28. Revels: Jerome Robbins and “Parasite” reviewed by Pippa Hammet
While we wait for the N.S.A. to give permission for Louise to form her own espionage cyberunit, and while we indulge Albertine and Paco in their on-going strike, and while I string along Mr. Xu for U.S.-Chinese cultural exchange against all the odds, my dear employer has formed a book study group (me, Mme Sesostris, Belle, and Louise herself). Our first volume for discussion at Ebersdorf Tower will be Jerome Robbins, by Himself (Knopf, 2019), a hefty tome at 430 pages. We ladies do not make it easy on ourselves. In the meantime, Louise and Cheryl have received communications from a French ballet entrepreneur, Mme Liane Beach, who wants to pay up front for exclusive rights for Cheryl’s services! She wants to buy Louise out, so to speak, or become a co-producer. Mme Beach is willing to underwrite non-production of our prodigy’s choreography in order to guarantee Cheryl’s first major dance work for Beach’s Parisian-based ensemble, Le Swing.
Louise is, of course, deeply suspicious of anything that hails from Paris, understandably after her experience with A&P and the defunct Ebersdorf Ballet, but she’s listening to Beach’s argument nevertheless. (“We can sometimes learn from those crafty Frogs,” she confided between Skypings.) It seems the present Parisienne also commands a database called Terpnet with which she aims to control the choreographic market around the world. By selectively suppressing new production, Beach claims to be able to increase the rates for the services of “hot” dance makers, rather in the way the art industry has raised prices through calculated unavailability of product. Whenever Terpnet purchases rights to a choreographer, the artist is thereafter known as “a Beachhead”. Approached by Beach, dear Cheryl’s immediate response was, “I just don’t want to end up on TikTok!” To which La Beach answered, “You must be premiered either in Paris or New York. There are no other choices. Your only decision is: how and in what style? In the meantime, we impose a balletic dopamine fast: calculated deprivation.” And, of course, the Parisians would like to reopen our darkened Ebersdorf theater, The Louise, as the venue for their company’s New York debut. In the meantime, only studio showings would be allowed for Cheryl -- nothing public. Beach mentioned six figures to secure first rights: Big Money.
Beach claims that the worst thing a young choreographer can do is to have her work presented promiscuously at “museums” like Paris Opera Ballet, New York City Ballet, or American Ballet Theatre, since no visiting artist signed by those ensembles is guaranteed anything beyond what she calls “dog act” publicity and evanescent support. (Even the “resident choreographers” allied with such cultural white elephants end up as specialty numbers alongside predictable items from standard repertory. It’s a Teflon relation.) Beach says she and Terpnet are the prime alternatives to planned obsolescence and industrialized “innovation”. No one wants to end up like Zak Posen.
Cheryl and Sandy say there may be something to Beach’s idea of delayed debut. After all, why else do downtown types spend years on “movement studies” instead of making real dances, if not to inflate their reputations and demand a munificent reward when they eventually “go legit”? Take Trisha Brown’s career arc, for example: decades of dedicated “experimentation” and then toward the end – opera productions? Talk about the dance of the seven veils!
Beach insists that the only way to combat the rampant inflation of tyro careers in the current market is to plan carefully every step in one’s early output – including paid inactivity and calculated shifts in style – just like Picasso beyond his Montmartre period. Beach thus advises fighting market forces with global oversight and strategic scheduling. She clearly wants an American protégé and might grant a big business arrangement with her U.S. rival, Louise, perhaps even share-and-share alike. This of course casts our New York girl as a player. I suspect that this is why Louise is listening.
Cheryl’s first loyalty is to our Lulu, so there have been lots of emails over the last few days. The question is, at this point does Cheryl want to make a fortune doing nothing? What happens to her Nekomata video? There is talk of showing it (if and when finished) with no fanfare at a tiny Chelsea gallery – a very sneaky preview for the elect! And is Louise willing to share her discovery and her theater? Our boss loves to string people along, so an outcome may not be forthcoming immediately. And Beach obviously has her own big picture in mind; she is positioning herself as an arts power broker now and for the future. She has asked Cheryl to look at a 1954 Hollywood movie, Johnny Guitar, as a possibility for a full-length ballet for Le Swing. Beach has even mentioned a planned tour of her dancers to New York. If our young genius signs with Beach, Cheryl’s work would potentially open at The Louise. I try to look sympathetic to everything and everyone during the discussions. And I take lots of notes. I do wonder what Albertine and Paco would make of these developments?
