West Side Story, and also his Age of Anxiety, to which the new one bears some resemblance. But let me add right away that Events is stimulating stuff….The 20-odd minutes of dancing, as some assorted young people experience their everyday ambitions and frustrations in abstract movements, spring directly from a jazzy, pulsating and interestingly varied score.” 

Jill Johnston (Village Voice, October 26, 1961) 
     “Aside from its professed function as a ‘comment,’ Robbins’ new jazz dance, Events, lets off some fine dance steam with appropriate explosions. John Jones is beautiful in his crucial role as a taunted outsider.” 

Doris Hering (Dance Magazine, December 1961): 
     “From the very beginning, with its huge Ben Shahn act drop depicting a man with a mosaic abdomen, Events seemed to have as its purpose the making of a BIG STATEMENT–a statement about the futility of human relations in the shadow of the bomb….The people in Events–four desperate creatures on a row of chairs, a crucified man, two homosexuals, a Negro who panders and is rejected by a heartless mob, a group of cripples–all of these groping humans never really come alive. Nor do they grow through experience.”

Jamie Bauer, Patricia Dunn, Sondra Lee, Helge Grau, Robert Thompson.

Jamie Bauer, Patricia Dunn, Sally Kirkland, Sondra Lee, Helge Grau, Allen Midgette, Deane Selmier, Robert Thompson, Michael Walker.

Jamie Bauer, Helge Grau, Robert Thompson, Arlan Wendland.

Mildred Allen, Jean Kraft, Jack Litten, William Metcalf. Pianists: Mitchell Andrews, Robert Kaufman, Robert Miller, Lawrence Smith. Choir: The American Concert Choir, prepared by Margaret Hillis.

The Bride: Erin Martin. Her Parents: Veronika Mlakar, Joseph Carow. The Groom: William Glassman. His Parents: Sallie Wilson, Bruce Marks. Matchmakers: Rosanna Seravalli, Ted Kivitt. Friends and Guests: Karen Krych, Janet Mitchell, Diane Anthony, Janie Barrow, Ellen Everett, Victoria Leigh, Gillian Orpin, Gretchen Schumacher, Eliot Feld, Edward Verso, Lawrence Gradus, Reese Haworth, Robert Holloway, Paul Nickel, Marcos Paredes, Paul Sutherland, Richard Zelens.

The composition is divided into four tableaux which run without interruption:  
Tableau I: Preparation of the Bride. 
Tableau II: Preparation of the Groom.
Tableau III: Departure of Bride. 
Coda: Lamentation of Mothers.
Tableau IV: Wedding Feast. 

“Stravinsky used as material for Les Noces the ritualistic elements found in the ancient customs and traditions of Russian peasant weddings, but reserved the right to use them with absolute freedom, paying little heed to ethnographical considerations. 
His purpose was not to reproduce the wedding or show a staged dramatization with descriptive music, but rather to present a ritualized abstraction of its essences, customs, and tempers. The text is adapted from folk songs and popular verse, typical wedding remarks, clichés of conversations, but again they are not used realistically but rather as a collage of the words spoken or sung during these traditional rites. The first half of the ‘scenic ceremony’ deals with the preparations, and revolves around religious elements. Alternating with these intense invocations and blessings are continual lamentations by the parents for the loss of their children, and by the bride against the matchmaker, on leaving home, and on losing her viginity. In the second half (the wedding feast) the grief and religious elements are forgotten in robust celebrations with food, drink, songs, toasts, boasts, bawdiness, rough jokes, etc.: a married couple is selected to warm the bed and finally the marriage is allowed to be consummated while all sit outside the nuptial chamber.”

1969, Royal Swedish Ballet; 1976, Hamburg Ballet; 1981, Teatro Alla Scala; 1989, Finnish National Ballet; 1990, Norwegian National Ballet; 1998, New York City Ballet. 

