Dancing Master

"So make the guests happy," said the entertainment director at Camp Tamiment in the Poconos, and young Jerry Robbins did--as a borscht-belt dancer. Jerry (whose real name was Rabinowitz) wanted to be a chemist, but his immigrant father was toughing it out in the corset business in Weehawken, N.J., and Jerry had to take what jobs he could find.

He was too good to stay in the Poconos; he worked his way up from the chorus of Broadway musicals to leading roles with Ballet Theater. The wiry kid from Weehawken was uneasy in velvet doublets and ostrich plumes. But in comic and character roles he moved with an antic wit that charmed audiences, and soon he got his chance to take U.S. ballet out of doublets and put it in dungarees.

In 1944 Robbins teamed up with an unknown composer named Leonard Bernstein to put together a strictly Stateside ballet about sailors on shore leave. When it opened, Fancy Free (later blown up into the smash musical On the Town) became one of the greatest ballet hits in history. After that Jerry almost always had a hit. His serious ballets (Age of Anxiety, The Cage, Afternoon of a Faun) are untarnished by time, and his dance interludes for musical shows--notably the monumental madness of the Mack Sennett sequence in High Button Shoes--revitalized Broadway ballet.

With Pajama Game, Bells Are Ringing and West Side Story, Jerome Robbins became a director as well as a choreographer. In both roles he remains a recorder of American urban ritual; his dances pulse with the rich, peculiar rhythms of youth on the make, mostly backstage or in back alleys, in the Waste Land as well as Weehawken. This month Manhattan is in the midst of what amounts to a Jerry Robbins festival: by next week his works will hold five stages simultaneously. The American Ballet Theater and New York City Ballet repertories boast Robbins creations; West Side Story and Bells Are Ringing are still packing them in. And for the first time, American audiences are getting a chance to see Ballets: U.S.A., the Robbins show that was a smash at Spoleto, Italy (TIME, June 23) and the Brussels Fair.

In Opus Jazz, before brilliant backdrops by Ben Shahn, cool cats off the city streets wander through the compulsive variations of "The Slop," Robbins' reproduction of a minor juvenile mania. Five boys and one girl horse around on a rooftop, spelling out the amoral communal sex of the tenements. A Negro boy and a white girl grope through their loneliness, reaching out with palms that never quite touch. The whole show adds up to the first hit of the fall season. At 39, Dance Master Jerry is still making the guests happy.

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