E-Mail This Article to a Friend Fancy freed Deborah Jowitt’s Jerome Robbins BY IRIS FANGER
	Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance By Deborah Jowitt. Simon & Schuster, 619 pages, $40.

Jerome Robbins spent 49 years at New York City Ballet as a performer and choreographer, but always in the shadow of George Balanchine, arguably the most influential force in 20th-century dance, so it’s no wonder that he never felt he measured up in terms of achievement. Yet as Deborah Jowitt points out in Jerome Robbins His Life, His Theater, His Dance, Robbins had a host of other irreconcilable shadows, as a Jew who lived uneasily with his heritage while assimilating into the wider gentile society, as a homosexual in an era when such relationships had to remain hidden, and as a former member of the Communist Party who capitulated to the House Committee on Un-American Activities and named names. He carried the guilt of this action for the rest of his life.

"It was my homosexuality I was afraid would be exposed I thought. It was my once having been a Communist. . . . None of these. I was & have been — & still have terrible pangs of terror when I feel that my career, work, veneer of accomplishments would be taken away (by HUAC or by critics)," Jowitt quotes Robbins as writing years later. And these words were set down late in a career that had encompassed the making of nearly 70 ballets and the choreography or direction (or both) of 14 Broadway musicals, among them West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof.

A skilled and meticulous research historian, Jowitt was granted total access to the archive of papers that Robbins bequeathed at his death to the Dance Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in Lincoln Center (since renamed the Jerome Robbins Dance Division). She mined his notebooks, his letters, and other correspondence that included notes from his lawyer, contracts, videotapes, and press clippings. To that, she added her own observations as chief dance critic for the Village Voice over nearly 30 years of Robbins watching to compile a dense text that weaves together descriptions of his works with his own annotations — which often undercut the triumphs. She does not dish the dirt that was brought up in Greg Lawrence’s Dancing with Demons, a volume based largely on interviews with Robbins’s friends and colleagues. Said dirt is sure to be the basis of Amanda Vail’s biography, which is due next year.

Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz was born in New York in 1918 (he died there in 1998), to Russian Jewish immigrants. He studied piano as a child but discovered dance by watching his older sister, Sonia, in ballet lessons at Carnegie Hall. At 18, he began serious classes when Sonia introduced him to Gluck Sandor and Felicia Sorel, who ran a ballet company and a school that was influenced by the German expressionist dancers. At their studio, emotional intensity was part of the technique. Later, Robbins would join Actors Studio, which was headed by acting gurus Bobby Lewis and Elia Kazan, as a member of the advanced group that included Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, the latter one of Robbins’s early lovers. His training in the Method acting techniques developed by Konstantin Stanislavsky would carry over into his choreography and stage direction, where his insistence that the performers create an off-stage life for their characters was the polar opposite to Balanchine’s emphasis on movement for its own sake.

By age 19, Robbins was dancing as a chorus boy on Broadway, but he wanted more. He joined the fledgling Ballet Theatre in 1940 as a performer, choreographing his first work in 1944. And what a ballet Fancy Free was in its evocation of the World War II milieu, filled with an all-American optimism as three young sailors on 24-hour leave hit the streets of New York. The scenario was set to a jazzy, urban beat that would echo throughout many of Robbins’s subsequent dances. The score was provided by the hot-shot young composer Leonard Bernstein, and it forged a partnership and a friendship that lasted until Bernstein’s death. In 1945, Fancy Free turned into On the Town, their first Broadway show.

Balanchine invited Robbins to join New York City Ballet in 1949. He began to contribute ballets to the repertory soon after, among them Afternoon of a Faun (1953) and Dances at a Gathering (1969). In between the times he spent at NYCB, Robbins would defect to Broadway, but he always returned. When Balanchine died in 1983, Robbins became ballet master in chief in concert with Peter Martins.

Jowitt in her "Afterword" calls Robbins "the greatest American-born choreographer working in ballet," and it would be hard to argue. Yet his influence on the classical-dance stage pales in comparison with his contributions to musical comedy, that most American of the theatrical performing arts. There’s probably not a night that goes by without a performance somewhere of West Side Story or Fiddler on the Roof. Jowitt has given us a volume that describes the making of each of his works in the context of his life story, a volume embellished by Robbins’s musings. It’s the portrait of a most complex artist.