DISCUSSION QUESTIONS TO OPEN THE CONVERSATION, BEGIN BY ASKING: 1. Jerome Robbins was once a household name; is it still so today? Which of his works have survived in the popular imagination, and why? How does the fact that his name has faded somewhat from popular memory reflect the ephemerality of dance itself? 2. Jerome Robbins is the author of both the ballet The Goldberg Variations and the musical Peter Pan. Was he a popular or a highbrow artist, or a bit of both? And if the latter, how did he combine these sensibilities? 3. When a choreographer begins a new dance, he or she is faced with a studio, a few dancers, and little else except the music. How does the music help guide the choreography? How do the two support and enlarge each other? 4. How do Robbins’s dances reflect his desire to see real people, not just performers, onstage, and how did Robbins go about producing this effect? 5. Robbins was not an abstract artist—he was drawn to stories and narrative. How did this differentiate him from other choreographers of his era, and how is this reflected in his works? 6. How did Robbins’s anxieties and complexes about being gay and about being Jewish affect the trajectory of his life and of his art?
OVERTURE 1. Wendy Lesser describes Jerome Robbins as “the most hated man on Broadway.” How and why did he acquire this reputation, and what were some of the causes behind this tendency to mistreat and manipulate his collaborators? 2. Robbins was a dancer, a choreographer, a director of musicals and prose theater, and co-director of films. He also drew, wrote, and made collages. How did all these facets of his identity and talent coalesce into the artist that he would become? 3. In what way does Jerome Robbins’s upbringing and education reflect the cultural and social aspirations of his Jewish, immigrant parents in early twentieth-century New York?
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