Interplay
Interplay is a one-act ballet made by Jerome Robbins to Morton Gould's 1945 American Concertette, created for Billy Rose's Concert Varieties and first given at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York on 1 June 1945. It moved quickly into the classical ballet mainstream, taken into American Ballet Theatre's repertory that same October and later revived by New York City Ballet, where Robbins would go on to serve as ballet master.
What is danced
The article does not describe the choreography, so no vocabulary, steps, or set pieces can be reported from it directly. What can be said from the record as given is structural: this is a one-act, plotless work built on a concert score (Gould's American Concertette) rather than a narrative libretto, and it was made for a cast of five named principals (Alicia Alonso, Janet Reed, John Kriza, Harold Lang, Tommy Rall), implying a work organized around soloist turns rather than corps-driven spectacle. Beyond that, any claim about specific step vocabulary would be reconstruction, not something this article supports.
Context
The work dates from 1945, created for a Broadway variety bill (Billy Rose's Concert Varieties) rather than for a resident ballet company, and only afterward crossed into the ballet repertory proper via American Ballet Theatre the same year. That crossing — a piece made for a commercial revue stage being absorbed into a major ballet company's season within months — is itself part of what the article documents, and situates the piece within the mid-1940s traffic between Broadway and ballet that also produced other Robbins works of the period.
Staging history
American Ballet Theatre presented the work on 17 October 1945 with new costumes by Irene Sharaff, distinct from whatever production the Ziegfeld premiere used. New York City Ballet revived it on 23 December 1952 at City Center of Music and Drama. A filmed record exists from American Ballet Theatre's July 1949 performance at Jacob's Pillow.
How to watch it
With no synopsis on record, there is no plot to follow; attend instead to how the five principal roles are distributed and contrasted against Gould's score. The 1949 Jacob's Pillow film of the American Ballet Theatre production is the concrete reference point the article offers for seeing the work rather than reading about it.
Credits
- composer: Morton Gould