Jerome Robbins Biography

(dancer; born October 11, 1918, New York, New York; died July 29, 1998)

Jerome Robbins proved his never-ending creativity throughout his career by continually pushing the conventional bounds of dramatic and balletic expression. He was an extraordinary showman and a major force in the world of theater and dance.

Jerome Rabinowitz was born in New York City to Russian-Jewish immigrants who had fled the European pogroms. He was still small when his family moved to Weehawken, New Jersey, where his father owned a delicatessen and later became a corset manufacturer. Young Jerome studied piano and violin and even played the piano in a children's concert at the age of three. Soon after, he began studying dance at the Gluck-Sandor Studios.

In 1935, the young man who was to become Jerome Robbins (his name was changed when he established himself professionally) graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School and spent a year at New York University before leaving to pursue a career as a dancer. He studied ballet with Ula Duganova, Eugene Loring, and Anthony Tudor; modern dance with the New Dance League; interpretive dance with Sonya Robbins; Spanish dance with Helene Viola; and Oriental dance with Nimura.

Robbins joined the American Ballet Theater in 1940 and made his solo debut there as Petrouchka in 1942. Two years later, he created and choreographed his first ballet, Fancy Free. Leonard Bernstein composed the music for the smash hit, a performance that received 20 curtain calls on its opening night in April 18, 1944.

In 1945, Robbins choreoraphed Interplay, a ballet that intermingles ballet and jazz dance. His first serious work, Facsimile, with a score by Bernstein, broke radically with ballet tradition by having one of his characters, a woman being mauled by two men, cry out for help. In 1947, he both directed and choreographed Look Ma, I'm Dancin', becoming only the second choreographer to perform both roles simultaneously.

From early on in his career, Robbins was known as a fiercely determined man uninhibited by the usual standards. In 1948, he joined the New York City Ballet as a dancer and choreographer, then the following year he became the associate artistic director under George Balanchine. He won a Dance Magazine Award in 1950 for his performance in The Prodigal Son.

For the next few years, his choreographic output was very random. His ballet, Age of Anxiety, based on a W.H. Auden poem and accompanied by Berstein's music, won a Dance Magazine Award for "outstanding creativity in the field of American ballet." The next year, he choreographed Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and I. Three months later, his ballet, The Cage, a disturbing production about predatory females, opened.

In 1954, Robbins helped exhilarate a whole generation of theatergoers when he choreographed and directed the legendary production of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, starring Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard. The production opened on October 20 of that year at the Winter Garden Theater. One year later, he won an Emmy for directing a television version of the show.

Three years after the enormous success of Peter Pan, Robbins, along with Bernstein, Oliver Smith, and Stephen Sondheim, brought West Side Story to the Winter Garden. This electrifying musical about rival street gangs featured Bernstein's jazzy street-tempoed score and classic Robbins dancing--young American kids filling the stage with turbulent movement. Once again, Robbins won a Dance Magazine Award for "extending the expressive range of the Broadway musical theater." Three years later, Robbins recreated the show's "Cool," "America," "Jets," and other dance numbers for the film version of West Side Story. He won two Academy Awards for directing and for "the brilliant achievement in the art of choreography on film." The film won 11 Oscars in all.

Robbins formed his own ballet company in 1955, called "Ballets USA," for which he created Moves, an abstract ballet without music, and in 1959, he directed and choreographed Gypsy for Ethel Merman. In 1962, he directed his first non-musical play, Arthur Kopit's Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad. The following year, he directed Brecht's Mother Courage, starring Anne Bancroft.

In 1964, Robbins again directed and choreographed for Broadway with the captivating Fiddler on the Roof. The musical won nine Tonys the following year, two of them for Robbins's direction and choreography. Five years later, this smash was still bringing in the crowds.

During the 1970s, Robbins created such radical and original works as The Golden Variations, The Watermill, Dybbuk Variations, and Chansons Madecasses. He remained with the New York City Ballet until 1990, when he gave his official farewell at the Festival of Jerome Robbins's Ballets.

Robbins died on July 29, 1998 at the age of 79.