Robbins Foundation Awards Go to Tharp, San Francisco Ballet; City Center Gets Lasky Prize | Playbill

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News Robbins Foundation Awards Go to Tharp, San Francisco Ballet; City Center Gets Lasky Prize The 2008 Jerome Robbins Award for excellence in dance or theatre will go to choreographer Twyla Tharp, whose Movin' Out was a Broadway hit, and the San Francisco Ballet, the New York Times reported.

The Jerome Robbins Foundation will bestow $100,000 to each winner. The foundation's inaugural Floria V. Lasky Award will go to New York City Center, a longtime home for dance and theatre.

The awards will be presented on Sept. 26, at City Center's annual Fall for Dance festival, which is to offer a tribute to the late Robbins.

The Lasky Award is named after the famous show business lawyer who was president of the Robbins Foundation. The award is for $25,000.

Robbins is world renowned for his work as a choreographer of ballets as well as his work as a director and choreographer in theatre, movies and TV. His Broadway shows include On the Town, Billion Dollar Baby, High Button Shoes, West Side Story, The King and I, Gypsy, Peter Pan, Miss Liberty, Call Me Madam and Fiddler on the Roof. His last Broadway production, Jerome Robbins' Broadway in 1989, won six Tony Awards including Best Musical and Best Director. In addition to two Academy Awards for the film "West Side Story," he received four Tony Awards, five Donaldson Awards, two Emmy Awards, the Screen Directors Guild Award and the NY Drama Critics Circle Award. Robbins was a 1981 Kennedy Center Honors recipient and received the French Chevalier dans l'Ordre National de la Legion d'Honneur. He died in 1998.

Jerome Robbins established the foundation in 1958, in honor of his mother, with the intent to support dance, theatre, and their associative arts. Later, following the outbreak of AIDS, he directed foundation resources to the AIDS crisis. Those contributions continue today. Before his death, Robbins conveyed his wish that the foundation extend its resources to the performing arts — dance and theatre especially, though not exclusively. Visit www.jeromerobbins.org.

 
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