The Concert
Jerome Robbins made his comic masterpiece, ``The Concert, or, The Perils of Everybody: A Charade in One Act'' in 1956 for New York City Ballet, revised it for his own troupe, Ballets: USA, and later kept the revisions as well as the bright Saul Steinberg drop curtain for the production, with costumes by Irene Sharaff. A dance comedy that isn't just cute or clever but downright hysterical, the choreography is loopy, following the actions and wandering thoughts of audience members gathered to hear a concert of Chopin. As the pianist begins to play a series of Chopin etudes, a cast of eccentrics one by one enters "the concert," each carting his or her own folding chair. There's the purist, the gabbing, paper-crackling pair of women who disturb his serenity, the timid nerd, and an ice-maiden wife and her crass, lecherous, cigar-chomping husband, a swooning music fan, a tough cookie, gum-chewers and foot-tappers. And most of all, there's the over-the-top ballerina wannabe who gavottes in and rests her arms and head on the piano. Then what happens is a dreamy reverie, in which each plays out his/her fantasy.
The whole affair grows unreal, with the husband ready to stab his wife to death, umbrellas needed for the ``Raindrop'' Prelude, a flock of butterflies circling the piano during the ``Butterfly'' Etude, and almost everyone trying to dance in step succeeding only in outrageously demolishing the loftiest conventions of classical ballet. All this happens faster than it is possible to describe.
Choreographer
Jerome Robbins is considered by many people to be the 20th century’s greatest American-born ballet choreographer. His unique style combines classical and modern dance, jazz, Broadway, social dancing, creative and complex partnering, and movements taken from everyday gestures.
Robbins was born in New York City on October 11, 1918. He graduated high school in 1935 and enrolled in New York University as a chemistry major, but had to drop out after one year because the family couldn’t afford the tuition. As a child he was interested in puppetry and eventually studied piano, violin, voice, and acting, as well as dance. His sister, Sonja, was a modern dancer.
He began his professional career as a dancer in a Broadway chorus line. He joined the corps de ballet on the newly formed American Ballet Theatre in 1940 and two years later became a soloist with the company. In 1944 he choreographed his first ballet, Fancy Free, a story about three sailors on leave in New York City and the girls they meet on a hot summer evening. The ballet was an instant success, combining classical ballet, popular dances of the day, and natural gestures in a way that was new to the world of ballet. Fancy Free was later expanded into a popular Broadway musical On the Town, the first of 16 Broadway shows that Robbins either choreographed or directed, including The King and I, Gypsy, Fiddler on the Roof, Peter Pan, and West Side Story. West Side Story, created in 1957, includes a “competition” at a teen dance that is reminiscent of the Team Play movement of Interplay.
During his long career Robbins created over 60 ballets, mostly for New York City Ballet, which George Balanchine had invited him to join in 1948. Among his most famous ballets are Interplay, Afternoon of a Faun, Dances at a Gathering, The Goldberg Variations, and The Concert.
Robbins won four Tony Awards, two Oscars, and in 1981 was given the prestigious Kennedy Center Award for his contribution to the world of dance. He died on July 29, 1998.
Composer
Frederic Chopin is often referred to as “The Poet of the Piano.” It’s said that no one understood the piano better than Chopin. He could make it sound romantic and poetic. Most of his pieces were short, but he could pour out a happy, sad, passionate, or dreamy melody that was perfect in terms of form and style.
Frederic Chopin was born on February 22, 1810 near Warsaw, Poland. His father, a tutor, was French and his mother, a piano teacher, was Polish. He first took piano lessons from his mother and by the age of six he was creating original music. His first composition, The Polonaise in B Flat, was written in 1817. His parents arranged for the young prodigy to take piano instruction from the Czech teacher, Wojciech Zywny. When he was 12, he took private composition lessons with Josef Elsner and a year later enrolled in the Warsaw Lyceum, where his father was a teacher, to study literature, music theory, singing, harmony, and drawing.
Both Zywny and Elsner were great influences on the young Chopin. Zywny taught him the works of Classical composers like Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, representatives of the “follow the rules” Classical Period with its focus on structure and form. At the same time he allowed young Frederic to explore the music of the emerging Romantic Period, with its emphasis on ideas and impressions, beauty, imagination, and feeling. Elsner did the same and, as a result, Chopin’s compositions were Romantically expressive and emotional, yet defined by a purity derived from the Classical Period before him.
