Last night, I had the pleasure of spending the evening at the School of American Ballet, the feeder school for New York City Ballet, talking with Megan Fairchild, a principal dancer and alumnus of the school who’s now starting to teach there. We were there to speak to the Ballet Connoisseurship seminar, an adult lecture series about ballet choreography, technique, and history. The topic of the evening was Ballet and Broadway, and we spent a lot of the evening talking about Megan’s experience performing in the 2014 revival of On the Town, in which she played Ivy Smith, aka Miss Turnstiles.
On the Town grew out of a ballet called Fancy Free, and both were choreographed by Jerome Robbins, who would go on to choreograph basically every musical you love - West Side Story, Gypsy, Fiddler on the Roof - as well as 54 ballets for New York City Ballet. Megan spent the evening fielding questions from me and the audience about what it’s like to go from dancing in pointe shoes to dancing in three-inch heels, and the difference between dancing two shows a week and dancing eight.
Right before the seminar, I had dinner with my favorite dance teacher, and as she dropped me off at SAB and gave me a quick hug she said, “Oh, Jerome Robbins threw a chair at my mentor.”
Apparently, her mentor, a former City Ballet dancer, has a “Jerry threw a chair at me” story that he’s told her several times. And even though I’ve never met her mentor, I believe it.
Robbins was famously, infamously, “difficult.” He was “demanding” and “hard-driving.” He was all the words we use to describe talented men who treat the people around them - and especially the people underneath them in a power structure - like crap.
Here’s what I said in my remarks last night, treading carefully because I was at the company where Robbins made those 54 ballets.
No biography of Robbins is complete without noting that the man was difficult to work for and with. He was notorious for blowing deadlines and blowing budgets, and blowing his top at dancers in the studio. He’s often described as “demanding,” “perfectionistic,” “a taskmaster,” and in my research, I’ve found contemporaneous accounts from dancers and other observers who use much stronger language than that. It is true, of course, that the work he produced was often excellent, and sometimes genuinely revolutionary or game-changing. And it’s also important to consider what the experience of working with him was like for the dancers who found themselves on the receiving end of his temper or his less than kind treatment.
Except very few people do consider it, not really. When Robbins is remembered, it’s as a genius first, a man who threw insults (and sometimes chairs) second, and then a genius again. On my way to New York, I watched the documentary Fiddler: Miracle of Miracles, in which Stephen Sondheim says in no uncertain terms that working with Robbins (on West Side Story) was absolutely awful, and that any amount of suffering was worth it for the work Robbins produced.
This framing - he was brilliant, and yes, he was a nightmare, but oh, what genius! - isn’t just a product of the 1970s or 1980s. Just last year, the New York Post ran a story about how badly Robbins treated his dancers and actors, and the headline was: “Actors recall living in fear of Jerome Robbins — yet dying to work with him.”
In the name of art, he’d make actors and dancers go through their paces again and again, often screaming at them and hurling insults.
“Jerry not only attacked you, he attacked your family, your background, where you lived, how you lived, who you studied with,” Tony Mordente, a “West Side Story” cast member, told biographer Greg Lawrence.
Yet Mordente and many other stars say they owe their careers to him.
This is a familiar narrative, the tortured genius who treats the people who love him and work with him terribly, but who is redeemed by the quality of his work: it’s basically every biopic of a man you’ve ever seen. In the name of art.
We wave bad behaviour away when it’s accompanied by brilliance, and we’ve been doing it so long that we’ve convinced ourselves not only that the brilliance is worth the bad behaviour, but that you almost can’t have the brilliance without it. Real geniuses, we tell ourselves, are assholes.
It’s a lie, of course, and one that mostly serves men, whose outbursts are so often treated as signs of passion or commitment. It’s just a lie that you can’t be brilliant and kind, or at least not-abusive, at the same time. The truth is, if you can’t do great work and also treat your workers well… well, maybe your work isn’t actually great.
That’s all for this week. For those of you who are staring down Nutcracker season - as teachers, parents, or dancers - I wish you strength. Thanks for reading.