The Returns of Alwin Nikolais: Bodies, Boundaries and the Dance Canon (review)

In 1968 Marcia Siegel reported that Alwin Nikolais was “interested in finding a way to throw moving patterns onto moving bodies, but so far even film projectors are not powerful enough to do the job effectively.” Siegel went on to quote the artist directly as he lamented, “I always seem to be looking for something that hasn’t been invented yet.”¹ There is a certain irony in reading this passage today, given the presence of new media and technologies in contemporary staging practices. But considering what it might have meant to desire that capacity four decades ago, one comes to a core issues of this volume, which are dance and vision: both how artistic visions can materialize in dance and how that effort can be viewed.

The Returns of Alwin Nikolais: Bodies, Boundaries and the Dance Canon is admirable in its scope. Instead of a volume that argues for Nikolais’s place within the central canon of modern dance—in fact, Mark Franko’s contribution analyzes the construction of the canon itself—Claudia Gitelman and Randy Martin have curated a fascinating set of essays that approach the work of Nikolais from a number of vantage points. In this way they demonstrate the boundaries that structure our understandings of Nikolais but also argue for their permeability. Martin, using Nikolais’s artistic practice to speak about disciplinarity, writes in the first chapter: “to assert a set of boundaries within a given environment introduces techniques not simply to police but also to transgress the elements of time and space that they form” (11). Here, Nikolais becomes the focal point for a discussion that is also about the limits of dance and of dance scholarship.

Readers will be most familiar with Nikolais as the thinker, dreamer, and maker evoked in the texts and images of Nik: A Documentary, edited from his unpublished manuscripts by Marcia Siegel in 1971, and in “No Man from Mars,” his contribution to Selma Jeanne Cohen’s 1966 volume The Modern Dance: Seven Statements of Belief.² The Returns of Alwin Nikolais complements these earlier essays by placing itself adjacent to and filling in the spaces around Nikolais’s modern vision. Its purpose is to be the “first single volume dedicated to a critical assessment of his work” (17), and it does so with respect and interest.

One of the central boundaries that is both established and rendered fluid by this collection is that of materials. At a rudimentary level, this is manifested in the assemblage of analytical essays set alongside resources that include short memoir pieces by Nikolais and Murray Louis, Naima Prevots’s compilation of critical receptions of Nikolais’s choreography, and Gitelman and Jana Feinman’s detailed chronologies of premieres and performances. But even this distinction between primary and secondary sources is blurred by the revised and reprinted essays from Siegel and from Herbert Blau, the latter of whose contribution, first published in 1982, weaves Nikolais’s work into a musing on the future of the theater.

The fluidity of boundaries is also evident in how the collection treats time and place. Here, contributions tend to form a genealogy in the Foucauldian sense of dispersion rather than a search for origins. They are linked through sets of associations, as in Philip Auslander’s wonderful essay in which he uses parallels to contemporaneous visual arts in order to clarify how Nikolais’s formalism served as a method to stave off referentiality. In “Artisans of Space,” the second of two essays by Siegel that appear in the book, associations run to a past that is not only American. Siegel proposes similarities between Nikolais’s stage experiments and the work of Oskar Schlemmer at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, as well...