Chopin, like many young musicians of his day, eventually went to Vienna, the center of music at that time. Unable to return to Warsaw because of a war, he eventually moved on to Paris where he became well-known as a pianist, composer, and teacher. While he was never able to return to his native Poland, he always kept a silver goblet filled with Polish soil by his side. He died at the age of 39 and was buried in Paris.
Rodeo about Choreographer and Composer
Choreographer and Cowgirl
Agnes de Mille was born in New York City in 1905. Her father, William, was a successful playwright and her mother, Anna, had a strong interest in art, music, and literature. Agnes’s uncle, Cecil B. de Mille was the most famous Hollywood movie producer and director of his day.
Agnes knew she wanted to be a dancer when she was five years old, but her parents would not let her take lessons. Her father thought that female dancers looked too much like acrobats and not ladylike enough. When Agnes was fourteen, a doctor recommended that her sister take dance lessons to strengthen her feet. Since the de Mille family always treated both sisters exactly the same, Agnes finally got her chance to study dance. She continued her lessons throughout her teenage years but thinking that she would never make it as a professional dancer, she also enrolled in college at UCLA and graduated with honors.
All the while, however, her greatest desire was to dance. After graduating from college, she spent the next several years auditioning unsuccessfully for Broadway shows and creating choreographic character sketches to demonstrate her skill for pantomime and comedy.
Although her infrequent dance recitals were enthusiastically received, she could not make a living with her art. She eventually went to London, on a loan from her sister, to further her studies in dance. After a year, her uncle the movie director asked her to come to California to choreograph the dance scenes for his epic motion picture, Cleopatra. Unfortunately, he hated her work and fired her.
In 1942, when she was thirty-seven, Agnes seriously considered leaving the world of dance. Instead, she auditioned for the chance to create and star in a ballet for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. America had recently entered World War II and the company wanted to add the novelty of an American ballet to their repertoire. They had already commissioned music for the piece from the American composer Aaron Copland. The company selected Agnes to be the choreographer and principal dancer. The result was Rodeo: The Courting at Burnt Ranch.
Rodeo captured the lives of real people doing real things. It tells the story of an awkward cowgirl who finally wins the heart of the champion roper at the big Saturday night dance. Using ordinary, everyday gestures and stylized movements, she devised steps that made the classically trained dancers look like bowlegged ranch hands riding horseback and lassoing steers. The ballet, with Agnes dancing in the lead role, was a sensation, receiving twenty-two curtain calls at the premier. Agnes de Mille was finally a star!
Agnes then moved on to revolutionize the use of dance in Broadway shows. Up until then, dance in Broadway shows was simply a chorus-line production that stopped the action of the play. When Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein hired her to choreograph Oklahoma! in 1943, she created dances that were totally integrated into the story. They related to the plot, expanded on the action, and illustrated the emotions of the characters.
For the next seventeen years, de Mille choreographed a number of Broadway shows that became classics of the American stage, including Brigadoon and Carousel, and also choreographed works for American Ballet Theatre. Eventually confined to a wheelchair, she continued to choreograph ballet until a year before her death in 1993.
…a uniquely American composer
Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 14, 1900. He was the youngest of five children. Like Agnes de Mille, Aaron knew what he wanted to do at a very young age. He was eleven when he realized that he liked music very much. “I want to study music,” he said, “I want to be a musician.” But, like Agnes, he was not encouraged to pursue his dream right away. He wanted to take music lessons, but because his mother’s four older children had all taken lessons and done nothing with their music, she did not want to spend the money. For that reason, Aaron did not begin to study music until he was thirteen or fourteen years old.
At that time he worked in his parents’ store and spent most of the money he made on music books and tickets to concerts at the Brooklyn Academy of Music where he first heard the great symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky. Before long, he wanted to learn how to make his own music and after he graduated from high school, he began to study music composition and orchestration. It was around this time that jazz was becoming popular. This new American music would influence Aaron’s later work.
