With each step, a discovery

The myth of the suffering artist endures in painting, poetry and literature, but it has a lesser-known counterpart in the performing arts -- the suffering inducing artist. This is the individual who inflicts on others what most artists in these more solitary media merely inflict on themselves. In dance, a performing art with more than its share of difficult personalities, ballet and Broadway choreographer Jerome Robbins was reputed to be one of the most gifted of dance makers, yet also demanding, temperamental and the cause of suffering for others. This may be in part why no candid assessment of his life and work was published until after his death of a massive stroke in 1998, three months short of his 80th birthday.

After Robbins’ death, his literary executors opened his archives to biographers Deborah Jowitt and Amanda Vaill and a friend, writer Christine Conrad, who has published a picture book. Now Jowitt, dance critic for the Village Voice for the last 37 years, has written the first authorized biography, “Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance.” It is candid yet balanced, insightful about his work and revelatory about his theater. It lays bare the tension between Robbins the person and Robbins the artist, and what his associates endured to have access to the art. Jowitt suggests an almost erotic tension to the games of cruelty and domination he played in the rehearsal rooms in which he brought forth his masterpieces of American identity in motion -- “Fancy Free,” “On the Town,” “West Side Story,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Dances at a Gathering.” These works cross between the genres of ballet and musical theater, and their content swings from abstraction to detailed psychological storytelling -- territory Robbins traversed with both fluency and, Jowitt suggests, continual anxiety. “So how come I still think of myself as phony and my talent as invisible ink?” he wrote in a journal before the premiere of several major works at a 1972 Stravinsky festival.

Robbins was an extraordinary popularizer of dance and an artist who did so without selling it short. Jowitt is in many ways his equivalent as a dance critic, a master of vernacular expository prose, rendering the texture, sensation and pleasures of watching moving bodies. This fluency doesn’t appear often enough in the book, but when it does, there is poetry in the match of writer and subject. In an early review on the occasion of the New York City premiere of his “Dances at a Gathering,” she wrote: “[It] is a very quiet ballet; everything about it, every possible meaning is whispered -- as if it were happening in such clean air that sound carries a great distance.”

The first moment we see critic and dancer meet on this expository plane comes early in the book when Jowitt views the young Robbins in an early 1940s home movie filmed on the rooftop of the Weehawken, N.J., apartment building where his parents lived. “He looks fluent and boisterous, with a kind of witty precision -- easy and intense at the same time.” With this single sentence she captures a central paradox in the allure of Robbins’ style. Later, she extends this insight: “Atmosphere is crucial to his work, and atmosphere is very hard to rehearse.”

Jowitt begins her tale of Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz by slyly showing how the future is located in the past as she draws on Robbins’ own notes for an unpublished autobiography. The child of eager-to-assimilate Russian immigrants, Robbins’ first connection to his Jewishness came in 1924 at age 6 when his mother, Lena, took him and sister Sonia to her husband’s Polish shtetl to meet their grandfather. In her description of the kindly man singing little Jerry to sleep with Yiddish songs at night we can imagine the model for Tevye, his shtetl and his passion for the Jewish tradition in “Fiddler on the Roof.”

Jowitt suggests that Robbins’ methods for achieving this kind of expressiveness in dance were similarly forged early, when as a 21-year-old entertainment counselor at Camp Tamiment in the Poconos, he learned to hold an audience with the illusory spontaneity of a vaudevillian while sharing the stage with comedians Danny Kaye and Imogene Coca. Barely two years later, Jowitt suggests, Robbins absorbed another essential ingredient of his style -- infusing character through dance. She details him observing choreographer Antony Tudor demonstrating Stanislavsky-like “tactics for getting dramatically rich performances out of dancers,” as a likely model.

With the 1944 premiere of Robbins’ first big hit, “Fancy Free,” Jowitt sketches the paradox of the public accolades and the private doubts that would dog Robbins his entire career, noting sadly that the more euphoric the opening night party became, the gloomier Robbins grew. Jowitt hints that the accessibility of so many of his dances and their revolutionary enrichment of classical ballet may in fact have contributed to his doubts about their value as high art. “Robbins created orderly but combustible traffic patterns for ensemble and principals and played with variants of social dancing,” Jowitt writes about “On the Town,” the 1943 Broadway musical Robbins and composer Leonard Bernstein spun from “Fancy Free.” “He loved to have dancers look as if they were doing a step for the first time. That air of discovery became one of the hallmarks of his style and ironically something to be labored over in rehearsals.” Indeed, it is this hidden part of his work process that Jowitt details so richly, showing us repeatedly how much of his dances Robbins pruned and threw away.

Jowitt approaches the major episodes of Robbins’ life with a wise dispassion -- letting the reader decide the sincerity of his remorse about his eagerness to divulge names when he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1958 because of his membership in the Communist Party. Jowitt quotes Robbins writing that his fear of having a deeper secret revealed -- his homosexuality -- prompted his eager disclosures. “I panicked & crumbled & returned to that primitive state of terror -- the facade of Jerome Robbins would be cracked open and behind everyone would finally see Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz.”

Jowitt doesn’t embellish the other often-repeated tale -- of Robbins being so disliked by dancers in rehearsals that a full stage of performers once silently watched him slowly back up and fall into the orchestra pit as he harangued the dancers. No one uttered a word of warning -- or concern, for that matter, after he crashed into the timpani. “He would take the skin off your bones and then build you back up,” remembers Helen Gallagher, who danced in the chorus of “On the Town.” “That’s how he did it. He destroyed you in order to make you into what he wanted you to be.”

Jowitt speculates little about Robbins’ personal life, although she catalogs, courtesy of his autobiographical and diary entries, recreational drug use and an impressive and lengthy list of male and female lovers, including dancers Tanaquil Le Clercq and Nora Kaye, to whom he was engaged, and Montgomery Clift, with whom he had a passionate affair for several years. His most enduring relationships, however, were artistic. His collaborations with Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, Oliver Smith, Betty Comden and Adolph Green remade musical theater. “Before Robbins we were used to actors bursting into song in a musical,” Jowitt writes. “Now they burst into dance and we accept it.”

To achieve realism, Robbins went to extremes. He forbade dancers playing the Jets and the Sharks in the original “West Side Story” to fraternize or eat lunch together during rehearsals and filming in order to heighten competitive tensions between the groups. In “Fiddler on the Roof,” he repeatedly pushed the performers to find an inner motivation for their smallest actions to embed significance in “the littlest brush stroke in the scenery.”

During his 50 years of choreographing for New York City Ballet, Robbins had a cordial yet distant relationship with company director George Balanchine. Robbins’ admiration -- and, it is hinted, occasional envy -- of Balanchine’s genius is offset by the latter’s frank assessment of their differences. “You know,” Balanchine once told dancer Violette Verdy, “the real American choreographer at NYCB is Jerry, not me. He’s the one who can capture the fashions, the trends, the relaxed character of American dances and their lack of a past or a style.” It was this freedom from a past and a style, Jowitt suggests, that Robbins aspired to just as deeply offstage as on. *