Hawkins, Frederick (“Erick”)

(b. 23 April 1909 in Trinidad, Colorado; d. 23 November 1994 in New York City), dancer and choreographer best known for his pioneering approach to modern dance based on haiku-like metaphor and unstressed, “free-flow” movement.

One of four children, Hawkins was the only son of Eugene Gilbert Hawkins, an inventor, and Myrtle Minnie Cunning. When he was about ten, the family moved from Colorado to Kansas City, Missouri, where he attended public schools including Northeast High School. Encouraged by his teachers, he applied for a scholarship to Harvard University. He was accepted, entering Harvard in 1926 and receiving a B.A. degree in 1932 with a major in Greek studies.

While still in college, Hawkins attended his first dance recital, featuring the German dancer Harald Kreutzberg. The event electrified Hawkins: “Wow! … for the first time in my life, I knew what I wanted to do. Dance and make dances.” Sometime later he studied with Kreutzberg in Salzburg, Austria. He moved to New York City in 1934 to study ballet at the new School of American Ballet, founded that year by George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein. Balanchine pronounced him “very promising” and permitted him, even as a beginner, to teach. He made his dance debut on 9 June 1934 performing in Balanchine’s three works, Serenade, Dreams, and Mozartiana.

In 1936 Kirstein took the best of the Balanchine dancers to form his own Ballet Caravan, for which Hawkins wrote his first piece of choreography, Show Piece, which debuted on 15 July 1937. In the summer of 1936 Caravan performed at Bennington College, Vermont, and on opening night, Martha Graham, whose troupe was also there, went backstage to “single” Hawkins out. Hawkins soon decided to switch from ballet to Graham’s modem dance because, he said, “I had a continuing desire to do Balanchine’s work … but at the same time I knew the range of the ballet technique would never let me develop.”

Graham had opened her studio in 1926, and she taught only women in her own passionate style that was full of torso contractions. Her attraction to, and later infatuation with, Hawkins was unprecedented, as was her permission to let him attend rehearsals and then dance in the company. He became the first male member of her troupe, making his debut in American Document in 1938. While he was with the company, he starred in several other new dances including El Penitente (1940), Appalachian Spring (1944), and Dark Meadow and Cave of the Heart (both 1946).

Hawkins also took charge of the administrative and financial affairs of the company, imposing order on its hitherto chaotic business and obtaining grants to underwrite some productions. At the same time, he was beginning to choreograph his own works, including John Brown (1945) and Stephen Acrobat (1947). These pieces first revealed his stylistic and philosophical differences with Graham.

During one summer, Hawkins traveled through the American West, his birthplace, to study the dances of the Plains Indians, and was struck by the reverence for and harmony with natural phenomena in their dance ceremonies. An intensely thoughtful man, Hawkins combined this reverence with an appreciation of the loveliness of the human body and his studies of Asian philosophy. In addition, an injury that occurred while he was still with Graham made him more aware of his own body and the whole subject of kinesiology (the study of the principles of mechanics and anatomy in relation to human movement) in general.

Hawkins concluded that the locus of movement taught in ballet (the lower back) and by Graham (the torso) was incorrect for proper dance. Instead, he felt its source was from the pelvis, and that dance movement should not fight gravity (as in ballet) but work into it, as did the dances of the Plains Indians. This conviction led him to reject the tensions inherent in both balletic and Graham techniques, calling hers “bound flow” as opposed to his own “free flow.”

This free-flow style of movement also fit with his maturing beliefs about the function of art. Influenced by the impersonality of Asian art forms (where the individual artist was not necessarily present), his respect for nature, his belief that art must always show a triumph of life over destructive forces, and his love of metaphor, Hawkins gradually developed a philosophy of dance that differed radically from traditional ballet—with its emphases on conflict, loss, and the individual dancer—as well as from Graham’s emphasis on emotion.

Although many critics were unprepared for Hawkins’s dances, Edwin Denby already recognized that in his John Brown he was performing a kind of “Japanese nö drama,” something antithetical to Graham’s intense, psychological works. Nevertheless, Hawkins remained with Graham for another five years, and they were married in the summer of 1948. He finally left both Graham and the troupe while on tour in 1950; they divorced in 1954.

