N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz

N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz is a timeless piece that captured the mood of urban America in the late 1950s, incorporating the symbolic rhythms of vernacular dance into the formal structures of ballet. When Jerome Robbins created the work in 1958 for the first Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, the ballet was a sensation, with choreographers around the world imitating Robbins' finger-snapping, jazz-propelled dances. In 1993, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater became the first modern dance company permitted by Robbins to perform the work.