DANCE REVIEW : Robbins Puts His Stamp on City Ballet Festival of His Works

New York City Ballet opened “A Festival of Jerome Robbins’ Ballets” on Tuesday night that was in glaring contrast to its unexceptional 1988 American Music Festival.

The hoopla and incidentals that cluttered the ’88 event were not for Robbins, the 71-year-old choreographer who largely absented himself from the previous festival. This time around, no special edition posters, artwork slide shows, T-shirts, or gussied-up, conspicuous, would-be patrons of the arts distracted attention from the company’s life force: dancing.

This celebration, which runs two weeks and includes 27 Robbins ballets from his 40-odd years as a choreographer, began almost matter-of-factly as another night at City Ballet. (All programs, with the exception of the still undecided-upon bill that closes the festival, are regular subscription performances.) Almost, but not quite, just another performance.

The first night of this Robbins run came about by way of concentrated preparation and added expenditure. The legendary perfectionist of both the Broadway and ballet stages has had priority over all City Ballet rehearsals for the past 12 weeks, including the luxurious “dark” past week, which interrupted the current season and gave over all stage time to Robbins’ rehearsals. From the looks of the three ballets on the first of nine different mixed bills, the effort is paying off handsomely.

Simply, yet somehow slyly, Robbins arranged an opening program that began with his very first ballet, “Fancy Free,” from 1944 for American Ballet Theatre, followed by his latest, “Ives, Songs,” from 1988 for City Ballet.

The former reviews Robbins’ roots in Ballet Theatre’s character/classical bent. The latter trades fully on the supreme and unadulterated classicism that City Ballet’s founding genius, George Balanchine, championed and developed.

For the first time since “Fancy Free” entered City Ballet’s repertory in 1980, it looks truly at home and alive. With Tom Gold, a little dancer with big feet and a brazen eagerness, the showoff sailor role was performed with a cheekiness built on classicism. With Robert LaFosse as the sweet guy, the ballet had a character full of inflection and nuance in both dance and gesture. As the slangy, sexy gob, Damian Woetzel was only slightly off. His very clear and potent dancing couldn’t always produce the inherent Mr. Smoothie slink, especially in his snake-hips rumba.

The two main women, Allison Brown and Stephanie Saland, were indelibly vivid, both feisty and feminine, as the very jazzy thrust of Leonard Bernstein’s a night-on-the-town score was happily addressed and displayed.

“Ives, Songs,” set to 18 songs by Charles Ives (for piano and male vocalist) inverts the balance that early Robbins worked with. Here, characterizational material is secondary and classical vocabulary dominant. The carefully rehearsed cast of 39 dancers demonstrated a rewarding command of both ends of this dancerly spectrum.

Led by an extra-rangy Maria Calegari, heroically partnered by an impassioned Alexandre Proia, with a stately Saland strongly supported by a cool but intense Jeppe Mydtskov, “Ives, Songs” was by turns windswept, witty and grave, like the eccentric and evocative music that makes up its score.

By ending this program with “Fanfare,” the choreographically illustrative work made in 1953 to “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” by Benjamin Britten, the man of the season may have been effecting one of his inimitable theatrical twists. His festival didn’t need to start with an orchestral fanfare, as some past festivals have done. His own active repertory already included “Fanfare,” one that was suitable for an evening’s finale.

Before this closing work got under way, however, an extra Robbins thought was presented. First, a loudspeaker announcement asked the audience to observe a minute of silence. Then, in front of the curtain came former principal dancer Sean Lavery to say that the silence was meant to dramatize what could happen to many of our arts organizations if the National Endowment for the Arts were not renewed. Lavery suggested that the audience should “not presume that common sense would prevail” and encouraged everyone to voice concerns in letters to Washington.

The first Robbins bill then closed with a sometimes strongly--especially by the men--and other times thinly, danced performance of a playful ballet.

This festival opener artfully revealed that when business-as-usual concerns Jerome Robbins, the result is a class act.