Jerome Robbins

Jerome Robbins was born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz in New York City on October 11, 1918, the younger child of Harry Rabinowitz and Lena Rips; he later worked professionally under the surname Robbins. His father, an immigrant from Poland, eventually settled the family in Weehawken, New Jersey, where the Comfort Corset Company and frequent trips across the Hudson fed a young imagination steeped in music, amateur theatricals and performance. He graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in 1935 and briefly attended New York University, but the Depression damaged the family business and ended his studies. His older sister Sonia, already a dancer, helped him find a place in Senya Gluck-Sandor's Dance Center, a mixed world of modern dance, ballet, theatre and revue that became an early model for an artist who would refuse the border between serious dance and popular entertainment.

Robbins trained in ballet with Ella Daganova, studied acting and modern dance, appeared with the Yiddish Art Theatre, and spent formative summers at Camp Tamiment in Pennsylvania, whose rapid weekly revues taught him to shape character, comedy and musical timing under pressure. He danced in Broadway ensembles before joining Ballet Theatre - later American Ballet Theatre - in 1940, rising from the corps to principal roles such as Petrouchka within repertory by Fokine, Tudor and de Mille. Ballet Theatre also gave him his first major choreographic opening: with a score by the young Leonard Bernstein, Fancy Free premiered on April 18, 1944, sending three sailors on shore leave through classical command, streetwise looseness and recognizably human awkwardness. Its success led that same year to On the Town, developed with Bernstein, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, director George Abbott and designer Oliver Smith.

The late 1940s established Robbins as a rare force in both ballet and Broadway. He won his first Tony Award for choreographing High Button Shoes and joined New York City Ballet, becoming its associate artistic director in 1949 - the company having been founded by George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein, not by Robbins. His works there ranged from the predatory female world of The Cage to the hushed intimacy of Afternoon of a Faun and the affectionate comic disorder of The Concert. His Broadway work grew more dramatically integrated in the same years: the 'Small House of Uncle Thomas' sequence in The King and I staged a dance narrative inside the musical, and he won an Emmy for the televised Peter Pan in 1955.

This ascent carries a grave historical counterpoint. On May 5, 1953, Robbins testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, acknowledged former Communist Party membership and named other people, who then faced consequences within an already coercive blacklist culture. Accounts report that he had been threatened with public exposure of his homosexuality, and historians weigh career fear, political disillusionment and personal pressure differently; the exact number named and the precise motive vary among secondary sources, but the central act is not in dispute. It belongs in his story plainly and compassionately - neither omitted, nor sensationalized, nor treated as settled in its motive.

Robbins's most influential musical-theatre decade continued with West Side Story in 1957, which he conceived, directed and choreographed alongside composer Leonard Bernstein, book writer Arthur Laurents, lyricist Stephen Sondheim and designer Oliver Smith. Dance did not decorate the conflict; it established the gangs' identities, territory, desire and violence. He founded Ballets: U.S.A. in 1958 (creating N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz and Moves) and directed and choreographed Gypsy in 1959. For the 1961 film of West Side Story he shared directing credit with Robert Wise, receiving the directing Academy Award jointly with Wise and a separate honorary Academy Award for his achievement in film choreography. Fiddler on the Roof followed in 1964, made with Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, producer Harold Prince and designer Boris Aronson, and brought him Tony Awards for both direction and choreography.

After Fiddler, Robbins returned to ballet. Dances at a Gathering (1969), set to Chopin for ten dancers, brought him back to New York City Ballet after thirteen years, its relationships arising and dissolving without conventional plot; The Goldberg Variations, In the Night, Watermill and Other Dances explored different modes of musical listening and theatrical time. Glass Pieces (1983), set to Philip Glass, sent walkers, runners and classical dancers through an urban architecture of repeated pulses and crossing paths. After Balanchine's death, Robbins and Peter Martins were named co-ballet masters in chief of New York City Ballet in 1984. In 1989 Jerome Robbins' Broadway restaged material from his musical-theatre career and won him the Tony Award for best direction of a musical. His honors included the 1981 Kennedy Center Honors, the 1988 National Medal of Arts and France's Legion of Honour, and his support helped build the New York Public Library's moving-image dance archive, renamed the Jerome Robbins Dance Division in 1999. He died at his Manhattan home on July 29, 1998, aged seventy-nine.