The Concert (subtitled The Perils of Everybody) is a ballet made by Jerome Robbins to a suite of Chopin piano pieces, first given by New York City Ballet at the City Center of Music and Drama, New York, on 6 March 1956. It was designed by Saul Steinberg with costumes by Irene Sharaff and lighting by Ronald Bates, and its original cast was led by Tanaquil LeClercq and Todd Bolender.
What is danced
The source article does not describe the choreography, structure, or movement vocabulary of the ballet — it gives credits, a premiere date, an original cast list, and a roster of companies that have staged it, but no synopsis, scene breakdown, or account of steps or technique. Nothing in the text supports specific claims about what is danced, so none are made here from the article itself.
Context
The article situates the piece within Robbins's recurring engagement with Chopin's piano music: it notes that he went on to make three further Chopin ballets — Dances at a Gathering (1969), In the Night (1970), and Other Dances (1976, made for Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova) — which places The Concert as the first in a sequence rather than an isolated work. It was made while Robbins held the position of ballet master at New York City Ballet, the company that premiered it in 1956.
Staging history
Beyond the 1956 New York City Ballet premiere, the article lists revivals and stagings by The Australian Ballet (premiered 10 May 1979, revived 1987 and 2008), The Royal Ballet (premiered 4 March 1975, with revivals across 1976–2018), the Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Academic Music Theatre (premiered 10 July 2010), and Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre (premiered 13 April 2007), alongside unspecified stagings by Boston Ballet, Houston Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, Vienna State Ballet, and San Francisco Ballet.
How to watch it
The article gives no guidance on performance convention; a viewer would need to look elsewhere for the specific staging or comic business the work is known for. What can be drawn from the record is the design team (Steinberg's décor, Sharaff's costumes) and the original NYCB cast, useful reference points for comparing later castings.
Credits
- composer: Frédéric Chopin