When Jerome Robbins died on July 29, 1998, at the age of seventy-nine, the world lost not one choreographer, but two. One of these choreographers was a genius.

This was the Jerome Robbins who choreographed thirteen Broadway shows—leg- end among them On the Town, The King and I, Peter Pan, Gypsy, and Fiddler on the Roof. This was the Robbins who conceived, directed, and choreographed West Side Story, the musical and film phenomenon that had every baby-boomer boy in America attempting that chesty Jets leap, that T (for testosterone) in the air. And this was the Robbins of Fancy Free, a ballet whose character— down-to-earth, free of classical pretensions is captured forever in its title.

In fact, Fancy Free was Robbins’s birth cry, his c’est moi. Though he studied widely--modern dance, ethnic, and ballet in the 1930s—and had worked with the Yiddish Art Theater, it was in this comic ballet about three sailors on leave that he burst upon the scene complete, with a choreographic voice so clear and confident, so cut-to-the-chase concise that you’d never guess it was a first anything. Writing of Fancy Free’s 1944 premiere at American Ballet Theatre, the critic Edwin Denby said of the smash hit, “Its sentiment of how people live in this country is completely intelligent and completely realistic.” More importantly, “The whole number is as sound as a superb vaudeville turn; in ballet terminology it is perfect American character ballet.”

Fancy Free was a masterpiece of sexy-slangy storytelling—John O’Hara meets Jack Cole—and such a concentration of gesture and energy, high hopes and humor, that one year later it was actually opened out into a musical. Robbins and Fancy Free’s composer, a young unknown named Leonard Bernstein, along with the librettists Comden and Green, turned it into On The Town. Imagine, a Broadway musical born from a twenty-minute ballet!

The inverse was possible too. In 1951, for The King and I, Robbins choreographed “The Small House of Uncle Thomas,” a dance-pantomime that pinpoints the musical’s theme of slavery versus freedom. It is fixed in the musical like an exquisite bird in a golden cage, yet, in memory, it floats free, its own world with its own beating heart. In his heroine’s escape--“run-Eliza-run, run from Simon”—Robbins burns that beating heart into the ear and eye. And he does this with a stress of brilliant simplicity: Eliza moves by hopping on one bare foot, the other flexed in Hinduese behind her. It is a childlike hopscotch, a crippled skip of flight—all tightrope-taut within a Siam silhouette of bent limbs and splayed fingers. Here is Robbins’s poetic gift in full display: a synthesis that is kinetic and true. For sheer, formal terror on the dance stage, the zigzagging bloodhounds of Simon have it over the evil fairy Carabosse of Sleeping Beauty. Well, Robbins understood tyrants. He himself was a mythic monster in the studio, driving dancers into the crosshairs of his perfectionism.

Robbins went back and forth between Broadway and ballet (he choreographed a little for ABT, a lot for NYCB, where he became a ballet master in 1969), and his best work reads on any stage. In 1995, when New York City Ballet decided to present Robbins’s dances from West Side Story— a suite he’d arranged for Jerome Robbins’ Broadway (1988), a show of Robbins’s greatest Broadway hits—there was disdain among the Kremlinologists. George Balanchine, they grumbled, had never seen fit to put these dances on his stage (he objected, I think, to boys in blue jeans). And yet West Side Story was the rocket blast of the 1995 season (and each season since), and not just because Robbins had rehearsed it within an inch of its life, or that the dancers brought a hot-blooded, rumbling joy to their roles as Jets, Sharks, and chicks. Robbins worked a stunning opposition into the choreography: absolutely explosive displays of sexual, territorial energy, but trapped within the dynamics of popular dance (mambas, cha-chas, jazz contractions, beatnik shrugs), and so luminously constructed that you saw everything—wide shot, zoom-in, switchblade.

It was thrilling to see those ballet boys in blue jeans, lifting into those huge T’s in their fresh T-shirts. The dances weren’t arty; they weren’t dated. They were vivid with social jitters to which rap kids could relate. “I would guess that in a few decades,” wrote the film critic Pauline Kael in a famously scathing review of 1963, “the dances in West Side Story will look as much like hilariously limited, dated period pieces as Busby Berkeley’s ‘Remember the Forgotten Man’ number in Gold Diggers of 1933.” She guessed wrong. This is perfect American character ballet—and its audience is alive.