Jerome Robbins (New York Times, March 28, 1965: 
     “The music is a masterpiece. The score is monolithic and elegant–barbaric, beautiful and frightening. This description also suits some singular mountain, and trying to climb it is what it feels like when choreographing ‘Les Noces.’” 

John Chapman (New York Daily News, March 31, 1965): 
     “So, last evening, choreographer Robbins had two Russian weddings going for him–the warm, colorful ceremony in Fiddler on the Roof, with its spectacular bottle dance, and this wild affair at Lincoln Center. At the conclusion of the new one there was great cheering for everybody involved….It is an extraordinary visual interpretation of a difficult score.” 

Leonard Harris (New York World Telegram and Sun, March 31, 1965): 
     “Robbins has given a vigorous, almost athletic quality to the dancing which serves more as contrast than companion to the abstract modernity of Stravinsky’s music. But it is an effective contrast.” 

Allen Hughes (New York Times, March 31, 1965): 
     “Jerome Robbins burst back into the dance world last night with a production of Igor Stravinsky’s Les Noces that is an almost overwhelming fusion of animal energy, ritualistic ardor and rhythmic attack….From the moment it begins until it ends, the work rushes at a headlong pace, something like a locomotive hurtling at top speed down a track that has no curves….Mr. Robbins has created in Les Noces an air of inevitability about the action that is as strong as that in The Cage.” 

Harriett Johnson (New York Post, March 31, 1965): 
     “While Robbins retained the severity of the work’s essential ideas, he vividly activated his powers of invention to dramatize the exuberance of youth, its healthy physical abandon, and its joy in the natural proclivity of the sexual body.” 

Miles Kastendieck (New York Journal-American, March 31, 1965): 
     “Les Noces calls for continuous rhythmic dancing from the beginning to the consummation, and Mr. Robbins has devised considerable geometric activity for them to enact. This ritualistic wedding celebration has both its athleticism and its bravura touches to stress the Russian accent….Mr. Robbins has stylized the dancing as a projection of Stravinsky’s ostinato rhythms. As the music is angular, so is the choreography.” 

Walter Terry (New York Herald Tribune, March 31, 1965): 
     “Mr. Robbins did not select an easy route for his ballet comeback for he took as his challenge ‘A Dance Cantata’ which the composer himself has said could probably not be really understood by anyone but a Russian….Mr. Robbins, of course, is not Russian. He is a New Yorker. But in his new choreography for Les Noces he has found movements and patterns and muscle dynamics which not only do honor to the powerful Stravinsky score but which also achieve a universal language, perhaps Russian in flavor but which echo the primitive, the folkloric past of any peoples.” 

Winthrop Sargeant (New Yorker, April 10, 1965): 
     “A great many people were charmed by Mr. Robbins’ return to the ballet stage after a number of years spent choreographing for the Broadway theatre….The whole spectacle reminded me of a very artistic football game, in which the Bride and Groom alternately took the role of the ball, and this impression was heightened by the fact that the large chorus demanded by the score was seated at the rear of the stage on what certainly resembled bleachers.” 

Doris Hering (Dance Magazine, May 1965):
     “In a lecture delivered in Memphis shortly after he had attended the premiere of Les Noces, George Balanchine twice stated that this particular Stravinsky score Cannot be choreographed. Be that as it may, Jerome Robbins made a thrilling ballet….Not many dance works are touched with the irony and wisdom of Jerome Robbins’ Les Noces. Not many grow from such a high degree of rhythmic fertility.” 

Clive Barnes (New York Times, February 6, 1966):
     “What is so special about Les Noces? Perhaps the fervor with which it has generally been greeted has a touch of relief about it….The company needed to create a masterpiece, a work that could unequivocally show that it was still a major creative company. The miracle came with Les Noces, and it came with such exquisite timing that anyone not having seen it with his own two eyes might be excused for being skeptical–but it is a most magnificent ballet. Indeed, much more, it is a summation of everything Robbins has so far been working towards.”