Dance Magazine makes its annual awards.

NEW YORK CITY--Christine Dakin, a leading dancer with Martha Graham Dance Company; Kate Johnson, a member of White Oak Dance Project; and Czech choreographer Jirf Kylian have been chosen to receive the 1994 Dance Magazine Awards, which will be presented April 25 at the Asia Society in Manhattan. This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the present awards, which were initiated in 1954 to honor "significant contributions to dance during distinguished careers." Marge Champion will be the mistress of ceremonies.

As always, nominations were submitted by Dance Magazine's editors and correspondents throughout the world. This year's recipients were chosen from among one hundred and eleven nominees by a panel that was chaired by Clive Barnes and included John Gruen, Doris Hering, Joseph H. Mazo, Richard Philp, Tobi Tobias, and Elizabeth Zimmer.

CHRISTINE DAKIN

Performing with vibrant intensity and guided by keen intelligence, Dakin has demonstrated that a style as distinctive and personal as that of Martha Graham can be continued and, indeed, revitalized, even after the passing of its creator. She puts a carefully controlled technique at the service of emotional intensity and vivid theatricality.

Dakin has never allowed her audiences to forget that Graham's dances are drama as well as choreography. Nor has she allowed us to forget that Graham's mythic heroines, for all their strength and determination, often are vulnerable, questioning their own motivations and actions. Dakin can seem, in the course of a single performance, as fragile as a Dresden shepherdess and as devastating as a hurricane. As she proved last fall in Twyla Tharp's Demeter and Persephono, she also can be wickedly funny.

Dakin was studying languages at the University of Michigan when she was captured by dance and began to take class. Thinking herself too old to begin a performing career--she had passed twenty--she decided to teach, and traveled to New York City to continue her studies at the Graham school. She auditioned for an apprentice ensemble being formed by Bertram Ross and Mary Hinkson. In his article about her in the October 1993 issue of Dance Magazine, Gus Solomons jr quoted Dakin's recollection: "Of course, I wasn't nervous, because I had no illusions of anything happening."

Something did happen, however, and she was accepted. She also performed with the companies of Pearl Lang and Kazuko Hirabayashi. She entered the Graham company itself in 1976, and in the years that followed advanced to principal roles. During a single performance in 1988, she danced The Bride in Appalachian Spring, The Chosen One in The Rite of Spring, and One Who Speaks in Letter to the World. In 1992, she danced her first Clytemnestra, and last year She took a major role in Demeter and Persephone.

In addition to performing, Dakin teaches and has started to choreograph. "I'm exploring it Slowly," she told Solomons. "If I feel something happening that makes me really want to try it, I'll let myself."

KATE JOHNSON

Some performers are identifiable the moment they step on stage, not merely by their appearance but by a specific almost magical presence. Johnson is like a beam of light, glowing softly and warmly from the stage. Her dancing offers precise definition of shape within a smoothly articulated flow of motion, even at great speed.

Her purpose in dancing, she has said, is "to get across an emotion, a large idea." The ideas she has embodied have been conceived by some of the outstanding choreographers of our time, including Eliot Feld, Mark Morris, Merce Cunningham, the late Hanya Holm, and, most unforgettably, Paul Taylor.

Johnson was born in Florida, where she took her first dance classes. After high school she studied ballet in Chicago, then came to New York and began her modern dance training with Manuel Alum. During the 1970s she danced for more than two years with the Feld Ballet. Johnson performed with Rosalind Newman and Dancers and the Hannah Kahn Dance Company; and in 1982 began her memorable eight-year association with Taylor's Company.

In 1988 she appeared as a guest artist With New York City Ballet, dancing in Peter Martins's Barber Violin Concerto. After leaving the Taylor company in 1990, she joined the White Oak Dance Project, directed by Mikhail Baryshnikov, where she continues to perform.

Johnson has always managed to honor the style and intentions of each choreographer whose work she interprets while at the same time bringing to every dance her own unmistakeable elegance and gentle intensity.

JIRI KYLIAN

In an interview he gave in 1981, Jiri Kylian said that his choreography was concerned with "man as a part of nature--or not as a part of it." The relations between humans and the natural world, and between humans and other humans, form the emotional content of his dances.

Kylian is one of the world's most respected and influential choreographers. As artistic director of Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT), not only has he created a major body of work, but also he has pushed the company into new avenues, created NDT 2, a troupe of young performers, and NDT 3, which develops works especially for mature dancers.

The choreographer was born in Prague, where he began his study of ballet at age nine. After five years of training, he won a scholarship to the Royal Ballet School in London. John Cranko hired him to dance with Stuttgart Ballet in 1968, and it was in Stuttgart that he made his first choreography.

Kylian made his first work for NDT in 1973, and two years later was appointed joint director of the company, which he soon forged into an instrument suited to his intense, romantic, and humanistic vision. In 1978, Stuttgart Ballet presented his Return to the Strange Land at the Metropolitan Opera House, and American critics acclaimed the appearance of a major choreographer. Kylian brought NDT to the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1978, and to New York City in 1979.

As a choreographer, Kylian has deliberately broken the barriers between ballet and modern dance, and he also has incorporated folk elements into his work. He continues to create, adding to a large, impressive body of work; and NDT continues to be among the most highly respected European dance companies.