Academic literature on the topic 'Alwin Nikolais'

Abstract The Abominatron was an unexpected hit at the 1964 Audio Engineering Society (AES) convention, attracting the attention of luminaries and musical heavy-hitters such as Alwin Nikolais, Eric Siday, Lejaren Hiller, and people from the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Bob found himself taking orders for modules, something he’d never anticipated. Nikolais and Siday become his first customers. But in the meantime, he needed to roll out the high-end amp (dubbed the PMS-15) because the business had lost $28,000. Tooling up to produce 100, he ended up selling three—a catastrophic end to a two-year project. But success at AES gave him hope and he threw himself into hawking the new equipment, taking an ad in a 1965 AES journal, and attending the Music Teacher’s National Association (MTNA) convention. No sales were secured at the convention, but Bob met George Kelischek, an instrument builder who would become very influential in his life.

Abstract This Introduction lays out the historical and theoretical framework for the entire book, speaking to the fields of dance studies and China studies. It first states the research questions and main contributions of the book, and then introduces the major Chinese modern dancers under study—Yu Rongling, Wu Xiaobang, Dai Ailian, and Guo Mingda—and their connections to the Western canonical counterparts, including Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, Rudolf von Laban, and Alwin Nikolais. It explains the book’s transnational and transcultural perspective and its critical, dialectic stance toward both Eurocentrism and Sinocentrism in Western and Chinese dance historiographies. The chapter critically compares John Martin’s expression theory of modern dance with the Chinese counterpart and points out the distinctive characteristics of dance modernism in China in terms of dance’s intermedial relation to language and other artistic mediums. It then reflects on the nature of the book as “a dance history without dance,” as well as on the employed primary sources and interpretive strategies, by integrating theoretical views on this issue in the existing dance scholarship. The Introduction concludes with chapter outlines.

Abstract The “Epilogue” introduces Guo Mingda, a Chinese male modern dancer-choreographer and theorist. Guo left Republican China (1912–1949) for the United States in 1947, obtained his master’s degree in dance education from the University of Iowa (1947–1950), pursued a doctorate in dance education at New York University (1951–1954), learned various schools of Euro-American modern dance, studied dance and choreography with Alwin Nikolais (1910–1993) at the Henry Street Playhouse in New York for four years (1952–1955), and returned to socialist China in 1955. Guo translated, integrated, and reinterpreted histories and theories of various schools of modern dance and played an instrumental role in preserving the modern dance discourse in socialist China—during a time when modern dance was banned—and in reviving the genre in the Reform Era of the 1980s. Therefore, Guo’s modern dance endeavors provided an important “(anti-)American link” that connected the end of modern/new dance in China in 1960 and the genre’s resurgence in the early 1980s, with the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) in between.

Hanya Holm, dancer, choreographer, and teacher, is widely considered one of the pioneers of American modern dance, and was one of the most influential figures to transfer German dance philosophies and practices across the Atlantic. In an international career that spanned eight decades, she established herself as an award-winning choreographer of diverse genres, a master teacher, and a tireless advocate for dance. Her approach to kinetic abstraction and the lived experience of movement was foundational to modern dance practice and theory. In particular, she developed elaborate theories of the dancer’s relationship to space. Unlike some of her colleagues, Holm did not develop a codified technique, but instead taught through improvisational exploration of a comprehensive movement syllabus based on natural forces such as gravity and momentum. She insisted that each dance composition have its own form and its own vocabulary—an imperative passed down to her from her mentor Mary Wigman—and Holm, in turn, encouraged her students to develop their own aesthetic. Protégés including Alwin Nikolais, Murray Louis, Nancy Hauser, Valerie Bettis, Eve Gentry, Don Redlich, and Glen Tetley made distinctive contributions to modern dance in the latter half of the twentieth century.