Download Alwin Nikolais (1910-1993)

Alwin Nikolais (1910-1993)
by Ted Bain
Alwin Nikolais, choreographer, composer, and
designer, is recognized for his integral use of
percussion training for teachers and dancers; for
his own original system of movement notation,
Choroscript; and for his experimental projects
featuring mixed-media spectacle and electronic
music. Although a 1993 Dance Magazine
retrospective correctly notes that Nikolais’s 1950s
choreography introduced dance to the era of
modern multimedia theater (28), it was Nikolais’
mastery of abstract composition that may have set
more significant precedents for modern
choreography.
Nikolais was born in Southington, Connecticut, the
son of John and Martha (née Heinrich) Nikolais.
Along with his two sisters and three brothers, he
studied music, and during his high school years he
was employed as a piano accompanist for silent
films at the Westport Movie House. In 1929 he
graduated from Lewis High School in Southington.
In 1933, after attending a performance by the
German Expressionist dancer Mary Wigman,
Nikolais became interested in studying percussion
and approached Truda Kaschmann, a former
Wigman student teaching in Hartford, who
persuaded him to study dance. While a dance
student, Nikolais also directed the Hartford Parks
Marionette Theatre from 1935 to 1937. In 1937 he
began teaching, dancing, and choreographing for
his own company and school in Hartford.
From 1938 to 1940, Nikolais spent summers at the
Bennington School of Dance in Vermont, where he
was influenced particularly by Hanya Holm,
another Wigman student. He collaborated with
Kaschmann in his first fully commissioned
professional work as a dancer and choreographer,
Eight Column Line, which premièred in Hartford in
May, 1939. Before and after World War II, during
which Nikolais served with the United States
Army's Criminal Investigation Department, he
directed the dance department of the Hartt School
of Music from 1940-42 and from 1946-49. After the
war he also studied and taught with Holm in New
York City and in summer dance workshops at
Colorado College in Colorado Springs, where, in
1949, he met his longtime associate Murray Louis.
Copyright © 2012 Dance Heritage Coalition
In 1948, Nikolais began teaching at the Henry
Street Settlement, a Lower East Side Manhattan
neighborhood center devoted to social work, and,
in the following year, began to establish the Henry
Street Playhouse as a leading dance school and
theater. After retiring as a performer in the early
1950s, he devoted himself fully to teaching,
choreographing, designing, and composing. His
resident Henry Street Settlement performance
group, which became the Alwin Nikolais Dance
Company, provided regular concerts, children's
shows, and training in dance composition and
teaching. Among the dance artists who have drawn
from Nikolais’ progressive range of aesthetic and
professional responsibilities, Murray Louis and
Phyllis Lamhut, two original members of the group,
have acknowledged Nikolais' influence on their
own achievements as teachers, choreographers,
and company managers.
During these years, the Nikolais ensemble
performed at the Henry Street Playhouse with little
technical support. Nikolais designed and often
made costumes, constructed props, set lighting,
composed the music, and operated or cued the
technical effects for each performance. Special
exits and entrances were choreographed to enable
the dancers themselves to switch slide projections,
make technical changes, or provide musical
accompaniment.
The first of Nikolais' major innovative works,
Masks, Props, and Mobiles (1953), was presented
in separate parts, or movements, and introduced
Nikolais' characteristic depiction of figures in
motion, blending in and out of a stage environment
of projected colors and patterns. Nikolais' stated
purpose was to have each dancer's motion create
and control linear designs and sculptural shapes
without revealing his or her own physical body.
This dance also introduced his integral use of tentor cocoon-style stretch fabric costumes that
continuously re-sculpt and extend the dancer's
shape.
Nikolais's Henry Street projects represented an
ongoing effort to broaden the dancer's medium.
Among these, Kaleidoscope (1955), according to
1
Nikolais, further explored the use of props and
costume as a "means of extending the body as an
abstract protagonist" (Growth of a Theme, 31).
Prism (1956) featured one of the first uses of an
electronic score and lighting consciously designed
to define the appearance of figures in motion. Two
contrasting pieces, Tower (1965) and Tent (1968),
presented dancers creating material constructions
and becoming living parts of the evolving dominant
image.
Other significant Nikolais dance compositions
include Village of Whispers (1955), The Bewitched
(1957), Cantos (1958), Mirrors (1958), Allegory
(1959), Totem (1960), Imago (1963), Sanctum
(1964), Galaxy (1965), Première (1967), Fusion
(1967), Vaudeville of the Elements (1967), Scenario
(1971), Aphorisms (1977), Gallery (1978), Pond
(1982), Graph (1984), and Crucible (1985).
Selections from his 1950s dance concerts were
televised by the Ford Foundation and the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation, and his musical
compositions were recorded by Hanover-Signature.
He collaborated with avant-garde filmmaker Ed
Emshwiller in the 1960s and his company toured
inter-continentally from 1968.
