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More often than in any season in my recent memory, I've found myself leaving the State Theater buoyant and happy, floating on a cloud and babbling into my cel phone about what a wonderful, great, fantastic program I've just seen. As Constant Readers might recall, I usually find something or other to bitch about. It's a little unsettling to finish a program thinking "I wouldn't have changed a thing," and even more unsettling to add: "Maybe Peter Martins knows what he's doing after all." It sure seemed so at this matinee of four late-period works of Jerome Robbins, heralded by an intriguing essay in the program by Deborah Jowitt, fitting each work into its period of Robbins' life, tying them together in an apt, overarching theme of Robbins' coping with aging and the loss of compatriots, particularly Balanchine. I usually avoid reading such materials as I don't want to risk stealing another writer's ideas, however unintentionally. This time I weakened, and I'm glad I did; Jowitt's insights infused my appreciation of the program with an informed poignancy.

What the program didn't need was an infusion of pizzazz; the performance was humming and crackling with electricity (some from the Promethean baton of Fayçal Karoui); it seemed only appropriate that afterwards the Manhattan skies roiled and flashed with a vast summer thunderstorm's cannonade. If this was Robbins' expressing his approval from on high, he couldn't have been more emphatic. Getting drenched seemed a small price to pay.

The program started with a small video of old footage of Robbins, this time marking a combination from his 1984 Suite of Dances. Even aged, stocky and stiff-backed, Robbins still embraced the studio with the propulsion of his focus and imagination, tossing off hints and suggestions of movements which the piece's first performer, Mikhail Baryshnikov, was to give life. These brief films excerpts have been both wistfully nostalgic and touching was it really so long ago that Robbins last worked his theatrical magic here?

Next was Robbins' charming 2 & 3 Part Inventions, made for young teenaged students of the School of American Ballet in 1994. Set to familiar, formal keyboard works of JS Bach, played here by Nancy McDill, Inventions was danced here, too, by SAB students, looking fresh-scrubbed and bright as the morning dew in their practice clothes: t-shirts and leotards for the boys, simple dresses for the girls. The piece begins and concludes with with the students presenting themselves in formal bows. As Jowitt pointed out in her essay, here Robbins was working with dancers generations removed from his own dancing and choreographic prime. Robbins spent much of his career presenting adult dancers as adolescents, their hot or cool exteriors reflecting their generations' inner turmoil, as refracted by Robbins own infinitely troubled soul the hepcats of New York Export, Opus Jazz or the soaring hoods of West Side Story. When they weren't the embodiment of artistic and generational suffering, Robbins' dancers-as-adolescents were the slightly disturbing grownups-playing-children of Mother Goose Suite.

Here, using actual adolescents, Robbins sheds these conceits. Robbins presents these teens unburdened by angst or adorability, but children of pure unclouded brow, and dreaming eyes of wonder. They enlivened the formality of his grave progressions with a luminous clarity and such unaffected, sublimated joy that I found myself thinking: "Ah, those happy, dumb kids. Just wait until they get older and the real world crushes that joy off their naive little faces." (I have never been accused of being a Pollyanna.) Then I remembered the hell that is the life of too many adolescents, a hell well known to Robbins, who built much of his career out of portraying that turmoil.

So why are these kids so transcendently joyful? On one level, they're happy because Robbins wanted to make a happy ballet for them, but I think the answer lies in their scrupulous attention to every little detail of their performances. Angst may be old hat, Robbins might be telling us and these eager young students, but the beauty of a well-presented foot, a careful reverence, a singing arabesque, is a joy forever, and Inventions we see students on the cusp of their adult careers, breathing life into the academic technique they've worked so long to master. In this moment of discovery, every little detail matters for these dancers, in a way that, regardless of their future triumphs or trials, they never will again. It's almost like we're seeing an epiphany.

