NIKOLAIS, Theodore Alwin ("Nik")

(b. 25 November 1910 in Southington, Connecticut; d. 8 May 1993 in New York City), choreographer whose theory of decentralization and imaginative use of projected lights, costumes, and props were hallmarks of his theatrical productions.

Nikolais, the youngest of six siblings, began to study piano at an early age. In 1929 he launched his career in theater as an accompanist at the Westport Movie House, but talking pictures soon forced him to look elsewhere for work, so he began to accompany dance classes in nearby Hartford, Connecticut. In 1933 he attended what he later termed a "life-changing" dance performance by the German choreographer Mary Wigman, who inspired him to study dance. From 1935 to 1937 he served as the director of the Hartford Parks Marionette Theatre. His work with the puppets provided him with the foundation for what he would later call his theory of decentralization: that "art is motion, not emotion." In 1937 he founded his first dance company and school in Hartford.

Nikolais served overseas in the Army Signal Corps from 1942 until the end of World War II, and in 1948 he became director of Henry Street Playhouse in New York City. One year later he formed the Playhouse Dance Company in a studio on the Lower East Side. Though in a location somewhat removed from the center of the dance community, this suited Nikolais's tastes. This group later became the Nikolais Dance Theatre.

Nikolais met Murray Louis at Colorado College in 1949, and the two began a lifetime partnership, which included choreographing works together. Louis was also a dancer in the Nikolais Dance Theatre, even after he formed his own company in 1953. Also at Colorado College, Nikolais served as dance assistant for the German expressionist Hanya Holm.

In his choreography, Nikolais moved away from what he considered the self-absorption, and the tendency for dances to be allegorical, that had prevailed in the 1940s. He championed the idea of abstract gestures, unique and defensible in and of themselves, and neither interpretive nor derived from ballet or jazz. He emphasized the difference between movement and motion, defining motion as intentional movement, or the act of moving with purpose. Therefore, any action could constitute dance.

Nikolais also maintained that dance need not be accompanied by, and would not even be enhanced by, emotion. This he learned from working with puppets while at the Hartford Parks Marionette Theatre. It was an aspect of his work that did not always sit well with the early critics, who often deemed his creations "inhuman." However, his piece Kaleidoscope (1956) was considered "evidence of a new force in the modern dance world."

Nikolais continuously explored the concepts of space and time in his work. Unrestricted by allegory or realism, time took on new dimension and offered new possibilities. Key to his works was his theory of decentralization, in which man was part of, but not central to, his environment. His dancers did not represent human characters on stage. The dancer was one aspect in the interdependent relationship—Nikolais labeled it a polygamy—between the props, the sets, the lights, the music, and the motion.

He designed intricate sets and costumes to challenge the dancers and to further remove an audience's temptation to view them as humans. The props and costumes required his dancers to overcome obstacles as they explored space and time through pure motion. Often the costumes extended or distorted the dancers' forms, and occasionally completely obscured them.

In Imago (1963) the dancers were clad in small cylindrical headpieces reminiscent of helmets and had long articulated arm extensions ending in flat discs. Thus attired, they danced to a score of dissonant electronic sounds against a backdrop of cobalt blue. The music Nikolais used was all recorded: with the aid of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he purchased Robert Moog's first synthesizer in the 1960s.

Sanctum (1964) opens with a man swinging from a trapeze. Later, dancers appear inside stretchy fabric ovals, which flex open and shut suggestively as they move. In another section, the dancers maneuver across the stage, carrying long silver poles. Finally, several dancers seem to be trapped inside open-sided, cage-like boxes with flexible sides from which they struggle to free themselves.

In Tower (1965) the dancers emerge with sections of metal fence, which they proceed to hitch together to form a tower. Then the tower, in a flash of light and sound, is destroyed.

Nikolais was considered a pioneer in the fields of lighting as well as costumes. He was interested in lighting the movement, not the dancers themselves, so he generally lit the dances from below, and often projected images (which he painted himself) onto them. His use of projected lights is considered by some to have been a precursor for the discotheque scene that emerged in the 1970s.

In Tent (1968) a large expanse of white cloth is at once a set, a prop, and a dancer. The dancers carry the cloth on stage, assist in raising it, dance beneath it, around it, and under it, and finally appear above it wearing masks with just their legs showing beneath the cloth "like a grove of swaying stalks with heads," according to Don McDonogh. As the tent lifts, projected stripes and colors on the dancers' bodies make them appear naked and vulnerable. The tent occupies the same level of humanness as the dancers, and is thus equal to them in their environment.

The Nikolais Dance Theatre performed infrequently in the 1960s in New York City but toured extensively throughout the United States. Nikolais's 1968 tour of France catapulted him to world fame and ultimately led him, at the invitation of the French National Ministry of Culture, to form the Centre Nationale de Danse Contemporaine in Anger, France. Although he had retired as a dancer in 1950, Nikolais continued to choreograph until 1992, the year his last piece, Aurora, with music by John Scoville, premiered at the Joyce Theatre in New York City. He died of cancer at Cabrini Medical Center in New York City.

Nikolais took the crisp lines of Wigman and Holm, clothed them in stretch jersey, bathed them in projected images, and surrounded them in synthesized sound. An evening with the Nikolais Dance Theatre was an experience unlike any other.

Marcia B. Siegel, ed., "Nik: A Documentary," in Dance Perspectives (1971), offers some background information on Nikolais and is richly illustrated with color photos of his works, along with many personal sketches. Don McDonogh, The Complete Guide to Modern Dance (1976), gives detailed descriptions of some of Nikolais's dances. Elinor Rogosin, "Discovering Alwin Nikolais," in Conversations with American Choreographers (1980), explores his theory of decentralization and motion versus emotion.

Katharine Fisher Britton