Revisiting Robbins's Faun. (Kickoff).

WE PROBABLY ALL HAVE HAD THE EXPERIENCE OF REVISITING A FAMILIAR WORK TO FIND THAT IT IS STILL FRESH AND VIGOROUS AND ABSORBING. THAT HAPPENED TO ME RECENTLY. THE SUBJECT WAS AFTERNOON OF A FAUN, particularly two productions--the youthful Vaslav Nijinsky's 1912 ballet for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and the 34-year-old Jerome Robbins's 1953 ballet for New York City Ballet. (I never liked the idea of fauns very much: half man, half goat, lazy, useless, oversexed, mythological creatures with barnyard habits living in the woods.)

Robbins's Afternoon of a Faun could be seen last season in productions by, among others, the Paris Opera Ballet, New York City Ballet, and Ballet West. Nijinsky's L'Apres-midi d'un faune has been performed in sometimes dubious reconstructions since its beginnings in Paris in 1912; the Joffrey Ballet's production, done for Rudolf Nureyev in 1979, is still in its active repertoire in Chicago.

There is a resurgence of interest in Robbins's life and times as well as his enormous influence in theater dance and ballet. Several books have come out recently on Robbins, a genius known to be deeply insecure, a harsh taskmaster, a perfectionist, and a man who was respected, but not liked, by many of the artists who worked with him.

Robbins created some seventy ballets, primarily for American Ballet Theatre, his own Ballets: USA, and New York City Ballet, where he held numerous positions for half a century. He did fourteen Broadway musicals, of which West Side Story, Gypsy, and Fiddler on the Roof changed the course of musical theater. Robbins's most characteristic quality, perhaps, was his ability to focus on the central idea of a work; he explored characters, even in his more abstract ballets, and made you care what happened to them.

I took another look at his Faun and compared it with Nijinsky's earlier ballet. Nijinsky's was about a mythological creature who encounters nymphs in a wood on a summer afternoon. Nijinsky created a revolutionary choreographic style that shattered ballet tradition. The dancers moved on a flat, two-dimensional plane such as you might see in Greek reliefs. The ballet required some 120 rehearsals, and the premiere caused a scandal, having to do with the Faune's sexual fantasies.

By contrast, the Robbins work is an inward-looking encounter for two dancers, both lost at times in narcissistic reverie while looking at their reflected image in an imaginary mirror--which is the fourth wall, where the audience is. Its premiere on May 14, 1953, came at a painful time: Robbins went before the House Committee on Un-American Activities on May 5, 1953, and named fellow artists who had at one time been in the Communist Party. For years I have understood that Robbins did this because he was blackmailed by government agents--to be exposed as a gay man in 1953 might have ended his career.

Out of that harrowing experience came the profound introspection of his Faun, grounded in the real world of a dance studio and its very human interactions. Robbins's work is deeply human; he is able to make you care, through movement, about what is going to happen next. We could do with more of that kind of movement.

Richard Philp has been an editor with Dance Magazine since 1970, was editor in chief from 1989 through 1999, and is known for his strong support of the arts.