Jerome Robbins Exhibit Opens Today, 3/25 at NYPL!

Among the most celebrated choreographers of his time, Jerome Robbins belonged to New York. His work showcased the grit and the glory of the city through populist masterpieces such as West Side Story and On the Town, and moved fluidly between ballet and Broadway with technical artistry and vernacular energy. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts presents the first major retrospective of the man and the city he loved: New York Story: Jerome Robbins and His World, which explores Robbins' work and the many overlapping New York worlds that met in it. The exhibition draws from the library's collections of Robbins' personal archives, and the vast majority of the materials on display have never been seen by the public.

The exhibition, commemorating the tenth anniversary of Robbins' death, is on view from March 25, 2008 to June 28, 2008 in the Donald and Mary Oenslager Gallery of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, 40 Lincoln Center Plaza.

Scores of personal papers, drawings, set and costume designs, letters, notes on characters and costumes, and photographs are on display, along with costumes from Fancy Free and other legendary works, posters, a virtually complete collection of window cards from Robbins' Broadway shows and admiring notes from the likes of Igor Stravinsky, Leonard Bernstein and Irving Berlin. His early flirtation with left-leaning themes is documented, along with testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. All items are drawn from the extensive holdings of the Library's Jerome Robbins Dance Division, Billy Rose Theatre Collection and the Library for the Performing Arts Music Division, along with the collections of ballet companies, libraries, museums and private individuals across the city and beyond.

Robbins (1918-1998) was one of the first great American choreographers and a proud son of New York City. Born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz into a family that owned a Harlem delicatessen, he spent much of his childhood in Weehawken, New Jersey, but returned to Manhattan as a young man.  In both ballet and Broadway he made the city's landscape and kinetic pulse a living presence. He celebrated the ordinary – sailors on leave during World War II in Fancy Free and On the Town (both 1944), teenaged victims of racism in West Side Story (1957) and Old World families in Fiddler on the Roof (1964). He commemorated the city through landmarks like the Flatiron Building and slums and half-razed neighborhoods where lovers met on rusting fire escapes. Robbins relished the city's promise of unexpected romance and the exhilarating energy of its streets, its native gestures and glorious accents of New Yorkese.

"Over the years, Jerome Robbins was extraordinarily generous to the Library's Dance Division and we wanted to mark the tenth anniversary of his death with a comprehensive exhibition," said Jacqueline Z. Davis, the Barbara G. and Lawrence A. Fleischman Executive Director of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. "Among the Library's many connections to Jerome Robbins is one of the locations for the movie version of West Side Story, which was partially filmed on the site of what became the Library for the Performing Arts."

Jerome Robbins had a long history of supporting The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. In 1964, the Library established a film and video archive of dance with an endowment set up by Robbins using a percentage of his royalties as author from Fiddler on the Roof. Robbins bequeathed his personal collection to the Library upon his death in 1998, and the following year, the Dance Collection was renamed the Jerome Robbins Dance Division.

The exhibition includes materials spanning Robbins' entire career, from a sketch he made of one of his first original dances, Strange Fruit (1939), to his early 1950s testimony naming names before the House Un-American Activities Committee, to rehearsal photographs of his acclaimed retrospective, Jerome Robbins' Broadway (1989). The materials highlight his early career as a dancer, his close relationship with George Balanchine, and his famous reputation for brutal candor. But they also show a soft, generous and funny side that won people over.

Henri Cartier-Bresson thanked Robbins "with all my gratitude for your patience" in a photograph inscription from the 1950s. And composer Robert Prince wrote, "This is to certify that Jerome Robbins is a mensch," as part of a collage he delivered to the choreographer after the opening night of Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad on Feb. 26, 1962.

The exhibition is rich with materials exploring Robbins' influences and preoccupations as a youth. Photographs portray an idyllic childhood family trip to the Polish shtetl village of Rozhanka, which influenced Fiddler on the Roof. A fascinating sketch Robbins made in the late 1930s on the Weehawken ferry, titled The Story, shows his acute attention to the human form, with the postures of seated ferry passengers brought into high relief, and almost all other details about them, including their faces, obliterated.  Location scouting shots for West Side Story show colorful Manhattan spots such as Chinatown, public pools, docks and demolition sites.

Numerous papers, drawings, designs and photographs illustrate Robbins' spectacular career in ballet choreography, in companies such as the [American] Ballet Theatre (Fancy Free, 1944), the New York City Ballet (The Cage, 1951, Afternoon of a Faun, 1953, Dances at a Gathering, 1969), and his own Ballets: U.S.A. (N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz, 1958).

Although Robbins was reluctant for his works to be televised and videotaped, the exhibition includes numerous rare or little-known recordings of his dances and Broadway pieces, particularly on Ed Sullivan shows from the late 1950s and early 1960s. One of the earliest recordings of his work is a 1949 appearance on Ed Sullivan's show Toast of the Town, from his 1948 musical, Look Ma, I'm Dancing. An excerpt from a performance of the Goldberg Variations, recorded by the Jerome Robbins Dance Division with its original cast just weeks after its preview, features a very young Gelsey Kirkland.

Notable photos depict Robbins and Leonard Bernstein rehearsing On the Town (1944), Robbins with members of Ballets: USA, and New York City Ballet works including the Goldberg Variations (1971) and avant-garde Watermill (1972).

"This exhibition revealed to me to what extent Robbins was an artist in every aspect of his life," said the show's curator, Lynn Garafola, professor of dance at Barnard College. "I didn't know him as a visual artist or a photographer. Robbins sought to surround himself with beauty -- in his homes, his interiors, in the objects he collected. This aesthetic sense infused everything he did on stage.

"The Jerome Robbins Dance Division contains an enormous range and depth of materials relating to the great figures of the dance world," said Professor Garafola. "The Robbins archive, combined with collections relating to many other dance greats such as Lincoln Kirstein and Agnes de Mille, provide powerful insights into the Robbins legacy."

New York Story: Jerome Robbins and His World is on display from March 25, 2008 through June 28, 2008 in the Donald and Mary Oenslager Gallery of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, 40 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York. Hours are Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.; Monday and Thursday from 12:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. and Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Admission is free. For more information, call 212-592-7730 or visit www.nypl.org.