Several years later, in 1921, Aaron was among the first American music students to go to France to attend the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau, near Paris. It was there that he met and studied with Nadia Boulanger, the teacher who would have the greatest influence on his work. Aaron returned to America in 1925, when he was 24, and took a summer job as a pianist with a trio that entertained guests at a hotel in Milford, Pennsylvania. But playing with the trio took too much time from his composition work, especially since his former teacher, Nadia Boulanger, was planning an American tour as an organist and had asked him to write a piece of music for her. The result was the Organ Symphony, for which Aaron received much praise.
Copland was now being recognized for his work as a composer and he received fellowships and commissions that enabled him to continue his work. His music began to show the influence of jazz and his Jazz Concerto was performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Aaron himself at the piano. Although critics praised this music as “uniquely American”, the public at large failed to respond and some members of the Boston audience even hissed.
In an effort to make his music more accessible to a wider audience, Copland began to focus on “functional” music...the music that you hear in movies, in the theatre, and in ballets. He wrote music for the films Of Mice and Men (1939) and Our Town (1940), and his Children’s Suite, The Red Pony, inspired a movie of its own. Between 1938 and 1944 he composed three ballets on American themes--Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring-- which established his reputation as a great American composer and earned him the Pulitzer Prize.
In both of his “Western” ballets, Billy the Kid and Rodeo, Copland used actual cowboy songs to give them an unmistakably American character. And just as Agnes de Mille was able to portray real people doing real things with her unique choreography, Copland captures the true spirit of the American West with his music.
Romeo & Juliet
Act I
It is just before dawn in the town of Verona. Romeo is standing in a garden pining for his new girlfriend, Rosaline, who teases him from the balcony of her house. Depressed because Rosaline will not come down to him, Romeo leaves the garden.
As the sun comes up, the town market place fills with people who have come to buy and sell vegetables, flowers, and fruits. Members of the town’s two rival families, the Montagues and Capulets, wander around the square.
Everyone is very merry, especially Romeo and his friends Mercutio and Benvolio, who enjoy showing off for the crowd. But when Mercutio accidentally bumps into a member of the Capulet family, a swordfight breaks out. Everyone joins in, including Tybalt, the hot-tempered young leader of the Capulets.
The marketplace is in pandemonium when the Prince of Verona appears. He orders a stop to the fighting and, at his insistance, the rivals unwillingly shake hands with one another.
When we first see Juliet, she is in her house, teasing her nurse. Juliet’s mother enters, carrying a beautiful dress for Juliet to wear to the ball that evening. When Juliet is silly and playful, her mother tells her it is time to act like a grownup.
In the evening, the ball guests gather outside the Capulet’s house. In the crowd are Romeo, Mercutio, and Benvolio who have decided to sneak into the ball. The three party crashers are wearing masks so that they won’t be recognized as members of the hated Montague family.
Inside the Capulet’s palace, all the richly clothed guests perform a slow and stately dance. When Juliet joins the ball, her parents introduce her to Paris, the man they have decided Juliet should marry.
Juliet is very shy, but her parents encourage her to dance with Paris. All the guests pause to watch admiringly as Juliet and Paris perform an elegant pas de deux. Eventually, everyone joins in the dancing again. As the guests move gracefully to the majestic music, Romeo and Juliet suddenly see each other across the crowded room and fall in love at first sight.
Romeo and Juliet are enthralled with each other but their romantic meeting is interrupted when Tybalt, who is Juliet’s cousin, recognizes Romeo, and angrily tries to make him leave the ball. Juliet’s father, who does not want his party ruined, forbids Tybalt to fight with Romeo, and the ball continues peacefully to its end.
Later that night, after the ball has ended, instead of sleeping Juliet goes out to her balcony to think about Romeo. Suddenly, Romeo himself appears in the garden below. Juliet joins him and standing together in the garden they declare their eternal love for one another and agree to be married.
Act II
It is the day after the Capulet’s ball and the marketplace is filled with townspeople who have come to enjoy the carnival. Festive lanterns decorate the marketplace and the townsfolk and gypsies amuse themselves with a boisterous, merry folk dance.
