Twenty-Five Square Blocks

In an interview after Glass Pieces premiered in 1983, Jerome Robbins reflected, “I didn't set out to do a portrait of the big city.” Robbins' first concern was teasing out the structure and interweaving rhythms of the ballet’s propulsive score to plot sections for the corps and soloists. But in Glass Pieces, the world of the metropolis is ever-present. The ballet has been described as a valentine to New York City, which Robbins had called home for over sixty years. It spoke to a working life “concentrated over the twenty-five square blocks of Manhattan, principally in the West Fifties,” as his biographer Christine Conrad notes. Glass Pieces is a ballet that captures in abstract form the distinctive moods and quotidian exchanges that defined the emerging megacities of the late twentieth century. 

What sets the urban pulse of Glass Pieces racing is, of course, the score by Robbins’ fellow New Yorker, Philip Glass, who settled in the city in 1967. Influenced by the experimental minimalism of New York’s Downtown music scene, Glass fuses stasis and hypnotic repetition with tense counterpoints to evoke a ubiquitously metropolitan soundscape. His music invokes the hum of traffic; his fast-running, stop-start arpeggios the repeated action sequences of machines or factory-line workers. In the ballet’s second movement, the plaintive saxophone suggests the distant wailing of an emergency siren, insistent yet remote.

From the outset though, it’s Robbins’ choreography that firmly establishes the city’s invisible presence. The crowd of criss-crossing dancers colourfully summons the pedestrian scrambles introduced at several New York intersections in the 1960s—an innovation of NYC traffic commissioner Henry Barnes, which earned them the nickname ‘Barnes Dances’. Behind the dancers, a grid backdrop makes its own allusions to Manhattan’s famously uniform street layout, and the grid reappears as a choreographic motif in the ballet’s final movement. Robbins’ prowling squads of young men, turning sharply at each edge of the stage, define a procession of street corners: public space as public theatre for athleticism and youthful bravado.

As well as conjuring intersections, however, Glass Pieces also stands at one historically. Robbins’ masterful depiction of the distinctly contingent qualities of urban sociability simultaneously draws on twentieth-century traditions of dramatic dance-making while anticipating conceptual preoccupations with individual alienation, identity and crisis, which continue to shape a good deal of dance-making in the present. In Robbins’ ballet, pedestrians pursue their trajectories without making eye contact; dancers pair briefly before hastening away in opposite directions; a pas de deux unfolds shielded from – or in the presence of? – constant and indifferent others.

Glass Pieces belongs to a decade when aerial perspectives and time-lapsed visual techniques were allowing the spectacle of human systems – the human swarm – to be appreciated with growing awe and unease. Today, when more than half the world’s population lives in cities, and one in eight within a megacity, Glass Pieces is not just as a love letter to New York, but a portrait of urban living and its tensions experienced now by billions around the globe.