The other Jerome Robbins was the choreographer who turned his back on Broadway in the late 1960s. This artist was tired of the endless fight and compromise that came with any enterprise involving big-bucks egos. What Robbins wanted was to choreograph in a situation where he had sole control of the dance. A ballet company offered this. He was also, I believe, searching, reaching, for a choreographic voice that had thus far eluded him, a voice that would not be qualified as “character ballet,” but was classical.

What Robbins did not possess as a choreographer was apparent in his second ballet, Interplay (1945). It had the sort of plotless-plot Robbins would return to again and again—youngish dancers joshing around, playing with classical steps in a communal bubble of vague emotional temperature. Just as Denby declared what was so bold and right about Fancy Free, he fingered what Robbins was missing in Interplay: “In point of expression he has difficulty in the complete transformation of specific pantomime images into the large and sweeping rhythm and images of direct dancing.”

This is a rather abstract distinction, but what Denby means is that Robbins was grafting images onto his ballet, not drawing them out. It was synthetic versus organic. Classical dancing is its own growing language of shape, shadow, and blossoming intonation: a language that does not require synthesis with other dance forms (though it can accommodate other forms), but longs to meet its maker in a mystic commingling of arabesques, metaphors, and sighs. To see this way is a peculiar imaginative gift—the proverbial baiser de la fée—and you have it or you don’t. Robbins possessed the steps, adopted the classical etiquette, had formal facility to spare, and was superb within the framework of beginning-middle-and-end (The Cage; Afternoon of a Faun; The Concert; Ives, Songs). But the secret meanings, the poetic-infinite—this was beyond him. He had not been kissed.

But how he strived to reach that plane. There were the acclaimed, ambitious, “pure” works like Dances at a Gathering (1969) and Goldberg Variations (1971)—graceful, large-scale “interplays” to Chopin and Bach, ballets in which long length seems to speak for their seriousness. They are sleek, yet slow-going, beautifully fluent, but not quite rich or deep. Take Watermill, which Robbins choreographed for Edward Villella in 1972. A presage of Robert Wilson, it is another experiment in duration, only this time a Zen time-bend in which Villella hardly moves. Again, no breakthrough.

Robbins’s frustrations were never more apparent than in his final collaboration with Leonard Bernstein. Balanchine’s great collaborator had been Igor Stravinsky, and, in a smaller, narrower vein, Bernstein was Robbins’s. The two were well aware of Balanchine and Stravinsky above them—never more so than in their work on West Side Story. While all the talk focused on its being a contemporary version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the musical’s aesthetic precedent could be found in Stravinsky. Bernstein detonated his score with the screams and implosions of Le Sacre du printemps, and Robbins worked the social spasms of Nijinsky’s peasants into his gang dances. West Side Story is less a tale of love than a tale of tribes (at first, Maria was not Puerto Rican; she was Jewish).

In 1974, at NYCB, Robbins and Bernstein premiered Dybbuk, a ballet based on a classic of the Jewish theater, a magico-religious ghost story. In his book Thirty Years: The New York City Ballet, Lincoln Kirstein devotes four pages of psychoanalysis to Robbins’s work on Dybbuk, focusing on his obsession with abstraction. “The first performance passed well enough,” writes Kirstein:  

Soon after, instead of building onto present elements, Robbins commenced cutting. It was as if he were unable to make the work “abstract” enough, as if some dybbuk were pursuing him. I admit I never saw need for abstraction… . While the music was drawn powerfully from ethnic material, and dance steps could hardly resist following Bernstein’s domineering pulse, there was a constant if almost haphazard effort to strip the action of any shred of literal legibility.

It was compulsive self-sacrifice, Robbins rending his own magical storytelling, his gift, as if in some bargain with the patriarchs, an initiation rite into a mystic circle. Dybbuk was finally shelved because Bernstein got fed up with Robbins’s changes. And Robbins, probably the wealthiest choreographer who ever lived, a success in so many wonderful ways but not the way he wanted, went on. He made a total of sixty-six ballets.

Robbins was drawn to Bach in his last years. It was not an obvious match, but Robbins seemed at home in this bubble, happy to answer this stern voice of trills and ringlets. Robbins’s last ballet, Brandenburg, was premiered in 1997 and was again overlong, with the old coyness of Interplay reading faux in a choreographer of seventy-eight. Three years earlier, in 1994, Robbins made a showpiece for students at the School of American Ballet. This work, 2 & 3 Part Inventions, took facility as its subject— Bach’s and Robbins’s—and treated the students not as kooky kids in daisy chains, but as young artists in search of maturity, testing technique for its poetry. Robbins’s desire to the very end, that ceaseless reaching, was a deep bow to the art of ballet.