There are no pointe shoes in Jerome Robbins’s N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz. No tutus, either. Instead, there are sneakers, T-shirts, and leggings—and dancers who stalk, slouch, flirt, and spring across the stage, propelled by Robert Prince’s rollicking jazz score.
Created in 1958, the ballet felt unmistakably New York in its sound, its street clothes, its restless young people, its particular brand of cool. But, as its title suggests, N.Y. Export was never meant to stay put. In fact, traveling is part of its history. And this fall, its next stop is Miami.
On October 16, Miami City Ballet will perform Opus Jazz for the first time as part of American Rhythms, the opening program in artistic director Gonzalo Garcia’s first fully programmed season—and the first real glimpse of where he intends to take the company. “This is when my vision really starts getting developed,” says Garcia, who arrived at Miami City Ballet last year.
“I wanted to pay tribute to the incredible legacy and DNA of the company, but I also wanted to find new voices—new choreographers, new designers, new revivals of ballets that have not been done.”
With Robbins already embedded in Miami City Ballet’s DNA, Opus Jazz is a particularly irresistible place to start. It’s Robbins, yes, but Robbins in sneakers—and, for this new Miami iteration, some very stretchy denim, courtesy of GapStudio’s Zac Posen. The new production will feature the first authorized redesign of the ballet’s original stage costumes since its premiere nearly seven decades ago.
Garcia first saw the ballet in 2009, during his first season at New York City Ballet, where he would dance for the next 15 years. “I had never seen it, and I completely, completely fell in love with it,” he remembers. “It’s very intense, and there’s such a clear mood from the very beginning. The dancers come in almost staring at the audience—they’re almost ready to fight. It grabs the audience right away.”
The music helps: Prince’s score doesn’t so much accompany the dancers as egg them on. For his opening-night program, Garcia will place Opus Jazz immediately after George Balanchine’s virtuosic Allegro Brillante, making the temperature shift almost impossible to miss.
“We wanted to be bold and open with classical and follow right away with something very street and very unique and very different,” he says. “The music changes, we go into jazz, we go into a different world.”
The dancers have to go there, too. “As ballet dancers, you’re always trying to feel like you’re light as a feather,” Garcia explains. “In Opus Jazz, it’s almost the opposite. You have to feel the ground. You have to feel your whole foot in the ground and have the weight of your body much more connected to it.”
But you can’t simply dust off a Robbins ballet. His works are carefully licensed and stewarded, which brings us to Jean-Pierre Frohlich. Frohlich worked closely with Robbins—or “Jerry”—first as a dancer and later as an assistant, staging his ballets around the world. Robbins subsequently sat him on the advisory committee overseeing his ballets; today, Frohlich is also repertory director at New York City Ballet.
When Garcia called about bringing Opus Jazz to Miami, Frohlich was delighted. He was also ready for a wardrobe change.
“I said, ‘I would love you guys to do it, but the dancers would have to wear streetwear. I don’t want it with the original costumes.
I want it to resonate. I want it to live,’” Frohlich recalls.
The clothes of Opus Jazz had always belonged to the young people dancing in it; its original dancers appeared in sneakers, tights, and colored tops, everyday staples refracted through 1950s dancewear. The question was what those young people would look like now.
The answer came from Posen and GapStudio. It was less of a fashion-world cameo than one might imagine; Posen has designed for ballet before, including New York City Ballet and San Francisco Ballet, and is married to Harrison Ball, the choreographer and former NYCB principal dancer who, just to make the circle even smaller, once danced Opus Jazz himself.
Posen immediately recognized the vocabulary. “Gap and this ballet speak the same language,” he says. “Denim, jersey T-shirts, sweats, fleece, shirting—these are the American classics.” Frohlich’s brief was considerably more evocative. “JP wanted it to have this attitude of walking off the A train,” Posen remembers. “That’s such a Robbins attitude.”
For Miami, that means the street clothes of today: denim, hoodies, button-downs, relaxed trousers, T-shirts. Each of the ballet’s 16 dancers has an individual look rather than a uniform, and Posen developed the clothes accordingly.
GapStudio’s Infinity Stretch denim allows for the lunges, jumps, and deep bends of the choreography; seemingly ordinary T-shirts conceal the construction of leotards so they stay exactly where they’re supposed to. “Whenever you’re doing costume, it’s about highlighting the performance and the performers, not inhibiting them,” Posen says.
“The challenge was figuring out how to get denim to work for ballet.”
Because this Opus Jazz belongs to Miami, Posen also turned up the temperature on the palette. On a visit to Chicago, he wandered into a Matisse exhibition at the Art Institute and began thinking about how its saturated colors—milky turquoise, fiery tomato red—might collide with the Miami heat, and jostle with the tones and textures of American sportswear.
All this updating makes more sense when you consider that Opus Jazz was never particularly interested in behaving like a precious old ballet. Robbins created it in 1958 for Ballets: U.S.A., the troupe he assembled after composer Gian Carlo Menotti invited him to the inaugural Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. The company itself was something of an American export, touring from Spoleto to Florence, Trieste, and the Brussels World’s Fair.
The work was a hit. Choreographer Eliot Feld, then a teenage member of Ballets: U.S.A., later recalled that the applause at the Spoleto premiere went on for more than 20 minutes; original cast member Sondra Lee remembered the dancers being carried through the streets afterward. By September, Opus Jazz was on Broadway. Soon it was on television, too, with excerpts performed on The Ed Sullivan Show.
In 2010, then-New York City Ballet soloists Ellen Bar and Sean Suozzi created a film adaptation starring NYCB dancers, transplanting Robbins’s choreography to the streets and rooftops of New York. Now, another screen incarnation will coincide with the Miami production.
The two-minute visual campaign, directed by Garcia’s husband, the filmmaker and former dancer Ezra Hurwitz, was shot in Miami with MCB dancers in Posen’s costumes. Rather than re-create New York, Hurwitz placed the dancers in a spare white studio, where light and shadow become something like scenery and his camera can move from overhead to eye level and back again.
“Opus Jazz lives in the real world, the way West Side Story is anchored in Manhattan,” he says. “At the same time, the dancers pull you into an almost parallel universe.
The minimal environment gave us something more abstract and heightened, where the dancers and the choreography could really pulse.”
While preparing the film, Hurwitz discovered the old Ed Sullivan footage and became “obsessed”—particularly with what he calls the dancers’ “mid-century swagger.” Distilling 45 minutes into two meant pulling phrases from all five sections of the ballet and occasionally resetting Robbins’s steps against different passages of Prince’s score. A quiet duet Hurwitz nearly cut ultimately became the film’s final, haunting beat.
In Miami, Isabella DeVivo, Macarena Gimenez, Chase Swatosh, and Cameron Catazaro are among the dancers charged with bringing that swagger to the stage. Their surroundings are changing along with their clothes: Brandon Stirling Baker is reimagining the lighting, while the old scenic environment has been pared back—including the rooftop antennas that once placed Opus Jazz squarely in midcentury New York.
“I grew up with antennas on rooftops—I grew up in the ’50s and ’60s,” Frohlich says. “But I don’t think people seeing antennas on a rooftop today would understand what that is.” So out they go.
New city, new clothes, new backdrop. Opus Jazz may have been born of New York cool, but in Miami, it’s about to get a little hotter.