Romeo, Mercutio, and Benvolio enter the marketplace and are greeted cheerfully by the gypsies and townspeople. Romeo, who is daydreaming about Juliet, doesn’t even notice when Juliet’s nurse bustles into the square. She is carrying a letter and looking for Romeo. Mercutio and Benvolio take great delight in pointing out the wrong person when she asks for Romeo. Finally the nurse finds Romeo and gives him the letter. He is overjoyed…Juliet will marry him and is waiting for him at the church. Together with the nurse, he leaves to find her.
Friar Laurence has agreed to marry Romeo and Juliet because he hopes their marriage will put an end to the long and senseless feud between their two families. Romeo and Juliet meet at Friar Laurence’s cell; he blesses them and performs the marriage ceremony.
Back at the marketplace, everyone is gaily dancing and showing off. Tybalt, who is determined to find Romeo and continue their fight from the night before, interrupts the happy mood. When Romeo enters the market, Tybalt throws his glove at Romeo’s feet, challenging him to a duel. But Romeo, who is now secretly married to Tybalt’s cousin Juliet, returns the glove and instead offers Tybalt his hand in friendship.
Everyone, especially Tybalt, is astonished at Romeo’s behavior. In Verona, a Montague has never offered to be friends with a Capulet. Mercutio, however, is more than happy to step in and provide Tybalt with a fight. Tybalt fights seriously but Mercutio clowns around, kissing the gypsies and showing off for the crowd between sword thrusts.
When Mercutio is stabbed by Tybalt’s sword, he tries to pretend that he is all right, but everyone can see that he is mortally wounded. Romeo is distraught and enraged by Mercutio’s death. He grabs a sword, fights Tybalt furiously, and kills him with a well-placed thrust. Juliet’s mother, Lady Capulet, enters the marketplace, sees that Tybalt has been killed, and becomes frantic with grief.
Everything has gone wrong: Romeo’s best friend, Mercutio, is dead; Juliet’s cousin, Tybalt, is dead—killed by Romeo himself. The feud between the Montagues and the Capulets has taken a hopelessly tragic turn.
Act III
It is nearly morning the next day. Romeo, who has been banished from Verona as punishment for killing Tybalt, has secretly spent the night with his new bride, Juliet. But now he must leave quickly, for if anyone catches him in the town he will be killed. The lovers dance a farewell pas de deux and then, just as the sun is about to rise, Romeo slips out of Juliet’s window and makes his escape.
Juliet hardly has time to cry when her nurse and her parents come into the bedroom with Paris, and announce that Juliet must marry him the next day. Of course, Juliet refuses. Her parents are angry and frustrated. Juliet doesn’t know what to do. She can’t marry Paris -- and she knows that her parents will never accept her marriage to Romeo! She decides to consult Friar Laurence, who comes up with a plan. He gives Juliet a special potion. When she drinks it she will fall into a deep, lifeless sleep. Her parents, thinking she is dead, will place her in the family tomb, and Friar Laurence will send a message to Romeo to come help Juliet escape with him from Verona.
Juliet returns to her room and tells her parents that she will marry Paris after all. But as soon as she is left alone, she drinks the sleeping potion. Her friends arrive to wake Juliet for the wedding and perform a beautiful dance to celebrate her marriage to Paris. But when Lady Capulet is unable to wake her, everyone believes she is dead.
Meanwhile, Romeo does not receive Friar Laurence’s secret message explaining the plan to prevent Juliet’s marriage to Paris. So when Romeo hears a report that Juliet is dead, he believes it and rushes to her tomb. He finds Paris there, mourning Juliet, and stabs him. Embracing his love one last time, he plunges his dagger into his own heart, and dies with Juliet in his arms.
When the effects of the sleeping potion finally wear off, Juliet awakens to find her sweet Romeo dead beside her. Grief-stricken, Juliet grabs Paris’ dagger and kills herself.
Romeo & Juliet about Choreographer, Composer and Author
John Cranko-Choreographer
John Cranko was born in South Africa in 1927. He was only sixteen when he choreographed his first work for the Cape Town Ballet Club. He later studied dance at the Sadler Wells Ballet School in London and became a member of the Sadler Wells Theatre Ballet in 1946, at the age of nineteen.