I watched these students and remembered a comment Balanchine made about how American dancers live in the moment, unburdened by the weight of the past, and some afterimages of his vision of dancing in the eternal present still linger with the company in the dancers' casually athletic carriage, so different from the Kirov's or POB's smothering blanket of perfection. And yet, especially in ballet, the past is always with us, in its ancient codified technique, and its descent from French royalty. As I watched Robbins' almost-too-slick evolutions of his dancers from those first, well-mannered introductions, through varying ensembles slow and fast, including the obligatory "dance-for-the-two-guys," I pondered the oft-remarked differences in the musicality of Robbins and Balanchine, never more apparent in their treatment of Bach. In Concerto Barocco,, as in most of his work, Balanchine made of the dance a dialog, sometimes competing, sometimes collaborating, between himself and Bach. The performers dancers onstage, musicians in the pit are the instrumentalities of these invisible hands. For Balanchine, it's about the music, and what he does with it. It's no wonder that there's something sublime and ethereal about the world he created in Barocco; the dancers are both more and less than mere people.

Robbins' dances to Bach not just this one aren't about the music as much as they're about themselves; about the dramatic and emotional resonances of dancing to Bach. This inward-gazing focus can sometime make his work cute and pretentious, but more often, it imbues seemingly simple dances with surprising depth. When Robbins made Inventions, he and his dancers were far more than half a life asunder. He was only a few years from his death, and most likely knew this would be his last word on dancers as adolescents, and adolescent dancers. This last word wasn't so much for the audience (although it's a treat to watch), but for his dancers. As much as Robbins puts these students through their technical paces, he returns again and again to the courtliness of ballet's formative years. There are endless variations on bows and reverences the boys happily and gallantly squire the girls about and "make a leg" to each other, and to us in the audience. Balanchine delighted in American dancers' angelic existence outside of history; Robbins exploited it in his seminal works of the Fifties and Sixties. Without invalidating Balanchine's observation, it is impossible to separate ballet from its past, and Inventions celebrates the traditions Robbins once eschewed. For Robbins, Bach isn't just the master of rhythm and melodic time and space of Barocco, but a signpost marking the way out of Robbins' adolescent slough of despond, guiding one's attention outside of one's self towards a grander ideal. To those of us afflicted by experience, ballet's centuries-old deportment can seem archaic indeed. In Inventions, Robbins' gift for the audience is to show us tradition as new, as seen through the fresh eyes of these students, and felt through their intense focus. They've learned the mechanics of this tradition from the day they first set foot in a studio; Robbins shows them the path to enlivening this tradition, as it enlivens them. For all of us, it's a tremendous benefaction.

After musing on how lightly the weight of tradition can weigh on American dancers, how apt it was to be shown how well it can be handled by one on whom it lands with the heaviest imaginable force. From the venerable Paris Opera Ballet, etoile Nicholas le Riche presented Robbins' Suite of Dances, with an enthralling combination of technical perfection and deft, even Parisian wit. Also made in 1994, for the aging star Mikhail Barysnikov, Suite is also to Bach, various cello solos played with great sensuality by Ann Kim, seated onstage where le Riche could handily interact with her. This can also be seen as Robbins' meditation on aging; as Le Riche drifts from one cello piece to the next, he often seems to be recalling how he once danced, lost in reverie much as the girl in green from Dances at a Gathering. At times it's almost as if Le Riche's muscles remember better than his mind, with a dazzling series of pirouttes in second emerging from his noodlings about as if of their own volition. And what could be more emblematic of the strong will of a dancer made weak by time and fate than the moment when Le Riche, slouching, yanks himself erect by grabbing a handful of his own shirt between his shoulder blades? It should perhaps go without saying that Suite builds in virtuosity as it progresses, with ever-more-demanding steps from which Le Riche breaks impetuously free with a boyish cartwheel, a bracing, unexpected blast of fresh air. Suite also looks back to Baryshnikov's own past, the solo with which he won his Varna gold medal, the dramatically and technical tour de force, Vestris. With his insouciant smile and sparkling eyes, Le Riche is hardly the darkling presence of Baryshnikov's later years, but imbues every step of Suite with bonhomie which charmed as thoroughly as his always impeccable style astonished.

