New York City Ballet’s two-month spring season opens on April 29, and it’s very nearly all Jerome Robbins. Robbins, who died in 1998, would have turned 90 this October. During the season there will be 10 all-Robbins programs, encompassing 33 of his ballets, reflecting the length and depth of Robbins’s association with the company. He joined as dancer and choreographer in 1949, and worked with the company right up until his death.

The season opens with an all-Robbins gala performance, but two days later comes the real showstopper: “Fancy Free,” without which no Robbins tribute would be complete. For this performance, NYCB has cast not only its own powerhouses Damian Woetzel and Joaquin De Luz, but also American Ballet Theatre principal dancer Ethan Stiefel.

In 1944, “Fancy Free” was Robbins’s first hit as a choreographer and it remains perhaps the most popular ballet he ever created. “Fancy Free” has an interesting pedigree. In 1942, while Robbins was beginning his ballet career dancing with what was then called Ballet Theatre, Leonide Massine joined the company. Massine has been one of the leading choreographers of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Robbins’s “Fancy Free” grew directly out of a lineage of sailor ballets, in which Massine’s “Les Matelots” had figured prominently back in the 1920s. But in “Fancy Free,” Robbins completely Americanized this genre. “Fancy Free” was performed to a torchy score written especially by Leonard Bernstein. Both Robbins and Bernstein were 25, and “Fancy Free” spoke of their time, place, and generation.

Five years after “Fancy Free,” following a succession of new ballets as well as choreography for Broadway musicals, Robbins joined NYCB, which had been established a year earlier. Over the next seven years he created many different ballets for the company, some of which have been performed continuously until today and will be seen at NYCB this spring. Among them are “The Cage,” which relocates Act 2 of “Giselle” into the insect world; “The Concert,” a series of zany, surrealistically linked skits, and “Afternoon of a Faun,” one of a number of ballets in which Robbins examined the psychology of performers in general and ballet dancers in particular.

It was Balanchine’s work that had initially attracted Robbins to NYCB. Balanchine and Robbins were very different choreographers, but there are ironies and unexpected parallels between their careers and within their creative relationship. For example, Michel Fokine was a major influence on both Balanchine’s work and Robbins’s. While Balanchine was a product of the same Imperial ballet school in St. Petersburg that produced Fokine, it was Robbins who worked closely with the great choreographer. Fokine spent the final years of his life in residence at the Ballet Theatre, when Robbins was beginning his career there. In 1908, Fokine’s “Les Sylphides” had been a tribute to the 19th-century Romantic ballet, but, unlike the works it evoked, it was only one act and had no plot. Nor was it supposed to look like a facsimile of the 19th century. It was performed to Chopin, and it was to Chopin that Robbins, in his maturity, set a number of ballets that were similarly designed to refresh the conventions and movement language of Romanticism. One of the most charming is his “Other Dances,” originally created for Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov to perform at a gala in 1976, which NYCB is reviving this season.

In 1956, ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, one of Robbins’s closest colleagues at NYCB, was struck with polio, which ended her career. For the next decade, Robbins was largely removed from NYCB. The son of Russian and Polish immigrants, Robbins during the 1960s looked back at his roots in Broadway’s “Fiddler on the Roof” as well as a 1965 production of “Les Noces” that marked a return to what was now American Ballet Theatre. “Les Noces” is set to the aural cubism of a Stravinsky score in which words and music provide a fractured chronicle of a Russian peasant wedding. NYCB will perform “Les Noces” this spring, and will salute Robbins’s Broadway work with his “West Side Story Suite,” which he created for NYCB in 1995 based on his dances for the 1957 musical.

In 1969, Robbins returned to NYCB with “Dances at a Gathering,” an hour-long suite of dances set to Chopin that is also being performed this spring. The Robbins season has been prefigured by a number of Robbins revivals at NYCB in recent years. Robbins’s 1974 “Dybbuk,” which NYCB revived a year ago, embodies Robbins at his best, but the history of the work is a telling example of the self-doubt that plagued him. The 1974 ballet was meant to distill the themes of the great Yiddish play, but Robbins’s “Dybbuk” was considered by critics too vague and/or too plot-driven. Robbins himself felt that it followed the play too closely and soon pared it down to an abstract suite of dances. Soon after that, he dropped the ballet altogether. But when NYCB revived it last year, it was clear that Robbins had in fact made a masterly transposition that puts storytelling and kinetic exposition in perfectly balanced suspension.

Robbins’s work dominates NYCB spring season, but it is not the entire story. Also performed will be repertory by Balanchine, Peter Martins, Mauro Bigonzetti, Christopher Wheeldon, and Susan Stroman. And May 29, the company will give a new ballet by Alexei Ratmansky its premiere.