Now to our readings and my report. Louise believes that Jerome Robbins took the basic idea for his first ballet Fancy Free (1943) from the knockabout humor of the three sailors in the Ethel Merman Broadway musical comedy, Panama Hattie (1940). What is attractive about this theory is that it would mean the great Merman helped to define the full scope of this director-choreographer’s Broadway career, since he would eventually help to present her in Gypsy (1959), bringing her Broadway career to a triumphant close under his direction. Robbins went on to stage the pseudo-folk Fiddler on the Roof with great financial success, but the inspiration-to-farewell arc of the Merman Muse Theory entices, marking an epoch from Cole Porter to Jule Styne when Robbins was Broadway’s master of the revels. Louise is so savvy.
Jerome Robbins, by Himself consists of letters, journal entries, self-directed memos and notes, excerpts from scenarios realized or left as works in process, jotted scraps and illustrative desiderata. The two worlds covered by the book are the years of staging Broadway musical shows and the Robbins’ oeuvre dedicated to the academic dance, especially at New York City Ballet. Best of all (and reason enough to pour over the book) are the candid photographs that Robbins took of family, friends, lovers, and colleagues, over the decades. His subjects look at the lens in generous self-revelation, including great love for the man behind the camera. But somehow this kind of transparency and admiration was not enough for Robbins.
The book reveals the choreographer-director to have been one of those artists who are generally miserable in their private lives, however much they contribute to the amusement of nations.
Which is ironic because outside of the lengthy career of George Abbott, no director of local musical entertainments was so dependable for giving a show an uplifting rhythm, blithe humor, dramatic point, and overall shape. From On the Town to Fiddler, Robbins was a master architect as a stage director. Not only did he construct and fill his own strong edifices, but also he bolstered, often uncredited, the theatrical work of others, doctoring incoming shows from The Pajama Game to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. The world-wide success of the film of West Side Story spread his name internationally. But even this fame did not make Robbins contented with his achievements. How to explain this personal dissatisfaction?
Robbins’ reputation among the connoisseurs of theatrical craft built to the point that he was held in the highest esteem, especially by European theater writers, who often spoke of him alongside Jerzy Grotowski and Peter Brook. Perhaps it was the local absence of such critical appreciation, especially for his directorial skills in the American theater, that rankled. (Where, indeed, is there a substantive native critical text on this type of supervening artistry?) As a result, the world of ballet always beckoned as a haven, and Robbins replied with works like Afternoon of a Faun, The Concert, and Ives Songs. Overseas, the French especially praised the “American” art of Robbins’ ballets. (One quakes to imagine what that might mean.) But, perhaps because of the growing international reputation of George Balanchine, Robbins persisted in downgrading his own achievements at NYCB.
The unhappiness of the man may have led to a series of backstage stories (some undocumented) portraying his mistreatment of his theatrical colleagues, including identifying Communist alliances before H.U.A.C., scenes of bad temper toward assumed enemies, and jealous retribution toward favorites. The present volume contains evidence of painful guilt over homosexual liaisons, self-hatred for his Jewish middle-class background, feelings of artistic failure and general inauthenticity, and a tendency to take to heart negative criticism of his ballets in the U.S. press. The result was a nervous breakdown in the 1970s which placed Robbins in a mental institution and led to considerations of suicide. The detailed journal entries on temptations toward self-destruction are sobering.
What is particularly striking in the present volume is the absence of any sustained analysis of the work methods and theoretical approaches Robbins may have used in the practice of his craft. His mind does not appear to have worked verbally toward generalization about the arts of direction or dance-making. This does not mean necessarily that he was merely intuitive in his procedures. He may have kept such considerations in constant flux, as new challenges to his skills presented themselves. He may have not wished to share his thoughts on means. His summary rejection of Doris Humphries’ The Art of Making Dances shows his sensitivity to potential misrepresentation of the full range of options available to directors and choreographers – how easily they can be simplified in the telling toward methodology. Also, humor was a strong component of Robbins’ art, and humor is difficult to analyze in words. Perhaps the present editor, Amanda Vaill, has omitted such writings in her selection from the available materials, but somehow I doubt it. Robbins was a man with many mental demons. The miracle is that he produced as much fine stage work as he accomplished against the odds. Where would today’s Broadway be without Gypsy for regular revival? (Where will Broadway be after the Anne Teresa de Keersmaker version of West Side Story?)
Robbins helped bring the classic Broadway musical to its endgame, following the great period from 1915-1940 (pre-Oklahoma!). He missed working on the landmark productions of Berlin, Kern, Gershwin, Porter, and Rodgers and Hart. There is a story (not in the present book) that Robbins and Balanchine agreed that the success of Jesus Christ Superstar (1971) was a sign that Broadway had become no longer a place for serious work. Earlier, Balanchine had turned down his ballet company’s participation in the use of State Theater for productions of Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals. “Larry Hart – he was the important one there,” Mr. B is said to have responded to explain his demurral. Robbins took a secondary role at NYCB as refuge and safe harbor.
