The New Diaghilev

"We in America,'' explained Choreographer Jerome Robbins. "dress, eat, think, talk and walk differently from any other people. We also dance differently." Just how differently, London balletgoers learned last week with a shock of excitement and surprise. To British eyes, Robbins' Ballets: U.S.A., in town for a one-week run, was the most rousing explosion of music and movement to hit Piccadilly since World War II.

Robbins' young troupe (average age: 24) reached London midway in a four-month State Department-sponsored tour of Europe and Israel; so far, the troupe has attracted capacity crowds everywhere from Salzburg to Athens. Fortnight ago, performing without costumes or sets (lost in a plane crash), Robbins & Co. proved to be the hit of the Edinburgh Festival. Most of the program at both Edinburgh and London's Piccadilly Theatre was originally devised for last year's Spoleto Festival. Included last week were N.Y. Export, Op. Jazz, a deadpan exercise in which knees break, shoulders shrug in a serpentine evocation of youthful loneliness; The Concert, Robbins' acidulous spoof of the classical ballet; Moves, an abstract ballet without musical accompaniment; and Afternoon of a Faun, Robbins' coolly lyrical dissection of Debussy.

To most critics, Op. Jazz was the high point of the evening. "The hottest, coolest orgy I have experienced!" cried the Sunday Times reviewer. As for the program as a whole, the Daily Express found it "as exciting to us Limeys as anything that could be dished up by Chinese, Turks, Russians or what have you." To the granny London Times it was apparent that "what Diaghilev did for a past generation of balletgoers, Robbins is doing now. [He] is evolving the valid balletic idiom of today." And the Guardian's James Monaghan, after rapping the Royal Ballet for its "ivory-towered conception of the dance," concluded that what Robbins had brought to town was "the best foreign ballet by far that London has ever seen."

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