The Complicated Robbins

“By all accounts Jerome Robbins was a complicated, sometimes joyful, sometimes tortured, often angry man, so it is no surprise that his reputation remains complex. At his best, at least, Robbins managed to bend classical dancers and steps to his purposes. However uneven his ballets may have been — and Balanchine had some clunkers too — there are those of us who remain deeply moved by Robbins’s greatest late ballets: those made after he had rejoined the City Ballet fold in 1969, the prodigal son, and was working in a largely classical idiom with Balanchine-trained dancers.”