Personal Opinion about Alwin Nikolais

A choreographer is ultimately defined by the choices they make aesthetically and the way that they define dance. By emphasizing emotionality, abstraction, theatricality, reality, or pedestrianism Nikolais conveyed an individual message through very different means when compared with other choreographers. Nikolais's focus on decentralization set him apart by producing works which conveyed their message abstractly, instead of overtly relaying the meaning. This was controversial at the time and I believe that Nikolais was the forerunner for future modern dance and helped prepare the audience and dance world into Merce Cunningham's theories of no intent and chance operations. This man was thinking ahead of his time.

Decentralization Theory

Nikolais’s theory of decentralization, first conceived during his tenure at the Henry Street Playhouse, was essential to his ideas about choreography and performance. Blossoming from his mantra of dance as the art of motion not emotion, “decentralization releases the central ego’s hold and allows the body and mind to freely shift the focus and movement center to any point in the body or surrounding space” and it “allows space, 29 time, and shape to relate their contribution to the totality of a movement”. In other words, decentralization dictated that the choreographer and dancer release their egocentric impulses and explore space and movement beyond their usual boundaries. Movement did not need an emotional motivation or meaning and, therefore, one was encouraged to move simply for the sake of the motion, with the impulse for that motion stemming from the center of the body, one of the extremities, or even the forehead. In seeking ways to extend the boundaries of the human body, Nikolais began using props and costumes that extended the natural shape and line of the human form. Therefore, decentralization provides the explanation for many of Nikolais’s choreographic and costuming choices. It is also the source of many cries of “dehumanization” that have come from Nikolais’s critics throughout his career. By not using emotional intention to motivate his movement, he was making works that, in his opinion, were more about honest motion and less about contrived, melodramatic storylines.

Decentralization was the idea upon which all of Nikolais’s productions were based beginning in 1953 with his work Masks, Props, and Mobiles. Decentralization was built around the ability to change what was the center of the body through the use of “…improvisation and a technical approach to movement that included fluidity of mind, imagery, and response”. According to Nikolais’s beliefs, movement does not come from one internal emotional place, but it can emanate from many different ideas and spaces inside the human psyche. “For a decentralized dancer there is no single point of initiation. She/he attends to articulating joints; peripheral designs of body parts, points, lines, and volumes in space; dynamic textures; and qualifiers of motion identified by physics. Centered motivation tends towards the emotional; decentralized execution is intellectually commanded”. Decentralization was utilized as both a tool for the choreographic process and to train the dancers who came through Nikolais’s various classes. Nikolais wrote that with decentralization “one could now place the origin of force in or on any surface of the body, even a pinpoint of flesh. The concept quickly developed a new potential for nuance in motional expression”. Movement no longer came, for example, exclusively from the solar plexus as had been proposed by concert dance pioneer Isadora Duncan; it could be initiated by the 30 hip, foot, elbow, or right thumb. Nikolais believed that this expanded the possibilities of motion in addition to allowing a greater freedom in how movement was executed by the dancer. The dancer was permitted to shine through the movement, rather than assume another identity through acting. Decentralization epitomized the abstract nature of Nikolais’s productions. By removing the character, the meaning had to come from the movement alone. There was not a story for the audience to focus upon—instead they had to analyze the action on stage and come to their own conclusions.

Alwin Nikolais: Modern Dance Pioneer

Alwin Nikolais, the pioneer of multimedia dance who was often called a Renaissance man, a one-man band and even a P.T. Barnum for his solo choreographing, costuming and composing of strikingly innovative shows over half a century, has died. He was 82.

Nikolais, described by Los Angeles Times music and dance critic Martin Bernheimer as a genius, died Saturday in New York of cancer.

The former puppeteer who played piano for silent movies in his native Southington, Conn., sprang his first multimedia show, "Masks, Props and Mobiles," on an unsuspecting New York audience in 1953.

Nikolais not only created the movements of his dancers and composed the electronic music to which they moved, but also designed the lighting, scenery and costumes. He experimented with slide projectors and film, and magically made dancers change in appearance as they moved. As he demonstrated in "Structures," he could even make packing cases skitter across the floor with no evidence of human assistance.

Journal Article: The Dance Theatre of Alwin Nikolais

This article is the foreword written for the Nikolais Dance Theatre 1963 Souvenir Booklet.