The Nikolais Dance Theatre was based in the Henry
Street Playhouse until 1970, and thereafter shared
larger facilities in lower Manhattan with the
Murray Louis Dance Company. Co-managed as the
Nikolais-Louis Foundation for Dance, the two
companies and their founders remained closely
allied until Nikolais died in 1993. Nikolais’s honors
include the Dance Magazine Award (1968), the
Grand Prix de la Ville de Paris (1969), the Capezio
Award (1982), the Scripps American Dance Festival
Award (1985), two Guggenheim Fellowships, the
French government's Commander of the Order of
Arts and Letters (1982) and Knight of the Legion of
Honor (1985), Kennedy Center Honors (1987), and
the National Medal of Arts (1987).
Nikolais’s integration of music, design, and
movement may have been a natural evolution
following his employment as a piano accompanist
for silent films during the 1920s and his
directorship of Hartford Parks Marionette Theatre
during the 1930s. The original expressionism of his
dance movement may have been directly inspired
Copyright © 2012 Dance Heritage Coalition
by Wigman, Holm, and Louis Horst. Ultimately,
several of his innovations may become recognized
as significant precedents: his electronic mixing of
sound scores anticipates by 40 years the 1990s
techno compositions by rave and club DJs. His
utilitarian applications of design and movement
technique toward a pure aesthetic product might
be regarded as comparably postmodern to the
work of the 1960s Judson choreographers who
followed a decade later. His fastidiously considered
integration of lighting, costume, and stage design,
for which the construction of original materials and
instruments along with a close collaboration with
the performers were often necessary, are now
replicated, though perhaps to a lesser extent
integrated, by computerized conventions available
to most major theatrical staging of modern dance.
Nikolais’ theory of “decentralization,” by some
accounts, depersonalized dancers through costume
and design and focused more on the overall
spectacle of the production rather than on
individual dancers. Consequently, comparative
dance surveys have taken a reductive view of this
theory as a simple reaction against such ballet
conventions as story dance and virtuosity. In
suggesting that “the human presence does not
dominate [Nikolais’] theatrical world,” Susan Au
speculates that “Fokine might have accused him of
neglecting the element of drama” (159-60). In
acknowledging Nikolais’s “full range of phenomena
that includes man but is not wholly dominated by
him,” Don McDonagh also acknowledges that
Nikolais presents “the emotionally stressed
movement of violently motivated human beings”
(304). These cautious overviews typify the general
critical appreciation of Nikolais’s performed works
for their visceral effect, but not for their thematic
content. More precisely, Nikolais’s abstract
compositions may be divorced from time and
space, but they are not divorced from human
character, virtuosity, or drama. In most of
Nikolais’s dances, characters often define
themselves through the liminality of their human
forms, and play out a dramatic progression of
interactive responses to their setting. Nikolais’s
form of abstraction might therefore be explained in
terms similar to those in Herbert Read’s
explanation of the “constructive image”(125-40):
there is a paradoxical resonance in Nikolais’s
2
choreographed sequences of experiences without
chronology and in his dancers’ performances of
virtuosity framed within the parameters of an idea.
The Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis Papers,
including company publications and press packets,
scores in Choroscript, and manuscripts to The
Nikolais/Louis Technique: The Unique Gesture a
Philosophy & Technique of Modern Dance (2005),
along with an extensive collection of videos, are
archived in the Ohio University Dance Collection.
There are several YouTube excerpts from dances
including Imago, Noumenon, Crucible, Pond,
Liturgies, and Lyhthic. In the realm of mass
popularity, among the YouTube versions of Tensile
Involvement (1953), one of Nikolais’s most
frequently performed repertory pieces for over 30
years, is a Joffrey Ballet reconstruction that
underscores the opening credits to the Robert
Altman film The Company (2003), which was
perhaps at its the time the most widely
disseminated performance of a Nikolais
composition. Notwithstanding the dancers’ placed
movement1 (the antithesis of the style that
Nikolais’s theory of decentralization was meant to
establish, [Louis 58]) and the uninformed editing of
camera shots (obscuring the overall impression and
sequential development of the dance), viewers
nonetheless receive a clear impression of Nikolais’s
metaphorical characterization of human figures
extending their physical expression through long
intersecting bands of fabric to which they are
involuntarily and inextricably linked. Apart from
the limitations of dance as an ephemeral art that
rarely extends beyond its contemporary moment,
the clarity of Nikolais’s art may therefore survive
the imperfections of current and future renderings.
Ted Bain holds a doctorate from the University of
Toronto and has taught in English, Performing Arts,
and Comparative Literature departments in several
colleges including Cornell University, Rochester
Institute of Technology, University of Maryland,
Ithaca College, and Hobart and William Smith
Colleges. He has contributed to several journals
including Modern Drama, Theater Journal, Theater
Survey, and the Mid-Atlantic Almanack, for which
he served as editor for six years. His short films
have received two Maryland State Arts Council
awards and he currently teaches English in a high
school in Prince George’s County, MD.
NOTES
1. Dance movement is often described as
“placed” when it communicates in
performance only the intention or effort to
adhere to prescribed steps or figures.
For full citations to works referenced in this essay,
see Selected Resources for Further Research.
Copyright © 2012 Dance Heritage Coalition
3