The only thing he doesn't do is dance
What kind of dancing is this? All you can see are green hands vibrating, while behind them on the dark stage, a huge luminous painting of brown and gold shapes seems to be coming apart and reforming. Occasionally the dancers reveal themselves wholly - pale and eerie, pulsing with life.
Choreographer Alwin Nikolais, whose first Broadway season begins Tuesday at the Lyceum, is a magician in every sense that I can think of. A proscenium stage attacked by his visions becomes an elastic world in which opulent colored forms swim into sight, change, and vanish, in which dancers’ bodies are printed with light, and the motion of those bodies creates living charts of mysterious domains. Nikolais’ awesome sleight-of-hand, the luminosity of his palette, and his antic humor restore to us the vividness of a child’s vision: a door or a piece of rope become powerful beings capable of growing or shrinking or taking over our lives. And best of all, ladies and gentlemen, it’s all happening right before your very eyes. Oh, there may be places to conceal things, but nothing can be magicked in some studio cutting room.
Nikolais, however, is more than a facile showman who mixes lights, slides, props, costumes, electronic sound, and human bodies into a mind blowing optical party. Often he presides over a potent theatricalized ritual. Most attempts at this sort of thing have been biographies of passionate gods with towering, unapologetic egos who can suffer, die, and be resurrected for us every evening at 8:30, but Nikolais’ dances suggest earlier rites which existed before gods had names and personalities, when men assumed the shape and motion of rain or corn or fire in order to feel that they were part of a terrifying universe. Nikolais has written that he preferred to think of man as a “fellow traveller within the total universal mechanism rather than the god from which all things flowed.”
Practically speaking, however, this philosopher of humility controls almost every aspect of his dances. He is the choreographer, the lighting designer, the one who paints the slides and figures out how tricky costumes and props must be constructed. Since 1957, he has also created the electronic scores that accompany his dances. The only thing he doesn’t do is dance. In the old days when his company was in residence at the Henry Street Playhouse, you could see him during performances through the glass front of the light booth, flicking switches and twiddling knobs. Odd that a benevolent despot, so precise and so technologically adept, should want to create perilous kingdoms in which man is not the boss, but part of a larger pattern.
Some of Nikolais’ dances, such as Runic Canto, Totem, or Sanctum, have suggested primeval rites, but he is in no way a throw back. He brings a medicine man’s sensibilities to the bogies of modern life, or to natural phenomena as contemporary science views them. In one early dance, Prism, each of the dancers represented a color of the spectrum; the spectacularly vigorous finale had them running up the bare back wall of the stage in a fury of refraction.
One group of
the peculiar denizens of Imago might be single-minded ants as they
skitter smoothly back and forth on horizontal paths, occasionally colliding or
doing rapid about-faces, but Nikolais has titled the
section Boulevard and costumed the dancers in bright, bulbous robes, and
so we come to think of them as crazed drivers. The jabbering, speeded-up crowd
in the comical Tower does build a veritable
But although Nikolais is psychologically in tune with the child and with primitive man, his works don’t have that kind of awkward vigor. Expertise is evident in everything. The colors and shapes and energies he plays with can be beautiful and profound, or funny, or simply pretty, but they’re not often violent or crude. Nik is an optimist: you sense that he’s driven to create orderly patterns or bring existing ones to our attention.
I suspect that works like Grotto or Foreplay or Scenario seem less deep than Somniloquy or Tent because in them he uses human emotions and attitudes as choreographic motifs. His impulse appears to be to tidy up those emotions and set them in patterns that can be stopped and started at will. These particular dances make you feel as if he’s looking at us from uncomfortably far away, the way we look at the tracking of ants. Nikolais the puppet-master, instead of the Nikolais who can make mysterious forces visible.
When people refer to Nik’s work as “dehumanized” (he may even have given up gritting his teeth about it), they mean, I think, that not only does he not aggrandize man’s role, but he doesn’t keep his dancers downstage and brightly lit. However, without the dancers Nikolais’ theater wouldn’t be what it is. True, sometimes ingenious costuming alters their shapes into something non-human: the men in Mantis (part of Imago) wear jersey sleeves stretched over a series of disks, which give them absurd long appendages tipped with suction cups where their arms ought to be. In Noumenon (from Masks, Props, and Mobiles), three women completely encased in red jersey make them selves into faceless deities or slabs of wax being squeezed and molded by giant invisible hands.
Sometimes the dancers create illusions from their own bodies, helping each other to sprout extra pairs of arms and legs. Sometimes they fuse with the environment, perhaps disappearing into the texture of a slide projection. Sometimes they function as invisible prop men, folding and opening big sheets of paper to catch the light patterns, or sidling around in blackness making a dance of flashlights. In the early struggling days of the Nikolais company, a lot of dazzling effects were achieved by dancer-power.
And sometimes Nikolais dancers simply dance, with great sensitivity to the nuances of dynamics and shape. The style didn’t spring from impassioned psychological sources - as did the styles of many other modern dancers. The ideal Nikolais dancer doesn’t stalk about on a strong pair of legs gesturing heroically at the universe. His body is capable of many small articulations: a jerk of the knee sets off a quiver in the arms, a twist of the head, a shift in the hips, and an expansion in the upper right rib cage. You see joints where you know none exist. The fluid body, the light responsiveness, the spatial clarity, the famous ball-bearing walk make the Nikolais dancer ideal for the flexible role he’s been assigned.
Murray Louis, for years Nikolais’ leading dancer and one of those on whose bodies the style evolved, now choreographs for his own company (the two companies are sharing the Lyceum season), and he employs a variant of the style with great skill to show purely human en counters - deploying the current of energy flowing through space from one alert body to another in order to make complicated kinetic jokes or erotic statements, or whatever he wishes.
Nikolais’ dances, seldom having heroes and heroines, have no story lines. Each is made of discrete segments thematically linked. In some of the lightest and brightest of them, Nikolais’ delight in sensuous display tends to make you greedy for the next part. In his deepest works, however, the effect is cumulative. And sometimes the end is a holocaust: the environment swallows the dancers.
In the beautiful and disturbing Tent, the immense multi-purpose white fabric billows down over the dancers and gently presses them to the ground. In Structures, the dancers build a little town out of the three-paneled screens they’ve been playing so many witty games with; flickering red lights set their structure on fire while lifesized dummies hurt out from behind it. Echo ends with the dancers vanishing into the dark floor while the projected patterns, which have been wrapping their bodies, gather together and reign from the backdrop.
Come to think of it, in Echo Nikolais probes deeply into the scary puzzle which appears here and there through all his works - one that concerns all proper magicians and children: is an echo any less real than what it repeats? Are we any realer than our shadows?