Mother Goose
Mother Goose is a one-act ballet made by Jerome Robbins for New York City Ballet's 1975 Ravel Festival, set to Ravel's Ma Mère l'Oye — the 1908 piano-duet suite that the composer himself orchestrated in 1912 and later expanded into a ballet score with a new prelude, opening scene and four connecting interludes. It premiered on May 22, 1975 at the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, with costumes by Stanley Simmons and lighting by Jennifer Tipton, as one of many new works Robbins and Balanchine produced for the festival built entirely around Ravel's music.
What is danced
The source article does not describe the choreography, cast a synopsis, or name any individual numbers or divertissements within the piece — it gives production credits and the musical history of the score but nothing about steps, holds, or vocabulary. Ravel's suite (Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant, Petit Poucet, Laideronnette, Les entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête, and Le jardin féerique) is a well-known five-movement children's fairy-tale sequence, but nothing in the article confirms how Robbins mapped movement onto these movements, so no specific dance vocabulary can be attributed to sections of the work from this source.
Context
The ballet was made for NYCB's Ravel Festival in May 1975, a company-wide project (paralleling the 1972 Stravinsky Festival) in which the company's choreographers, chiefly Balanchine and Robbins, produced a wave of new works across a single composer's output in a concentrated run of performances. Placing a fairy-tale-themed piece by Robbins inside that festival situates the work within NYCB's mid-1970s practice of large thematic festivals as a vehicle for new choreography rather than narrative revival.
Staging history
The work was first given under its French title, Ma Mère l'Oye, at its 1975 premiere, and that title was kept for its first revival in January 1978; by May of that same year the title had been anglicized to Mother Goose. The article gives no further revival or touring history beyond this title change.
How to watch it
Because the article supplies no synopsis, a viewer has no citable guide here to specific set pieces; watching should instead track how Robbins handles Ravel's five contrasting fairy-tale movements as danced episodes, and whether design (Simmons' costumes, Tipton's lighting) marks the transitions the composer wrote as connecting interludes.
Credits
- composer: Maurice Ravel