A strange hero's influence.

I had never seen dancing like Daniel Nagrin's. His solo dances were actually "duets" with unseen others, with memories, space, music. His movement was initiated internally, by intense sensations, emotions, or thoughts. He had athletic virtuosity but was not graceful, revealing exertion fully and never trying to make it look easy. He embodied pride, but even though his torso was mostly vertical, his body forms were often twisted and angular. He did not project his energy out to the audience; rather, he pulled us into a sometimes very small kinesphere. He seldom released his energy freely, but usually kept it powerfully controlled within his body. His laserlike, direct focus would change with lightning speed.

I couldn't identify with the mostly macho characters he chose to investigate, and in those first viewings, I didn't necessarily like Nagrin's work. I was transported to a place where dancing is a profoundly significant human endeavor, however, and there was no turning back. I had been on a quest for my life's meaning, and in Nagrin's teaching, rehearsing, and performing, I was shown a vision of how to combine life and work through dance, as an ennobling activity of the human spirit. I was introduced to an art that explores, values, and makes accessible what it means to be human.

I have been making and performing my own solo modern dance concerts for more than thirty years now, and there is no question that it was those initial encounters with the dancing of Nagrin that called me to this journey. His passionate, uncompromising love for dance and his long career of exceptional diversity have inspired countless others to pursue dance.

He and his former wife, Helen Tamiris, the modern dance trailblazer, are among the few artists who have successfully fused (or blurred the distinction between) art and entertainment. Nagfin has drawn on the jazz music and social dance he experienced in the 1930s at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom in New York City in his choreography, teaching, and lectures. His Broadway career as the lead dancer in several shows choreographed by Tamiris culminated with the Donaldson Award (precursor of the Tony) for the 1955-56 season.

In the early 1940s he and Tamiris appeared in both club dates and modern dance concerts. He choreographed dozens of solos, which have been restaged over the years on more than forty artists and companies. From 1960 through 1964 he co-directed the Tamiris-Nagrin Dance Company. In 1957 he began a series of tours to colleges and festivals throughout the United States, Europe, and the Pacific, where he performed, lectured, and taught master classes. In the early 1970s he founded and directed The Workgroup, a New York City-based ensemble which developed new works through improvisation.

In 1981 Nagrin accepted an invitation to my Seattle Summer Institute of Dance, where he taught dance composition, coached me in his work Jazz: Three Ways, and performed excerpts from The Peloponnesian War, his 1968 full-evening, multimedia response to the Vietnam War. He taught with the uncompromising rigor and attention to detail he had exhibited when I first knew him twenty years earlier, but also with a richness of life experience that enthralled our students. His performing was powerful and provocative, controversial and unsettling for much of our audience. Wearing only briefs, his body was expressive and well-toned, looking fifteen years younger than his age of 64.

Most significantly, his mentoring gave me new life that extended my performing career by many years. At age 41, I believed that my best years as a dancer were behind me and was beginning to phase myself out of performing altogether. Nagrin gave me what can best be called tough love, pushing me toward a physical virtuosity I had believed was no longer possible. I am profoundly grateful for the gift of his perception.

At an age when one might have expected Nagrin to slow down and reflect upon past accomplishments, he gave up his loft in Manhattan and started a vibrant new career as a professor of dance at Arizona State University at Tempe and as a writer of a series of remarkable books. His writings contain a wealth of information communicated in no-nonsense, intimate, and personal language. Reading them is almost like spending time with Nagrin himself.

A few years ago I visited Nagrin at his home in Tempe. He recounted vivid memories of dance experiences we had shared and spoke passionately about the touring and writing that his retirement from ASU has made possible. He has mellowed with age and exudes a personal warmth that is as inspiring as the feisty outspokenness I remember from our first meeting forty years ago. He continues to lead the way, to show by example how to live one's life fully through the art of dance.

In his 62nd year, Bill Evans still performs solo concerts. He also performs with and choreographs for the Evans Modern Dance Company and the Evans Rhythm Tap Ensemble. He is a professor of dance at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

BY DANIEL NAGRIN

How to Dance Forever: Surviving Against the Odds. New York, NY: William Morrow & Co. 1988. 367 pages, paper. $16.00. ISBN: 0-688074-79-0.

Dance and the Specific Image: Improvisation. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. 1994. 256 pages, paper. $19.95. ISBN: 0-822955-20-2.

The Six Questions: Acting Techniques for Dance Performance. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. 1997. 221 pages, paper. $19.95. ISBN: 0-822956-24-1.

Choreography and the Specific Image: Nineteen Essays and a Workbook. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. 2001. 274 pages, paper. $22.95. ISBN: 0-822957-50-7.

To find out more about Daniel Nagrin, visit www.nagrin.com.