Jerome Robbins

Jerome Robbins 1918-1998O

riginal surname Rabinowitz C

redited as a world renown choreographer of Ballet and Broadway dance.

He has created work for the NYCB, Ballet U.S.A., ABT, and other international companies. 

Robbins is also know for his work as a director of musicals and plays for Broadway as well as a director of movies and television programs. 

Robbins was born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz.

First lived in the lower east side of Manhattan.

In the early 1920’s the Rabinowitz family moved to Weehawken, New Jersey.

His father and uncle opened the “Comfort Corset Company,” a unique venture for the family, which had many show business connections, including vaudeville performers and theater owners.

Biographical Information

R

obbins was the son Russian-Jewish immigrants.

He studied chemistry for one year at New York

University before embarking on a career as a dancer

in 1936.

Early Dancing Career

He began with the Ballet Theatre where he danced with special distinction the role of Petrouchka.

He also played character roles in the works of Fokine, Tudor, Massine, Lichine, and de Mille.

His first experience with Choreography occurred during Fancy Free (1944).  This ballet was followed by Interplay (1945) and Facsimile (1946), all of which were performed by Ballet Theatre. 

F

ollowing his ballet career he embarked on a successful career as a choreographer and later as a director of Broadway musicals and plays. 

Choreography

In 1944 Robbins choreographed his first, spectacularly successful ballet, Fancy Free, with a musical score by the young composer Leonard Bernstein. This ballet, featuring three American sailors on shore leave in New York City during World War II, displayed Robbins' acute sense of theatre and his ability to capture the essence of contemporary American dance using the vocabulary of classical ballet. Later that year Robbins and Bernstein, in collaboration with the lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green, expanded Fancy Free into a successful Broadway musical called On the Town.

Broadway Credits

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.

During this period in his life Robbins spent equal time working on Ballet and Broadway.

Since 1958 Robbins had worked with the ballet company he had founded, Ballets U.S.A., which toured sporadically until 1961. In 1965 Robbins resumed creating ballets with his acclaimed Les Noces.

For the next three years he worked on an experimental theatre project, the American Theatre Laboratory, but in 1969 he returned to NYCB.

He was a resident choreographer and a ballet master there until 1983, when he and Peter Martins became ballet masters in chief (co directors) of the company shortly before Balanchine's death.

Robbins resigned as co director of NYCB in 1990, though he continued to choreograph for the company. His last work, Brandenburg, premiered there in 1997. Many of his later ballets are more classical in style and more abstract in subject matter than his earlier works.

In 1949, he joined New York City Ballet as Associate Artistic Director. 

Among his outstanding works for the Company:

• The Cage (1951)• Afternoon of a Faun (1953)• The Four Seasons (1979)• Antique Epigraphs (1984)• Brahms/Handel (1984, with Twyla Tharp)• Ives, Songs (1988), 2 & 3 Part Inventions (1994)• West Side Story Suite (1995)•   For American Ballet Theatre’s 25th anniversary in

1965, he staged Stravinsky’s dance cantata, Les Noces, a work of shattering and immense impact.

Impact on Dance Today

D

uring this extraordinary career he served on:• The National Council on the Arts from 1974 to 1980• 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. 

• Awards received:• Handel Medallion of the City of New York (1976)• the Kennedy Center Honors (1981)• three Honorary Doctorates• an honorary membership in the American Academy • Institute of Arts and Letters (1985)• National Medal of the Arts (1988)

I

n 1958 Robbins formed a charitable organization bearing

his name, the Jerome Robbins Foundation. Originally

intended to fund dance and theatre projects, the

foundation also provided financial support to projects

combating the effects of the AIDS crisis. In accordance

with Robbins' earlier wishes, in 2003 the foundation

awarded the first Jerome Robbins Prizes in recognition of

excellence in dance.