Jerome Robbins’ moving synthesis
Jerome Robbins was fired halfway through shooting West Side Story, but he still won two Academy Awards for his work on the film—one for directing, which he shared with Robert Wise, and an honorary award “for his brilliant achievements in the art of choreography on film.”
Robbins (like many others) thought little of the prize, but that doesn’t diminish the fact that he won it for an enormous achievement. In West Side Story, he created a new paradigm wherein the traditional theatrical modalities—language, dance and music—do not remain discrete entities but rather coalesce into an entirely new form of storytelling.
From its inception, ballet has harnessed the power of dance to tell a story. However, dance in musical theater remained largely decorative until ballet giants George Balanchine and Agnes de Mille transformed Broadway by giving dance the same function as speech: to further plot and reveal character.
In West Side Story, Robbins took it even further. He transformed plot and character into movement, so even spoken scenes, like Anita’s contretemps with Maria after Tony has killed Bernardo, feel as if they’re in motion. Correspondingly, scenes that feel danced—the “Tonight” sequence leading up to the tragic showdown under the highway—are in fact not danced at all; they are, though not mundanely, “walked.”
A similar phenomenon can be seen in Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a film in which all of the dialogue is sung. Like West Side Story, Umbrellas blurs the distinction between language and other storytelling modalities. In these two works of art, there is no distinction between the spoken word and the musical fact of song or dance.
Though it’s possible to categorize Umbrellas as an opera and West Side Story as a ballet incorporating spoken text, doing so would miss the point of both works: Going way beyond being greater than the sum of their parts, they are films in which every part evolves into a new aspect of a new whole, whereby story becomes action becomes dance becomes character becomes song becomes voice becomes motion becomes story.
For all West Side Story articles, please go to:
To the Curb
Dance as Narrative (and More)
Street Signs
Utopian Variations
A Landmark Soundtrack
Robbins’ Road to Hollywood
