A different old modern dance.

You must have noticed while attending dance concerts recently or even not so recently, for, for this seems to have been going on for some years now--that American modern dance is adopting a classic slant. Now l`m not saying that the young ladies are wearing pointe shoes, or that the young gentlemen are dazzling us with their entrechats, but there is a strong classic element--call it influence, if you wish--in, for example, the work of Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, and the Alvin Ailey company. And for that matter, on the other side of the street, classic companies appear to have no compunction whatsoever, and comparatively little difficulty, in absorbing modern dance into their own repertories. I have no idea how many classic troupes perform Taylor's Company B, for instance, but that boogie-woogie bugle boy seems to be sounding loud and clear all across the country and even to territories overseas.

Yet there appears to be at least one area where modern dance remains strictly modern--in the nicest of old-fashioned ways. Murray Louis and Alwin Nikolais were inseparable even when they were not together. Although for many years they maintained separate dance companies, they still lived together as life companions. founded their own school, and worked as a unit. Even before Nikolais died three years ago at the age of eighty-two, Murray and Nik had already merged the two companies, and Louis, of course, now leads it. At the end of last year this now-fused troupe, officially called Murray Louis and Nikolais Dance, gave its customary annual New York City season at the Joyce Theater, and it struck me, certainly not for the first time, that this company. and indeed the whole Louis-Nikolais tradition, has different roots from the main stem tree of most American modern dance. Whereas all the other troupes and schools trace their background to the Denishawn influence of Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, Louis-Nikolais comes more from the German school of expressionist dance, from Mary Wigman, via her student and their teacher, Hanya Holm.

This difference has become more rather than less marked over the years. Not only has the Louis-Nikolais work immersed itself in what might be called "magic theatricality," it has also proved virtually immune to the strain of classic ballet virus which has modified (some would say strengthened) the entire aesthetic of contemporary dance almost everywhere, at times with cookie-cutter results. So today Louis-Nikolais seems the last outpost of modern dance's "old-time religion," which disconcertingly makes it appear unexpectedly fresh.

Of course all modern dance basically started as a rebellion against the forms, styles, aesthetics, philosophy, and even social background of the nineteenth-century classic ballet. Martha Graham in her early days of joyful revolution made this abundantly clear, as can be witnessed by her well-recorded 1931 confrontation with Michel Fokine at the New School; though violently opposed to the artificialities of classic dance, he ironically found himself cast by Graham as a staunch defender of its faith.

Yet perhaps--even as Graham, and also her rival and peer influence Doris Humphrey, inveighed against the painted horrors and corrupt artificiality of classic ballet and fancy toe dancing--the worm was in the bud. After all, at the Denishawn School, of which Graham and Humphrey were the outstanding graduates, classic ballet was part of the curriculum. Not stressed, perhaps, but present. And as Graham progressed as a choreographer--perhaps from Diversion of Angels (1948) onward--a certain classic tone could be sensed in her work. As she herself always maintained, "The toe is either pointed or it is not," and the artificiality of the pointed toe became part of the fabric of modern dance. As did modifications of the arabesque Soon the dexterity of at least partially trained classical dancers exerted an influence on modern dance choreography, moving it more and more towards the display of virtuosity almost for its own sake. Yet this tendency of embracing at least some aspects of classicism does seem far less noticeable in the work of Nikolais and Louis than in most modern dance companies.

It is fascinating that every classic ballet dancer, even every tiny student, can trace his or her lineage directly, teacher from teacher, to the eighteeth-century Gaetano Vestris and his son, the great Auguste Vestris. Sounds incredible but it's true And in modern dance most, if not quite all, can trace their academic heritage from those prime Denishawn teachers and innovators, Graham, Humphrey, and also Charles Weidman. In the perennially valuable Don McDonagh's Complete Guide to Modern Dance (1976), McDonagh has a tree of what he calls "Extended Choreographic Families," and alongside the Graham and the Humphrey-Weidman groupings is one marked Hanya Holm Nikolais did study at Bennington with Graham, Humphrey, and Weidman but still regarded Holm as his teacher.

Now, the German-born Holm was a student of Wigman, who in turn was the student and assistant of Rudolf von Laban (creator of Labanotation and the teacher of Kurt Jooss and his Essen School), and had earlier studied with Emile Jaques-Dalcroze This particular phase of American dance history from Holm onwards has been best documented by Walter Sorelk As for Murray Louis, he was the pupil of both Holm and Nikolais, as well as being Nikolais's artistic protege This is why both Nikolais and Louis have always taught and choreographed with a slight yet telling difference from the majority of their colleagues.

In an aphorism commonly attributed to her, although doubtless uttered by many, Graham said, "There are only two kinds of dance--good and bad" And whether it is a classic ballet or modern dance, or its theatrical, largely Dadaist reinvention as postmodern dance, or its blend of classic and modern into so-called third-stream dance, there is no doubt that its purity is a great deal less important than its quality or effectiveness. Yet it is sometimes useful, even significant, to note where things come from, and why some are rather different from others

Once in Soviet Russia I grimly noted that there were only two kinds of automobiles--the clean and the dirty. Variety is a quality to be cherished for it is the spice of invention, and difference is a mechanism of variety; so when we note that Murray Louis and Nikolais Dance provides something that nowadays is a little out of the ordinary in its feel for what was once known as expressionist dance, that is praise, indeed Not everything in our dance world has to be traced back to Martha Graham or George Balanchine.