Jerome Robbins Festival Program A

This year PNB is celebrating the 100^th anniversary of Jerome Robbins’ birth with a Jerome Robbins Festival. Artistic Director Peter Boal created two separate programs using seven of the twelve Robbins’ pieces in the PNB repertory. Tickets for the two programs are sold separately. I recommend seeing both, but it’s a lot of ballet to take in all at once. So what if you can only make it to one? Here is my take on Jerome Robbins Festival Program A.

Program A

The only remaining performance of Program A is in the evening of September 29. Buy your tickets here. In my opinion, Program A is the more accessible of the two programs. With five dances, it has more variety than Program B. But at 2 hours and 25 minutes, it’s only a few minutes longer than Program B.

Circus Polka

Circus Polka is actually on both programs, because it is a lot of fun, gives dozens of young dancers a chance to be on stage, and is only 3 minutes long. I’ve never liked the circus, and I don’t think anyone really likes polka music, but Circus Polka is a true crowd pleaser. Here’s the story:

In 1942, Ringling Brothers got George Balanchine (who was a contemporary of Robbins and later worked with him at New York City Ballet) to choreograph a ballet for elephants. Balanchine commissioned Igor Stravinsky to compose the music. For a long time there was a circus act with elephants performing to commissioned music by Stravinsky. In 1972, Robbins wrote a new ballet, replacing the real ringmaster with a professional dancer, and the elephants with ballet students.

At this festival, there are several different ringmasters. At the matinee, I saw Jonathan Porretta, returning to the stage after an injury; in the evening performance, I saw retired PNB principal Ariana Lallone. Porretta will be the ringmaster for the final performance.

Guided by the ringmaster, three groups of successively younger dance students perform a simple dance with movements that occasionally evoke elephant trunks and circus animals’ high stepping parade. It’s pretty much the cutest thing since the internet invented cat videos. Alas, I scoured the internet in vain for a video of Circus Polka.

In the Night

If you wanted to explain 20^th century ballet to someone who had never seen one, you could show them In the Night. Set to four Chopin nocturnes, In the Night presents three couples who each get their own dance, then come together for a final dance together. There is no plot per se, but each couple is so distinct in their presentation and character, that a story of sorts unfolds.

The first couple is tender and tentative and evokes every single falling in love scene every danced. The second is solid, yet elegant. They are comfortable and confident in one another. The third is passionate and fiery, but at odds as often as they are in harmony. Their relationship seems to be in dissolution, but they can’t make the final break. You can take them as different types of relationship; different stages of love; or even the evolution of a single couple over time.

Cast I Saw: (all were debuting in their roles)

Elizabeth Murphy
Dylan Wald

Lindsi Dec
Steven Loch

Rachel Foster
Ezra Thomson

Afternoon of a Faun

I don’t love Debussy, but I love what Robbins did with Afternoon of a Faun. A dancer is napping in a studio, the mirror replaced by the audience. Another dancer comes in and begins practicing. The first awakes, and they dance together. Evoking the flat images painted on classical ceramics, the dance is full of poses worthy of the cover of a romance novel. It almost feels like a budding romance, but the dancers self-consciously check themselves so often in the mirror that you can’t tell how much of it is real. Created in 1970, Afternoon of a Faun was probably reflecting on the artifice of the performing life, but it seems even more powerful in this era of social media selfies.

Cast I Saw:

Lesley Rausch
Jerome Tisserand

Other Dances

Robbins had already created a lot of dance set to the music of Chopin when he choreographed Other Dances [set to the music of Chopin] in 1976. These Other Dances were specifically made for Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov, and feature mazurkas and Eastern European folk movements that those two dancers excelled in. My favorite thing about Chopin is the movie Impromptu. Piano music and Hungarian folk dance aren’t really my thing.

But I saw Noelani Pantastico and Seth Orza in this piece. Orza is made to play the strapping young lad, and Pantastico is perfect at – well, pretty much everything. So even though I might sneer at Other Dances in other circumstances, this time I could almost believe I was watching the prettiest girl and boy in the village falling in love at the harvest festival.

West Side Story Suite

I’ve never liked West Side Story, with its fake accents and brownface makeup. Fifties musicals and musical theater are both so commercial and formulaic that even the best ones come with a taint of artistic bankruptcy. What I didn’t realize until this festival was that when Robbins was working on the musical, immigration patterns were shifting and Polish neighborhoods around the country were transitioning to Puerto Rican neighborhoods. This was true in New York, where Robbins himself was born to Polish immigrant parents. At the time (and for its time) West Side Story was a groundbreaking attempt to address serious contemporary social issues. And whatever else you can say about the story, it does not take sides; the whole point is that whenever we’re divided – whether you’re talking Shakespearean noble houses or successive waves of Americans – we’re in a tragedy.

I also don’t like it when ballet dancers sing. Maybe it’s irrational, since musical theater performers sing, dance, and act. Gene Kelly was a ballet dancer first, singer and actor second, but no one will fault him for branching out. But musical theater performers train in those multiple skill sets for years. Ballet dancers are supposed to just start singing for a particular piece despite having no background in that art. But I had a bad experience once with a ballet involving beach balls and a chorus, and I still give the singing ballet dancer side-eye.

West Side Story is Robbins, but it’s not really ballet. It’s still physically challenging in the athletic sense, but there’s not a lot of ballet technique involved. So it’s not like the singing detracts from the dancing. And honestly, some of the dancers really can sing. Anyway, Robbins wanted the dancers to sing, and apparently they have to audition for the roles and be approved by the Robbins Trust. Which means I must have been wrong about the voices being recorded in last summer’s performance, and I guess if I can’t tell the difference, I probably shouldn’t have an opinion.

There are also many long and potentially uncomfortable conversations to be had about the racial implications of plot and casting that I can’t even start to dig into here. I don’t think I will ever love West Side Story. But after seeing it at this festival and learning more about it, I can at least begin to appreciate it. And I firmly believe that any piece of art that requires long and potentially uncomfortable conversations is valuable.

Cast I Saw:

Tony Lucien Postlewaite
Riff Ezra Thomson
Bernardo William Lin-Yee
Anita Lindsi Dec
Maria Angelica Generosa
Rosalia Amanda Morgan