While, as Jowitt points out, Robbins always insisted his 1985 In Memory of... wasn't a tribute to Balanchine after his death two years earlier, given Robbins' use of Suzanne Farrell, Balanchine's muse, and Alban Berg's searing, dissonant 1935 Violin Concerto, dedicated to Manon Gropius, who'd just died at the age of eighteen, it's hard to envision it as anything else. As it charts its heroine's passage from life through brutal death to an ethereal apotheosis, Memory seems at times to look backwards to Wilder's Our Town, as death and the dead cohabit with the unaware living. This lead was danced with searing intensity and pathos by Wendy Whelan, who's been looking throughly rejuvenated this season. In the ballet's first section, she's partnered by the sensitive, impeccable Jared Angle. They're soon joined by a large ensemble who have the look of townspeople long familiar with each other. Whelan and Angle join in the various social formations, but Robbins leaves a bit of ambiguity about Whelan's status here. Is she a living member of this community, or, as with Wilder's Emily Webb, is she simply experiencing them again after her death? Robbins uses a bit of simple stagecraft to have Charles Askegard appear as if out of thin air as the ensemble, and Angle, drift offstage. Tall, blond and pale, Askegard loomed over Whelan with great ferocity, blocking her attempts to evade him with great efficiency as she contorted herself into ever-more-painful aspects of woe. Finally, Askegard carries her off, leaving little doubt that we have, indeed witnessed her death. In a brief apotheosis, we see a few of the first-movement's men return in shining white tights, as if representing otherworldy, heavenly beings. Whelan returns held by both Angle and Askegard, all also resplendent in white, and the pair hoists her slowly over their heads as she ascends towards a bright light just off the right-hand wing, striding in ethereal slow motion.
 

Wendy Whelan and Charles Askegard in In Memory of...
© Paul Kolnik

I can't imagine how Whelan, Angle and Askegard could have been better. In less deft hands, Robbins' story could easily drift into cloying sentiment or melodrama, yet with this cast every moment, even the quiet ones, cut like a knife. The whole enterprise was vividly animated by Kurt Nikkanen's lyrical, weeping violin and the driving pulse of Karoui's conducting. The entire orchestra sounded heartbreakingly magnificent.

At the premiere of Robbins' Glass Pieces in 1983, I remembered feeling that beneath its shiny surface it was shallow and facile. I couldn't have been more wrong. This afternoon it looked a masterpiece, and I don't think I've ever seen it sizzling with more energy. Much of this credit has to go to Karoui and the City Ballet orchestra. I was surprised when Karoui was appointed Music Director in his guest gigs, he showed a disturbing penchant for brutally fast tempi, faster even than the just-departed Andrea Quinn. Yet since he took over, he's shown he can temper his enthusiasm without dampening it, and this Glass Pieces pulsed with ever-increasing energy. In the first section, in which demis in gold unitards leap in and out of busily crisscross throngs of rushing dancers, they seemed angelic among the commonplace, expansive where the rat-racing ensemble was pulled in and taut. Among these gold-clad, Savannah Lowery tempered her too-familiar gauche athleticism to an almost-lyrical power and Tyler Angle's grace seemed positively seraphic. In the long, dreamy second section, Wendy Whelan was again riveting, moving between severe poses with the hieratical calm of a goddess, an impression aided by Robbins' motif of flattened, angular poses suggesting ancient Egyptian paintings. Whelan was attended in this quasi-ritual by Sebastien Marcovici, in a debut. As in his recent appearance in Afternoon of a Faun after a protracted absence, Marcovici looked in fine form, moving with strength and solidity through the plastique of Robbins' poses. The endless stream of corps girls silhouetted as they pranced in an ever-changing procession from right to left against the upstage backdrop might well be dancing drops of sand in an hourglass, sharply delineating the passing moments as a canvas against which Whelan and Marcovici painted with languorous strokes, as if, like the first section's golden strangers, they too existed somewhat apart from our everyday passage of time.

In the long, repetitive, pounding final section, Robbins embraced that passage of time with a vengeance, with kaleidoscopic phalanxes of men hopping, leaping and stamping across the stage in formations of almost martial precision. Glass's rhythms burst from the orchestra as the male formations split and chopped the stage in measured steps and jumps which nonetheless seethed with harnessed energy. I found myself rocking in my seat in sympathy with these surges and crests, almost giddy with the sheer, blinding power of it all. As the corps women finally joined the pattern, slinking and shuffling in arms-linked friezes, it was almost too much to bear, and the ending's sudden frozen stop of movement and music was deafening in its stillness and silence. The silence lasted only milliseconds before it was replace with well-earned cheers and applause.

This thunderous finale was echoed in the literal thunder which greeted me along with lightning and oceans of rain from the aforementioned summer thunderstorm which graciously walked me home.