Jerome Robbins (1918-1998) received world renown as a choreographer of ballets created for the New York City Ballet, Ballets U.S.A., American Ballet Theatre, and other international companies. He received equal acclaim for his work as a director of musicals and plays for Broadway as a director of musicals, as well as a director of movies and television programs.
His career as a gifted ballet dancer developed with Ballet Theatre where he danced with special distinction the role of Petrouchka, and character roles in the works of Fokine, Tudor, Massine, Lichine, and de Mille, and his first choreographic sensation, Fancy Free (1944). This ballet was followed by Interplay (1945) and Facsimile (1946), all of which were performed by Ballet Theatre. He then embarked on an enormously successful career as a choreographer and later as a director of Broadway musicals and plays.
Robbins’ first musical, On The Town (1945), was followed by Billion Dollar Baby (1946), High Button Shoes (1947), Look, Ma, I’m Dancing (1948, co-directed with George Abbott), Miss Liberty (1949), Call Me Madam (1950), and the ballet “Small House of Uncle Thomas” in The King and I (1951). His work continued with Two’s Company (1952), Pajama Game (1954, co-directed with Mr. Abbott), and Peter Pan (1954), which he directed and choreographed. In the same year, he also directed the opera The Tender Land by Aaron Copland. Two years after that, he directed and choreographed Bells Are Ringing (1956), followed by the historic West Side Story (1957), Gypsy (1959), and Fiddler on the Roof (1964). In 1988, he staged Jerome Robbins’s Broadway.
In 1949, he joined New York City Ballet as Associate Artistic Director. Among his outstanding works for the Company are The Guests (1949), Age of Anxiety (1951), The Cage (1951), The Pied Piper (1951), Afternoon of a Faun (1953), Fanfare (1953), The Concert (1956), Dances at a Gathering (1969), The Goldberg Variations (1971), Watermill (1972), Requiem Canticles (1972), In G Major (1975), Mother Goose (1975), The Four Seasons (1979), Opus 19/The Dreamer (1979), Glass Pieces (1983), I’m Old Fashioned (1983), Antique Epigraphs (1984); Brahms/Handel (1984, with Twyla Tharp), In Memory of… (1985), Ives, Songs (1988), 2 & 3 Part Inventions (1994), West Side Story Suite (1995), and Brandenburg (1997). For his own company, Ballets U.S.A. (1958 - 1962), he created N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz (1958), Moves (1959), and Events (1961). For American Ballet Theatre’s 25th anniversary in 1965, he staged Stravinsky’s dance cantata, Les Noces, a work of shattering and immense impact.
During this extraordinary career, Mr. Robbins served on the National Council on the Arts from 1974 to 1980 and the New York State Council on the Arts/Dance Panel from 1973 to 1988. He established and partially endowed the Jerome Robbins Film Archive of the Dance Collection of the New York City Public Library at Lincoln Center. His numerous awards and academic honors included the Handel Medallion of the City of New York (1976), the Kennedy Center Honors (1981), three Honorary Doctorates, an honorary membership in the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1985), and the National Medal of the Arts (1988).
