Where the Spirit Listeth

By John T. Elson

It seemed like a partnership that could not miss. Composer-Conductor Leonard Bernstein and Choreographer Jerome Robbins, who created an authentic American dance classic in Fancy Free (1944) and later joined forces on Broadway's evergreen West Side Story, were collaborating on a new work for the first time in nearly 17 years. In the season of The Exorcist, their theme had a certain built-in appeal: the ancient Jewish folk myth of the dybbuk, a wandering spirit of a dead person that invades and inhabits the body of a living man or woman. So what could go wrong?

The answer, alas, is quite a lot. Dybbuk, which was given its world premiere at Lincoln Center last week by the New York City Ballet, is a wan and murky evocation of the Hasidic legend that is all but drowned in a sea of pretentious metaphysical subfusc. The dybbuk story, a ghetto version of Romeo and Juliet given classic shape in Shloime Ansky's 1916 Yiddish play, involves the star-crossed lovers named Channon and Leah. Once their fathers had taken a vow that some day their children should wed. By the time boy meets girl, the vow has been forgotten, Leah's family has become wealthy, and Channon is merely a poor rabbinical student. When Leah's father arranges a more suitable match, Channon in desperation invokes the kabbalah --the body of medieval Jewish esoteric teachings--and is possessed by the evil spirit that he conjures up. In Channon's body, the dybbuk appears at Leah's wedding to claim her. Religious elders exorcise the spirit, but Leah dies, unable to live without the man she truly loves.

Bernstein and Robbins have used the old story merely as a point of departure.

Their Dybbuk is a sequence of abstract, related dance episodes that imply but do not explicitly contain a narrative structure. All this would be fine had not the collaborators approached their task with such owlish solemnity. Sequences of the ballet are described in the program notes as if they were stages of a sacred liturgy rather than parts of an evening's entertainment. For instance, a rather ordinary set of variations for male dancers is summed up as "The Quest for Secret Powers." In this case, rite does not make might.

Composer Bernstein contends that there is a mystical relationship between the occult numerology of the kabbalah and his 50-minute score. In fact, the Dybbuk music is a bland, pseudo-modern pastiche--a murmuring of Mahler here, a shriek of Stravinsky there, stray leitmotifs of Hasidic melody to suggest ethnicity. Robbins' choreography matches the music, sometimes cliche for cliche. When the orchestra explodes in a burst of Yiddish song, dancers sway sinuously, as if at a ghetto wedding. There are great yaps of brass at Big Moments of high stress; on stage, the performers thrust splayed hands to the skies or to the audience as if they had just discovered Martha Graham.

By far the finest segments of Dybbuk are the smoldering pas de deux for principal dancers Patricia McBride and Helgi Tomasson. Robbins has a flair for creating love duets that seem like extended caresses, and these are among his most lyric inventions. The role of Leah is danced to near perfection by McBride--City Ballet's reigning ballerina in fact if not in title--who adds some alluring fire to her customary ice manner. Tomasson, a smallish man with a precise, understated style, is splendid as her tender, obsessed lover.

Yet even their dancing triumph is marred by another of Dybbuk's striking defects: the costumes. McBride's flowing white gown is apt for a lovelorn bride, but Tomasson courts her while encased in a shapeless kaftan that looks like a bleached potato sack. In both the holy-place and exorcism scenes, male dancers wear diaphanous black cloaks over white body suits that ludicrously resemble Frederick's of Hollywood negligees.

It would be easy enough to improve upon Dybbuk's effete, stagy decor. But it is hard to imagine what Robbins--on his record, the most gifted of America's native-son choreographers--might do to enliven the content of the dance itself, which seems possessed of too little spirit rather than too much.

John T. Elson

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