Confusion Set to Dancing

"I'm tired," complains Choreographer Jerome Robbins, "of seeing bad Robbins." He has a case: no other U.S.-born choreographer is more widely--or ineptly --copied in Europe, where even bad Robbins is good box office. But Robbins' competition (most notably Maurice Bejart's company) will have a tough time copying, ineptly or otherwise, the ballet he produced at the Spoleto Festival last week. A plotless work designed to have, according to Robbins, "the total effect of reading the morning paper," Events adds new luster to the career of a man who, from Fancy Free to West Side Story, has developed into the freshest creator of U.S. ballet.

"Events," says Robbins, "is not Les Sylphides"; it is light-years away from that serenest of classic white ballets. If it has any theme, it is simply the "fantastic confusion that the ordinary day holds for everyone." The idea was suggested by Composer Robert Prince and Painter Ben Shahn, who collaborated with Robbins on one of his most popular recent works, New York Export: Opus Jazz. The three of them, meeting informally and often, kept adjusting music, choreography and set designs as they went along, improvising freely. Six hours before curtain time, Robbins' talented Ballets U.S.A. troupe had still not run completely through the work, and Composer Prince was still frantically writing new music. Robbins hopes that Events will "keep on changing after we leave here."

Last week's audience seemed more than satisfied with the current state of Events. Provided with a piercing, acid jazz score by Prince, the dance begins with a scene of total desolation: three men and a girl slump with wan, expressionless faces before Shahn's backdrop of a vast, bleak, windowed city. Uncoiling themselves, the dancers make sudden taut, tentative movements, then fall back in a slack-limbed pantomime of despair. To a suddenly quickened rhythm, a Negro dancer bounds onstage, is quickly surrounded by mocking, finger-snapping whites. For a time they applaud his acrobatics, then stare stonily as he wanders pathetically away. As a new stageful of dancers jig in a mechanistic imitation of gaiety, they are suddenly obscured by a billowing drop decorated with atomic symbols. At ballet's end the music breaks off with chill abruptness, leaving the original four dancers staring blankly at the audience over the footlights.

The cheering opening night crowd gave Events twelve curtain calls, and the critics were dazzled. "Robbins' latest ballet," said Rome's Il Tempo, "is the really great masterpiece of the dance theater in the second half of the 20th century." Masterpiece or not, it is a departure--"not like my other work," said Robbins, 42. "Otherwise I wouldn't want to do it."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.