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The original poem is difficult and ambiguous both in French (where it is more musical) and English where some say it is more comprehensible. It describes the half-awake rememberings of a faun who earlier had encountered and abducted two nymphs, one demure, one passionate. What occurred next is confused and probably shouldn't be dwelt upon. Eventually the faun gives up trying to disentangle his erotic memory or fantasy and falls asleep again. There are echoes of the story of Pan and Syrinx - she being the chaste nymph who was transformed into reeds to escape the lustful Pan, who then cut the reeds to make his pipes. The flute solo in Debussy's score is a reference to the music of the pan pipes, though Nijinsky's faun plays something more like a bamboo whistle.

In Nijinsky's ballet the faun is awoken by nymphs going to bathe. He frightens them, one leaves her scarf which he appropriates, retires to his rock where he lays out the scarf, lies on it, and the rest caused a scandal in pre-war Paris. The narrative is simple, what is remarkable is the choreographic style lifted from the bas-relief of antique vases.

Robbins reduced Nijinsky's cast of eight to just the main participants. They are unnamed: a boy and a girl, a faun and a nymph. They inhabit what Arlene Croce calls "a dreamy, narcissistic world" and this dreamlike quality is heightened by Jean Rosenthal's beautiful design. She created a box set of translucent white fabric with white floor to represent a ballet studio. The entrance is in the back wall, there is a barre and the walls and ceiling have large openings that stand for windows. The white space is strongly illuminated and through the windows is an intense blue, as of Mediterranean sky. This is the clear bright light and hard-edged definition of a de Chirico painting: a surreal rather than a real space, straight from a dream. The fabric walls are gently blown by a breeze, making a cool sanctuary on a hot summer's day. As becomes plain, the (absent) fourth wall of the studio is the mirror in which the dancers see themselves reflected when they look out into the auditorium.

The curtain rises to show a semi-opaque white gauze concealing the set. The light changes and the boy can be seen lying on the floor, naked to the waist, back to the audience. The gauze is raised. He awakes, raises a leg in a somewhat priapic gesture, contemplates his foot, suddenly sits up and seems surprised as he catches sight of himself in the mirror (perhaps an echo of Narcissus here), stretches, arises and starts a series of movements, tentative at first, in front of the mirror. (Robbins was fascinated by the way dancers moved when they were marking a part and that is reflected here – dancing without quite dancing.) His gaze is entirely at his own reflection, his own grace, his own beauty. He comes forward with palm flat in front of him as if to touch and feel the reflection in the mirror. His movements become bolder, he experiments with hand gestures then turns a somersault, stretches out on the floor and falls asleep again. From here it is open to the viewer to think that what follows is his dream or the continuation of a real story.

Enter the girl in practice tunic walking gingerly on pointe behind the set to the studio door, she pauses, rosins her shoes elaborately and enters. She too is entranced and engrossed by her reflected image. She fails to notice the boy until, at a climax in the music, she moves to his side of the stage and he wakes. They suddenly see each other in the mirror and freeze. She, embarrassed at being caught out, turns away, walks to the barre and starts her exercises. He makes to leave the studio, thinks again, comes behind her and lifts her high above his head by the waist and carries her to centre stage. From there the pas de deux develops. Their eyes meet several times, giving the potential for an explosion of sexuality, but each time they turn back to the safety of viewing themselves and each other in the mirror. The piece never develops into a conventional love duet. She, in particular, seems content to continue her classroom routines, perhaps using the familiar as a defence. Of the two of them, the girl is cooler, the boy shows the signs of a scarcely controlled adolescent frenzy.

The climax of the work is a chaste kiss that the boy gives to the girl's cheek, she observes it in the mirror and then reacts by touching her cheek in wonder, or as if to confirm that it was really she who was kissed, or maybe to cherish the moment. She rises, leaves the studio and tiptoes off stage as she came, not leaving in fright like Nijinsky's nymph, but withdrawing pensively to contemplate the experience. He stretches out on the floor and goes back to sleep.

There are different stories about the origins of the work. The initial image is said to have come to Robbins when he saw the handsome young Edward Villela, then a student at the School of American Ballet, lazing in one of the large-windowed studios at the end of a hot afternoon. From this perhaps came the setting and the idea of the dancers luxuriating in their own beauty. Robbins later described another incident: "I walked into a rehearsal studio and Louis Johnson was practicing a Swan Lake adagio with a student girl. They were watching themselves in the mirror. I was struck by the way they were watching that couple over there doing a love dance, and totally unaware of the proximity and possible sexuality of their physical encounters."
 

The intimacy of these physical encounters is permitted and escapes an obvious sexual connotation because of their context, the rehearsal studio or the stage. In Faun this produces the paradox of an meeting in which, in real terms, one of the least intimate gestures, the chaste kiss, is the most surprising one. Like Mallarmé's poem, Robbins' Faun is full of ambiguities and can be read by the audience and interpreted by the dancers with some freedom. Mallarmé's two nymphs (the chaste and the knowing) perhaps suggest two ways of performing the female role in Faun. Certainly in the recent Royal Ballet staging Sarah Lamb's self-absorbed and innocent nymph came from a different part of the mythological landscape than Alexandra Ansanelli's flirtatious vamp.

Intense self-scrutiny and analysis or, some might say, narcissism in a benign form, is part of a dancer's existence. Especially in ballet, movements are endlessly practiced in front of studio mirrors, something that has no parallel in ordinary life. Faun uses this activity to describe a dancer's experience and explore something about dancing which is not expressed in other work. Robbins famously said of Dances at a Gathering, another piece that takes us into the dancer's world, "the dancers are themselves dancing with each other to that music in that space". In other words dancers just doing what they do without reference to the audience. In Faun the conceit is that the dancers are in a private space, an enclosed studio, and that there is no audience (the auditorium being hidden behind the mirrored fourth wall of the set). At no point should the dancers seem to look through the mirror to the audience beyond.

Through the piece there are hints and echoes of its origins. The boy lifts the girl to sit on his shoulder and she paddles with her legs as if sitting on the riverbank and splashing her feet in the water. At the beginning of another entrancing lift she appears to dive through his encircling arms. This watery theme is evident from the beginning when she appears on stage with her long hair loose as if from the shower. There are, too, movements described by Francisco Moncion (who was in the original cast with Tanaquil LeClerc) as "pushing through the reeds on a hot, humid afternoon". At the conclusion the boy lies prone, then pushes up on his arms to raise his trunk from the floor in the ecstatic movement from the end of Nijinsky's Faune. Voyeurism is another connecting thread: it features in the poem and in the 1910 ballet, but in Robbins' version it is the members of the audience rather than the faun who who are voyeurs of this private encounter.

It would be easy to dismiss this ten minute piece as just another boy-girl brief encounter. That it is still in performance after 50 years suggests it is much more than that. To quote Arlene Croce again, "Robbins' infatuation with dancers has always been a great strength". In Faun he has used it to look at a little episode in the studio and to find enough poetry, beauty and mystery there to ensure the ballet's continuing fascination and survival.