He immediately began staging works there and, in 1950, was named resident choreographer. Cranko achieved immense popularity with one of his first works for Sadler Wells, a comedy ballet called Pineapple Poll, which premiered in 1951. While in England, he staged over thirty dances, including his first full-length ballet, The Prince of the Pagodas, in 1957. In 1960, he staged The Prince of the Pagodas for the Stuttgart Ballet in Germany, and one year later, became their artistic director.
Here Cranko achieved what came to be known in the ballet world as “The Stuttgart Miracle,” turning Stuttgart Ballet into a world-class company with an exciting and vital repertory. He sought out and hired dancers from 21 different countries, some of whom were considered rejects by other major ballet companies. Many of the classical ballet troupes of the past had been based on the principle that, in terms of their size and shape, all of the dancers should match a certain predetermined ideal of what a ballet dancer should look like. Cranko preferred dancers with interesting individual attributes, and created ballets that capitalized on their differences, rather than trying to make everyone look the same.
This approach was considered revolutionary in the ballet world, yet the company’s first American tour in 1969 was a huge box office success, making Stuttgart the first ballet company to tap into the mass market.
Cranko died in 1973 on a plane travelling from Philadelphia to Stuttgart. He is regarded as one of the outstanding choreographers of his generation and a pivotal figure in the ballet boom of the 1960s.
Sergei Prokofiev - Composer
Born in the Ukraine on April 23, 1891, Sergei Prokofiev is one of the most popular Russian composers of the 20th century. His father was a successful businessman and his mother was an amateur pianist.
Young Sergei showed musical ability from a very early age. He began studying piano with his mother when he was just three years old. He wrote his first music when he was five, his first opera at the age of nine, and a symphony by the time he was twelve. At the age of thirteen he entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory and gained a reputation for the modern-sounding music he was writing. He studied at the conservatory for ten years.
In 1918, because of political problems in his country, Sergei went to live in the United States. Although he was popular as a pianist, audiences and music critics did not like the music he was composing at the time. It was very different from the music they were used to hearing. To them it sounded unmusical, like the notes he wrote didn’t go together. In 1920 he wrote an opera called The Love of Three Oranges. It was performed in Chicago and New York and got bad reviews in both cities.
People in Europe were more interested in his kind of music, so in 1922 he moved to Paris, France and stayed there for 14 years. While in Paris he composed a famous piece you may have heard, a story for a narrator and orchestra called Peter and the Wolf.
In 1936 Sergei returned to his home country, then called the Soviet Union, and settled in Moscow, Russia. There he wrote some of his most famous music, including the two great classical ballets Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet. Prokofiev’s music fell in and out of favor with the government, but he was eventually awarded a Stalin Prize in 1951, just two years before he died. In his lifetime, he composed seven symphonies, eight operas, seven ballets, six movie scores, and over fifty other concertos, suites, sonatas, chamber pieces and choral works.
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was born on April 23, 1564 in Stratford-on-Avon, England, which is about 100 miles northwest of London. His parents were John and Mary Shakespeare. John was a whittawer (a maker and seller of leather goods such as purses, belts, and gloves). He was also active in local government and for a time served as “high bailiff,” or mayor of the town. John and Mary had a total of eight children. William was their third child and the first son.
The records aren’t clear, but William probably entered the Stratford Grammar School when he was seven years old. School began at six or seven in the morning and lasted most of the day, six days a week. The students studied the English alphabet, Latin grammar, logic, and literature (mainly Latin authors like Cicero, Virgil, and Ovid). William probably left school when he was 13 to help with his father’s business.
In 1582, when he was just 18, he married Anne Hathaway, a woman eight years older than he. They had three children in the next three years, the oldest Susanna, and twins- a boy, Hamnet, and a girl, Judith.
There is very little information about Shakespeare’s life between 1585 and 1592. It’s assumed that he was working as both an actor and a playwright. By 1594, he had written at least six plays and was fully involved in the London theater world until 1608. He was an actor in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and also wrote an average of two plays a year for the company.
By the late 1590’s, Shakespeare was an established writer and prosperous businessman. In 1599, he and six associates became owners of the Globe, a new outdoor theater that became the home of his own acting company, The King’s Men.
By the time of his death, on April 23, 1616, William Shakespeare had written thirty-seven plays. He is generally considered the world’s greatest playwright and most popular author.
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