On 19 January 1952 Hawkins gave his first concert on his own with openings of the (eye). This work also marked his first of many years of collaboration with the composer Lucia Dlugoszewski, later his second wife, and the sculptor Ralph Dorazio. Hawkins felt strongly about the integration of all aspects of dance, and he commissioned artists and composers for his new works. He abhorred the idea of recorded music for a performance and often positioned the musicians on the stage with the dancers. Dlugoszweski actually created new instruments, including the “timbre piano,” for his works. Hawkins later commissioned other composers such as Virgil Thompson, Alan Hovhaness, and Zoltán Kodály, as well as artists such as Isamu Noguchi.

In 1957 Hawkins formed his own troupe, the Erick Hawkins Dance Company, with the dancers he had been working with since leaving Graham. That same year he wrote Here and Now with Watchers, which he described as “just pure poetry of movement.” However, Hawkins was never interested in movement for its own sake, and in this work, as in many others, he was exploring through metaphor the “suchness” or essence of the elements involved. Don McDonagh later wrote that this piece “may have been the most important one that Hawkins … ever made.”

Despite McDonagh’s observation, for years Hawkins’s dances were not popular in New York City, where many critics gave them only pallid praise. They were bothered by the fact that, as Anna Kisselgoff said in a 1968 review, “while there is action on stage, there is rarely anything actually happening.” By the early 1970s most Manhattan dance critics had begun to recognize some of what Hawkins was trying to convey, and in 1972 Clive Barnes wrote, “I have in the past always found Hawkins difficult to take.... Now for me, at last, enlightenment seems to have come.” Barnes added that what he had heretofore regarded as blandness, he now realized was a “kind of Olympian simplicity.”

Hawkins continued to dance well into the 1980s and choreographed dances until just before he died. Some of his most well-known pieces were 8 Clear Places (1960), Early Floating (1961), Dawn Dazzled Door (1972), Death Is the Hunter (1975), Plains Daybreak (1979), God the Reveller (1987), and Killer of Enemies (1991). He received awards from the Mellon Foundation in 1975, Dance magazine in 1979, and the Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival in 1988. Western Michigan University awarded him an honorary D.F.A. degree in 1983, and President Clinton presented him with a National Medal of Arts in 1994. Hawkins also wrote essays and gave speeches, some of which appeared in his 1992 book The Body Is a Clear Place.

Hawkins was physically fit with a rugged, austere face. He recovered from a stroke in 1988 before dying of prostate cancer at age eighty-five. His memorial service in December 1994 in New York City was attended by many who appreciated his subtle, poetic dances and his own free-flowing dance style. In his persistent, quiet manner, Hawkins changed the way dance could be taught and should be perceived, with his insistence upon a tension-free technique and harmonious, life-affirming messages. Deborah Jowitt noted after his death that to Hawkins “dancing wasn’t simply something you did; it was a kind of poetic seeing into the essences of things.” As he had always wished, Erick Hawkins had indeed become a “poet of the body.”

There are modest Hawkins holdings at the New York Public Library Dance Collection and the Harvard University Archives, but the most useful autobiographical material comes from his book The Body Is a Clear Place and Other Statements on Dance (1992). No full-length biography exists, but his early life and relationship with Martha Graham are well documented in Agnes de Milk’s Martha: The Life and World of Martha Graham (1991). Don McDonagh’s The Complete Guide to Modern Dance (1976), though old, gives details about some of his earlier dances. There were many reviews of his works and other articles over the years, including: Anna Kisselgoff, “Dance: Hawkins Troupe,” New YorkTimes (15 Nov. 1968); Clive Barnes, “Hawkins and Tharp—At Home on Broadway,” New York Times (5 Nov. 1972); Jennifer Dunning, “Blunt Words on Ballet from Erick Hawkins,” New York Times (11 Feb. 1992), in an interview with Hawkins about his book; and Deborah Jowitt, “Erick Hawkins (1909–1994),” Village Voice (13 Dec. 1994). An obituary by Kisselgoff is in the New York Times (24 Nov. 1994).

Sandra Shaffer Vandoren