During recent years Alwin Nikolais has been developing a new theatre. Concurrent with the concept of music as sound, painting as color, sculpture as shape, and dance as motion is the concept of theatre as dynamics. This is Nikolais’ concept. His work, produced under this concept, is his contribution to man’s exploration of the abstract world.

Theatre has always been a cooperative of the arts, be the creative agent one man or many. It is the eye of an architect that designs the theatre itself, the stage, the sets; the eye of a painter and sculptor make the properties and costumes; the ear of the musician determines the pitch of voice, the volume of sound, the role of music; the voice of the poet writes the words; the kinetic sense of the dancer shapes the massing of the actors, the speed of the curtain’s rise and fall, the form of dance. However the manner in which Nikolais uses the arts is unique. In his theatre they are not assigned the usual supportive role, wherein they are used to decorate a pre-formed drama. He makes them in themselves the script and the actors. In the very being of color, the growth pof light, the breathing of shape, the shimmer of sound, art moves art, sculpture mounts sculpture and the action of drama unfolds.

Historically we have our theatre of dance, the Ballet; we have out theatre of music, the Opera. Dynamic considerations in Ballet revolve around a formed concept of motion and in Opera around a formed concept of sound. All structure and meaning (including literal gesture, verbal order, costuming and décor) are shaped to fit these concepts. In the abstract theatre (of Nikolais) all structure and meaning derive from the belief that the shape of energies and of time-space have a meaning in themselves. By molding the abstractions of motion, space, time, shape, color, light and sound Nikolais creates a direct sentient communication.

Form has meaning in itself, a principle of ancient heritage much used in our modern commercial world. A length of line seen to be short evokes a certain aesthetic action in man. A length of line seen to be long evokes a different action. Similarly a given number of lines of definite diverse lengths will evoke different action with each different positional organization. So it is with planar values, with solids, with temporal aspects, with color, light, sound, motion, each organization having its own aesthetic value, producing a reality of its own.

Thus Nikolais’ work is not abstract in the sense that he “abstracts” values from actuality to recreate aesthetic image. Rather he uses art substances themselves to generate this new reality. His theatre is based largely on the creation and resolution of tensions among structure of energies and time/space. The stage, a black cube, is carved by light into the arena for drama. It is modeled by sound until the planes of light vibrate with identification. It is tenanted with shapes which are one with the sound and light. This cube of space becomes a new place, wherein exists new adventures for man. Nikolais does this by speaking first to man’s senses—sight, hearing, sympathetic touch and kinesis, his sense of balance, his knowledge of positional changes.

Such sights and sounds do refer the spectator back to his own experience, for that is how man functions. However, perception must come before reference and not vice versa. In Nikolais’ approach each is allowed his own particular reference to actuality through a statement of a world in terms of space, time, light, color, motion, sound, wherein each finds his own individual existence. The spectator cannot come to this art to seek a statement of his own pre-formed image; he must partake of new images through his own basic nature.

(By Ruth E. Grauert: http://bearnstowjournal.org/1963_souvenir_booklet.htm)

Critical Review: Conjuring a Conjurer of Movement and Light

Alwin Nikolais was the magician of dance, the forerunner of now wildly popular companies like Pilobolus and Momix and a pioneer in multimedia effects. From the 1950s to the 1990s his work was celebrated both in the United States and internationally (he was particularly popular in France), and his company continued to perform for several years after his death, in 1993.

In 1999, Murray Louis, Nikolais’s personal and professional partner of 40 years, disbanded the troupe, and since then his work has been little seen in New York. On Tuesday night at the Joyce Theater, the Alwin Nikolais Centennial program continued a celebration of his birth that began last week at the Abrons Arts Center at the Henry Street Settlement, where Nikolais first began to create work in 1948.

For a whole generation of dancegoers it might now be hard to comprehend just how original Nikolais’s early experiments were, with their amalgams of bodies, light, sound and props. The evening began with Mr. Louis reading a proclamation from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg explaining exactly why this was so, and proclaiming that Tuesday was Alwin Nikolais Day. (Not exactly a long-term commitment.)

