Before, Between, and Beyond: Three Decades of Dance Writing

Awhirl in Every Port

Fancy Free, choreographed in 1944, was Jerome Robbins’s first ballet. It was made for the Ballet Theatre, of which the twenty-five-year-old Robbins had been a member for four years. The ballet was also a triumph for the young Leonard Bernstein, Robbins’s exact contemporary and the composer of the ballet’s lauded jazz score. In fact, everything about the ballet was praised: its set by Oliver Smith, the women’s costumes by Kermit Love, the way Robbins mixed social dance steps with ballet steps to make an American ballet that, unlike its contemporary Americana ballets, was not a nostalgic period piece but a piece of the present—a scene of three sailors on the town, picking up two women and dancing with and for them in a bar. The clothing, the dances, and the behavior were based not only on what Robbins saw around him as he “researched” his ballet by watching sailors on shore leave in wartime New York, but also on the sense of camaraderie between himself and the five other young dancers he chose for the roles. They had toured the country together, shared hotel rooms, 81 k Awhirl in Every Port Fancy Free New York State Theater, New York City January 31–February 3 : SoHo Weekly News, February 6, 1980 palled around and danced together in bars as well as on the stage. Edwin Denby called the ballet “a direct, manly piece.” And indeed, the dancing embodies an athletic muscularity that had only recently begun to enter the public eye in elite and popular art. In 1933 Ted Shawn had begun his all-male modern dance company partly to prove men could project a “masculine” image on stage. In the early 1940s Gene Kelly brought a powerhouse style to male dancing on the screen. But last Thursday night what had once been hailed as earthy and vital seemed like this year’s nostalgic period piece, thirty-five years old, and aging rather stiffly. Though the piece has been in the repertory of the American Ballet Theatre since its premiere, Robbins staged it for his company, the New York City Ballet, from a film of the original cast and with the help of Terry Orr, a sailor from an early cast. Maybe the cool classicism I always admire in the New York City Ballet’s dancing style has frozen a certain kind of expression out of the dancers’ bodies. Maybe ballet dancers can never look like anyone but ballet dancers, whether they do a jeté or a lindy. But the ballet just didn’t sit right. Peter Martins as the sailor played originally by Jerome Robbins— the one who stays behind when his buddies run after the first “passerby ,” then meets a second woman and dances a sweetly passionate tango kind of dance with her; the one who dances a rhumba with an imaginary partner in the sequence of sailors’ variations and then beats his chest in rhythm—could barely crack a smile, let alone loosen his hips to swing them in a Latin mood. Jean-Pierre Frohlich as the first sailor, with the exuberant pyrotechnical variation full of splits and acrobatic turns, performed every stunt with a studied tone. Only Bart Cook managed to look like he really meant the things he did, the high-jumping heel-clicking in the sailors’ opening dance and later, in his more whimsical variation, the leg swings, knee drops, and come-hither hand gestures, right down to the final swoon at Stephanie Saland’s feet. Cook is the mild, lovable sailor, the part made originally on John Kriza (to whose memory the ballet is now dedicated) who apparently was like that in life. After the three sailors fight over the two women—and the two women leave in the course of the fisticuffs that ensue—they cool off, drink another beer, chew another stick of gum, and play another game to see who can throw the wrapper farthest. A third woman walks by and, though they remind each other about the fight they just had, as the curtain lowers all three run out after her. 82    The final skidding run after the woman somehow reminded me of the Roadrunner, and the whole ballet suddenly seemed like a cartoon. It’s stylized to the point where the gestures are exaggerated and stereotypical , the timing too conscious. The story is perhaps overly sentimental for us now—how many women stand around reading newspapers under streetlamps outside bars?—and...