Faun in a Mirror

To the late great Dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, the Afternoon of a Faun was a lazy, sensual episode in the life of a mythological goat-man; he danced it (to Debussy's famed music) in horns, tail and dappled tights. Manhattan's Choreographer Jerome Robbins, 34, had a different idea. Last week the New York City Ballet presented the Robbins-version faun as a Narcissus rather than a goat-man; the title role went to a shirtless young ballet dancer in practice tights.

What the premiere audience saw first was Dancer Francisco Moncion resting on a practice-room floor. He began to stretch and ripple his muscles, then caught sight of himself in an imaginary mirror and went into a self-admiring performance. Ballerina Tanaquil LeClercq entered, joined in the mirror work. Eventually Faun Moncion turned and kissed Nymph LeClercq on the cheek. As if jolted by seeing each other as real people rather than mirror images, faun and nymph broke apart. She glided away, and he lay down for another rest as the curtain fell.

The audience, some of it expecting the old (and more emphatic) goat-man theme, was somewhat surprised by the innovations. But it admired the perform ance, burst into applause during one superbly turned movement, and at the end clapped until the house lights went up.

Choreographer Robbins, who knows his audiences (from his work for such hits as The King and I and The Cage), thought moderns would be bored by the tired old staging of Nijinsky's Faun, wanted to do something new that "recaptured its tensions." He got his idea during a lull in a ballet practice session, watching a youngster languorously stretching at the barre and enjoying the movements of his own body. The ballet's evolution was neither easy nor fast: three years after the original idea came to him, Robbins got down to work, took six weeks to whip it into final shape.

The Times's John Martin found it hard to take. "Nothing whatever of choreographic texture,"he wrote, and doubted "whether it is to everybody's taste." The Herald Tribune's Walter Terry decided that "the idea itself possesses impact [done with] taste and tenderness, some wry humor and much beauty."

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