In a sense, this supporting role was a poisoned chalice because any choreographer working with Balanchine’s dancers had to accept a dance idiom formed through that ballet master’s repertory and continuing invention, a style passed down the generations by graduates of the School of American Ballet. There was no opportunity for retraining the dancers that Robbins inherited from the ground up. This problem continues today when NYCB brings in choreographic outsiders and gives them an equivalent brief. The inevitable result is weak-tea imports. Robbins’ contributions to the company’s rep have to be seen in that light. He was not making ballets for his own company. Beyond the brief life of Ballets U.S.A., Robbins never had a company of his own with which to develop a movement idiom. (I’m thinking of idioms like those developed over time by Paul Taylor and Merce Cunningham in the modern dance field.) This lack may have contributed to Robbins’ admiration for Twyla Tharp, who certainly had a unique way of moving and who has explored it over many years.
This absence of idiomatic development may have added to Robbins’ sense of choreographic inauthenticity. It certainly makes most new work at today’s descendant of NYCB have an ersatz feel. Is there a Robbins idiom in ballet? Beyond its humanistic outline (real people having real relations with one another in real stage time), what is the movement language which he left to be explored by subsequent dance makers? In West Side Story, certain of the central dances (“Mambo”, perhaps much of “Cool”, and the film’s expanded version of “America”) were indebted to co-choreographer Peter Gennaro, who sometimes went uncredited. Robbins was the final editor, but the movement idiom was often borrowed. This is why admirers of Robbins’ dances regularly refer to the “Robbins touch” rather than to his dance language. The choreography in a Robbins show or ballet was an emanation of mise-en-scène rather than developed stand-alone statements. The Robbins project was often reliant on a larger architecture to which dance opportunistically hitched a ride, more evidence that Robbins was primarily a theatrical director rather than an originating source of new choreographic ideas. As he put it at his most tortured point, he could be taken as little more than a “flash kid”.
Which brings me to a new film that Master Raro and I caught at Lincoln Center: a South Korean movie entitled Parasite, directed by Joon-ho Bong. It deals with the members of a lower-class family in Seoul who exist through cheap manual work and organized scams. They infiltrate the modern home of a wealthy family, the Parks, whose head is portrayed as a self-satisfied, unloving snob. The first half of the movie consists of each indigent (father, mother, daughter, son) replacing through deception the maid, the chauffeur, and the former tutors in the Park home. There is a long sequence when the householders go away on a motor trip and the usurpers throw a celebratory revel: the underclass becomes a parody of the leisured middle class for a single boozy evening. But a mid-film plot twist (which I will not reveal) sends the movie into a new, violent direction that skewers further the economic disparities in today’s South Korea. The film’s unsparing humor and shifting points of view reminded me of Brian De Palma’s dark sense of satire.
The issue I would like to bring up is the character of the lower-class daughter, Kim Ki-jung (played by So-dam Park), who becomes the tutor of the youngest member of the Park family, Da-song (played by Hyun-jun Jung). At the end of the film, Ki-jung is brutally killed, and my question is: why does she have to be a victim within the logic of the movie’s narrative? My theory is that her young pupil, Da-song, represents the relation of the artistic impulse to private trauma. The boy has seen what he took to be a ghost at an early point in his childhood, and his sympathetic new tutor encourages his youthful artistry as a kind of therapy through drawings, paintings, and imaginative adventures in an American Indian teepee. When the specifics of the childhood trauma reassert themselves at the end of Parasite, the services of the tutor have either fulfilled themselves or perhaps allowed the child to free himself of traumatic effect. (Master insists that maybe a spectral repetition merely carves the trauma in stone – reinforcing or obviating the child’s artistic bent.) In any case, there appears to be a link between the irrational and the artistic that may allow the deceptive Kim Ki-jung to complete her tutorial services to the young artist through her sacrifice before the imposition of a “ghostly” reality-principle. Perhaps the movie is saying that art itself has a parasitic relation to social and economic realities. A sacrifice of some sort may be inevitable in such a dependent relation. It takes a strong aesthetic constitution to face such a possibility, and not all artists may be able to handle such a stern realization. (Perhaps Jerome Robbins was one such artist.) Master Raro liked Parasite very much. I am still thinking through the film’s implications.
Master has informed me of some kind of nocturnal activity in the studio-lab downstairs on the 35th floor of our Tower. He has requested my discretion in keeping this quiet for the moment. The French appear to be at our gates as well as within our very walls. I will have to get details. More to come.
P.H.
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