Balanchine and Robbins: Parallel Lives

"We will seek a harmony [...] even though we are as different as two drops of water." It is with this famous quotation by Wisława Szymborska, Polish poet and 1996 Nobel Prize winner for Literature, that we would like to begin this piece dedicated to two strongholds of ballet and beyond, to which the triple bill at the end of the 2023-2024 season pays tribute. After all, George Balanchine (1904-1983) and Jerome Robbins (1918-1998) were part of the same company for a long time, from 1949, when the founder of the New York City Ballet invited the younger Robbins to become a member and then associate artistic director, until Balanchine's death.

The two artists could have shared more artistic ideas and projects. They admired, respected, and perhaps tacitly challenged each other in a complex and always distant relationship. Instead, they were two peas in a pod because of their powerful genius/creativity, which, as we explore further, could transform the way of being and thinking about academic ballet, but also about musicals and theatre, projecting their respective languages beyond their time and into our and others' futures. Coincidentally, they have also been brought together by some personal affinities.

An ethnic Georgian, Georgij Melitonovič Balančivadze was born in St. Petersburg. Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz was a Jewish-Russian-American from New York. Both changed their names to simplify them. Georgij, the son of a famous Georgian composer, first felt his father's name taken from him shortly after his arrival in Europe in 1924 by Sergej Djagilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes, for which he would become the last of the great choreographers. He later considered vaguely Frenchifying his first and last names. Jerome, on the other hand, disliked anything that reminded him of his Jewish origins and was always ready to betray them, as he had betrayed many other things. "I betrayed my masculinity, my Jewishness, my parents, my sister. I can't undo it," he said in his indispensable and autobiographical Selections from His Letters, Journals, Drawings, Photographs, and an Unfinished Memoir, edited by Amanda Vaill in 2019, a book open on several fronts to the discovery of a personality plagued by guilt and demons.

One would not believe it after admiring the joyful brilliance of West Side Story, her absolute masterpiece of 1957 (the film version dates from 1962), or the magnificent and contradictory intensity of Fiddler on the Roof, another musical from 1964, set in 1905 in an imaginary Jewish shtetl in Tsarist Russia. It is reminiscent of the flying figures cherished by the Jewish painter Marc Chagall, but also of the existential precariousness of the Jews (and of the human experience in general), "forced to improvise a simple melody without breaking their neck," as Robbins writes in one of the many notes in his personal legacy, scrupulously revealed by Vaill with the blessing of the Jerome Robbins Foundation. There was no censorship from this well-deserving New York institution in revealing Robbins' otherwise notorious and confessed collaboration when, in the era of the Cold War and McCarthyism, he and a few other politically left-leaning artists, such as filmmaker Elia Kazan, felt compelled to reveal the names of friends and colleagues who, like himself, were "allegedly guilty" of Soviet propaganda on American soil.

More so than his covert homosexuality and a recalcitrant allegiance to the Jewish people, this despicable act was the truly agonizing and unforgettable dark spot in Robbins' troubled existence. Fortunately, the cowardly fruit of threats and possible blackmail against his work and the fame achieved in 1944 with the scapigliato and comic Fancy Free, previously set to music by Leonard Bernstein, did not lead to any serious consequences, at least in artistic fields, if we exclude the accusations against Bertolt Brecht and Charlie Chaplin, who returned to Europe never to return to the United States.

In this "witch hunt" environment, where was Balanchine and what was he doing? A gentleman with a rather fluid youthful charm, he dressed soberly but allowed himself the fantasy of a "shoelace" tie. He was affable and smiling, but not very talkative and not at all exhibitionistic, a heavy smoker of English cigarettes, and had a slight nervous tic that sometimes made the features of his face wrinkle. He could be found in the rehearsal room, listening to music, or at home playing with his cats. No political charges had ever been brought against him. He was a Russian who had applied for American citizenship in order to work in the country of "electric and athletic and physically slender youth," which seemed like a Mecca compared to Europe and especially to his Russia.

Yet he was perhaps more hated than loved during his lifetime, and even more so after his death. Everything was blamed on him, starting with a kind of Pygmalion complex that led him to marry the stars of his ballets: Tamara Gevergeva (later, for simplicity's sake, Geva), Alexandra Danilova, Vera Zorina and Maria Tallchief would all bear the Balanchine surname before Tanaquil Le Clercq, his last and longest partner (until 1969), died prematurely of polio.

And it is well known that in the winters of 1956 and 1957, the choreographer-husband abandoned all obligations to spend months at the bedside of this beautiful, now ex-dancer of great charm, perhaps because he had realized that Robbins himself was secretly in love, as, surprisingly, the very person concerned confirms in his letters. Wicked Balanchine? The musicologist Massimo Mila, who knew him, would agree. He counts him among the three nastiest artists on his list of artistic encounters, along with Eduardo De Filippo and Charlie Chaplin.