The mayor’s note invoked Martha Graham as a contemporary, which probably made Nikolais pirouette in his grave, since his work emerged out of a firm rejection of the kinds of psychologically inclined dance dramas that Graham was creating in the 1940s. Like George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham, he turned toward pure form and abstraction and away from narrative and emotion.

But unlike Balanchine and Cunningham, Nikolais was interested in sleight-of-hand and eye, in visual illusion rather than the expansion of a dance vocabulary. And unlike those choreographers, he was a one-man band, inventing not just the movement, but the lighting and sound too.

In one of his best-known pieces, “Tensile Involvement” (1955), which opened Tuesday’s program, the dancers are tethered to long elastic bands and create cat’s cradles of crisscrossing lines as they run on and off the stage. In “Crucible” (1985) tiny wiggling forms, reflected by angled mirrors, grow into larger abstract shapes and finally into strange truncated beings, apparently floating in space. (That the dancers’ upper bodies are eventually revealed as naked also both prefigures a contemporary dance trend and suggests the hippie counterculture of the “Hair” era.)

Both of these dances, like the excerpts from “Liturgies” (1983), were meticulously staged by Mr. Louis and Alberto del Saz, a former Nikolais dancer, and were performed with exemplary precision by the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company from Utah, the principal keeper of the Nikolais flame.

But for the sake of that flame they should all lay “Tower” (1968), from the longer “Vaudeville of the Elements,” to rest. Perhaps Nikolais’s original dancers could carry off the hectic shouting and posturing that “Tower” demands as its 10 dancers carry around metal frames that are eventually built

into said tower. But as it appears now, the performance by the suffering dancers is unconvincing; there is no dance interest, no visual suspense or drama. The wait for the tower to topple — you know it will — is excruciatingly dull. Nikolais, whose currency was wonder and magic, shouldn’t be remembered for this.

(This dance critical review is from The New York Times, By ROSLYN SULCASMAY, 5, 2010)

About Alwin Nikolais

Alwin Nikolais, (born November 25, 1910, Southington, Connecticut, U.S.—died May 8, 1993, New York, N.Y.), American choreographer, composer, and designer whose abstract dances combine motion with various technical effects and a complete freedom from technique and established patterns.

Initially a silent-film accompanist and puppeteer, Nikolais began his study of dance in about 1935 with Truda Kaschmann, a former student of modern dancer Mary Wigman, to understand Wigman’s use of percussion accompaniment. In 1937 he founded a dance school and company in Hartford, Connecticut, and was director of the dance department of Hartt School of Music (now part of the University of Hartford) from 1940 to 1942 and from 1946 to 1949. After serving in World War II, Nikolais resumed dance studies with Hanya Holm and became her assistant. In 1948 he joined the Henry Street Settlement in New York City and founded its school of modern dance; the following year he became artistic director of its playhouse.

The Nikolais Dance Theater (originally called the Playhouse Dance Company) was formed in 1951. In 1953 the company presented Nikolais’s first major work,Masks, Props, and Mobiles, in which the dancers were wrapped in stretch fabric to create unusual, fanciful shapes.

In later works—such as Kaleidoscope (1956), Allegory (1959), Totem (1960), and Imago (1963)—Nikolais continued experiments in what he called the basic art of the theatre—an integration of motion, sound, shape, and colour, each given relatively equal emphasis. His later works include Tent (1968), Scenario(1971), Guignol (1977), Count Down (1979), and Talisman (1981). Nikolais frequently composed electronic scores for these productions.

Although Nikolais’s choreography was sometimes criticized as “dehumanizing,” he maintained instead that it was liberating. He asserted that, in depersonalizing his dancers, they were relieved of their own forms and, hence, allowed to identify with whatever they portrayed. Nikolais was also noted for advancing the related concept of “decentralization,” in which the focal point could be anywhere on the dancer’s body or even outside the body. This was a departure from the traditional opinion that the “centre” of focus was the solar plexus. These theories were developed under Hanya Holm and were displayed in such works as Aviary, A Ceremony for Bird People (1978).

During the 1970s the Nikolais group toured widely abroad. In 1978 the French Ministry of Culture, together with the French city of Angers, subsidized the new National Centre of Contemporary Dance at Angers, a Nikolais school and company that made its debut in Angers, France, in November 1979. Nikolais made films of his works, as well as broadcasts on American and British television.