American Cinematographer - March 2010 - 24

I The Return of Jerome Robbins By John Calhoun Finger-snapping dancers on New York City streets. Spectacular skyline views and visits to derelict locations populated by athletically graceful, multi-racial young people. A jazzy soundtrack punctuated by bursts of romantic feeling. Sound familiar? Maybe so, but West Side Story is not the movie in question. It’s NY Export: Opus Jazz, a new dance film scheduled for a March 24 broadcast on PBS. The common feature to both is the late Jerome Robbins, choreographer and director of both stage and screen versions of West Side Story and choreographer of the original ballet NY Export: Opus Jazz, which premiered in 1958. Though the latter is a more formal, abstract work, with music by Robert Prince as opposed to the Broadway sounds of Leonard Bernstein, the kinship is clear. But apart from a prelude showing 24 March 2010 the performers going about their daily lives, transitions bridging the five movements, and a vérité montage of youths on the streets, NY Export: Opus Jazz is pretty much all dance for its 46-minute length. Relieved of the requirements of telling a linear story, it also has the feel of pure cinema. Each of the five movements is shot entirely in its own style: the first with a locked-off camera, followed by Steadicam, handheld, crane and dolly. And the frame is anamorphic, giving the dancers and their backdrop an expansive view. According to co-director/cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes, the inspiration for Opus Jazz came after New York City Ballet revived the dance, in 2005. “Two of the dancers in the restaging, Ellen Bar and Sean Suozzi, started talking about how cool this would be as a movie, and they conceived the story and the idea of shooting it in real locations,” says Lipes. They recognized that with its kinetic rhythms and the popular American Cinematographer NY Export: Opus Jazz frame grabs and photos courtesy of Bar/Suozzi Productions. Photos by Joe Anderson and Jody Lee Lipes. These frame grabs show two movements in the ballet NY Export: Opus Jazz, choreographed by Jerome Robbins. The top frame is from “Passage for Two,” which the filmmakers shot in 2007 to help raise money to film the rest of the work. The frame at right is from “Improvisations,” shot in a gym in Brooklyn. African-American and Latin-American influences on its dancing and music, Opus Jazz seemed destined to burst the confines of the stage. Bar and Suozzi became executive producers on the film and enlisted Lipes, whose credits include the documentary Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be the Same and the feature Afterschool, along with his colleagues Henry Joost (codirector and associate producer) and Ariel Schulman (associate producer and art director). Lipes and Joost wrote the adaptation for the piece. The first stage of filming took shape in 2007, when the producers raised funds to shoot “Passage for Two,” the ballet’s fourth movement. “Ellen and Sean wanted to shoot one scene from the larger film in order to raise more money,” says Lipes. The location was Manhattan’s High Line Park. Referencing both West Side Story and a performance of the ballet from The Ed Sullivan Show in the late 1950s, the filmmakers decided to do the five-minute duet mostly in a single take, using a 30' Jimmy Jib mounted on a dolly to capture the dancers from as many angles as possible. “We knew the piece was going to determine how the rest of the film would go, so we were very intent on doing it the right way,” says Lipes. “We gave ourselves two days because we wanted it to be at magic hour.” Shooting all day to give themselves backup footage, and as a means of practicing the complex take, Lipes and his crew completed more than 20 takes, but got the best one at the last moment. “It was overcast, but at the very end of the day,

American Cinematographer - March 2010

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