From a distance, our judgment is more forgiving. Balanchine, like Stravinsky, not surprisingly his close friend, was a cynic, a nihilist and a bon vivant, but of overwhelming emotions, as telluric as the music of Sacre, always hidden, except when, in the 1970s, he was asked by the Soviet government to return to St. Petersburg with the New York City Ballet.

While revisiting the city of his birth and the halls of the Mariinsky Theatre, he became so weak that he had to be rushed back to New York. Also late in life, his Pygmalion complex, especially toward young ballerinas, became more pronounced. The last muse he fell in love with, Suzanne Farrell, became his obsession to the point that the charming star had to move to Europe in the company of Maurice Béjart to escape him before returning under his tutelage, at least artistically.

With differing personalities, Balanchine and Robbins were not "holy monsters." The idea that an artist, by virtue of being an artist, is exempt from sin and guilt belongs to a neo-Platonism that is particularly appropriate to the era of Renaissance lordships. As for the relationship between the artist-human and his work, it is logical to think that it is very close and can instead be confusing, unexpected, contradictory: a mask behind which the man-artist hides.

The work of dance, for our two masters and Kantian "witty spirits" of an unchanging 20th century, was a "luxury of the mind," a Witz that almost never indulged in the business of producing meaning: it was a formal linguistic structure not cantered on the signified, but on the signifier, the sole vehicle of poetry and mystery. And here two real "drops of water" triumphed, intent on proclaiming that dance has nothing to share but itself. That music is its only, indispensable "plot", that theatre and even musicals are not an accumulation of words, actors or singers, but the blueprint of a mise en espace so meticulously studied as to contain its dramaturgical signs. Finally, that scenes and costumes can be omitted or reduced: costumes to pants, black skirts and white T-shirts.

None of this may have been new in the sphere of American New Dance, given the presence as early as the late 1940s of Merce Cunningham, the champion of a tacitly revolutionary formalism capable of proclaiming even the total detachment of movement from notes – and what notes. Those electronic or otherwise hostile to the general public of John Cage... but it was certainly new in the academic sphere, in ballet and with unsuspected followers. Surprisingly, Robert Wilson's theatre would not have existed if the director, as he often had to confess to incredulous audiences, had not been struck early in his career by the clear, shadowless and already "virtual" space of Balanchine's so-called "black and white" ballets. The emigrated choreographer's journey, from the banks of the Neva to those of the Hudson River, acquired a self-sufficient power of movement, expressed by bodies that were and still are its only spokesmen.

While Balanchine boasted a deep musical knowledge of family and personal origin (he attended the St. Petersburg Conservatory), Robbins was no less theatrically prepared. Jerome began at the Yiddish Art Theatre, which he attended with his sister Sonia, and became its leading man in his youth, despite anti-Jewish phobias. He frequently worked with choreographers of all kinds: modern, folk, oriental (including Antony Tudor, the creative psychologist; Eugene Loring, the author of Billy the Kid); and of course, Balanchine, who chose him as his first actor; directors (the aforementioned Kazan) and musicians, including jazz. All have contributed to the colourful, elusive richness of his finely tuned language, in his words, "to show Europeans the variety of techniques, styles, and unprecedented theatrical juxtapositions that make up the special development of dance in America. Italy's Spoleto Festival, under its founder Gian Carlo Menotti, was the first European country to take notice, and for two consecutive seasons (1958-59 and 1961) it hosted a (transitional) company, his Ballet USA, which enchanted with the power of its pure and theatrical, comic and even sad dance.

Robbins towered over choreography, theatre, and musicals. Like Balanchine, he knew that a director, like a choreographer, has little chance of success or even survival unless he masters the "musical" value of time. In the theatre, a text is time, a performance is time, a dance is time, space, energy (Laban). For better or for worse (with inevitable pieces linked to the taste of the time or unavoidable commissions), the "as different as two peas in a pod" have thrown down a challenge to history: a sign of predestination, but also of a strenuous will to escape the finiteness of the human condition.

On the one hand, the two figures were radically different in their modus operandi. Mister B., as he was called, should be considered a choreographer without prejudice, both in his aesthetics and in his working method, which consisted of having none.

Our maître de ballet, as he liked to call himself, in homage to Marius Petipa, his idol, a master of abstraction, always proved incapable of organizing a choreography on paper, without the bodies of his dancers and his favourite young dancers, on whom he imposed, as on all his athletic dancers, "not to think, but to move". The rest he would take care of, usually with instinctive skill and in a continuous stream. Conversely, the tortured Robbins, beloved above all by his circle of performers and collaborators and inaccessible to anyone else, would take months to fine-tune a movement or scenic detail.

A comparison can make it all clear even to a reader unfamiliar with dance or physical theatre. Balanchine was like Mozart, a quick and fluent composer, and Robbins was like Puccini, who took five years to complete one of his operas. The two took opposite paths to reach Olympus and remain captivated by it.

Marinella Guatterini
Professor of Theory and Aesthetics of dance at the “Paolo Grassi” Civica Scuola di Teatro (Corsi Afam) and scientific advisor to La Scala Theatre
Translation by Alexa Ahern