Erick Hawkins (1909-94).

Beauty--an almost sacred beauty--was the motivating force in Erick Hawkins's work. Emerging from extensive aesthetic resources, his images remain as potently allusive as the haunting lines of a revealing poem. He seemed to be saying that the beauty of life lay in being what we are and in being able to yield in joy to the wonders of otherness. He spoke in similes and movement, in metaphors that reached into a sphere of nonreality in order to give us a greater understanding of our reality.

Hawkins asked us to look beyond the obvious in his "free-flow" technique; he wanted us to see the poetic perception in the clarity and sophisticated simplicity of his style. His work can be very erotic: Without being vulgar or obvious, he created some dances in which he celebrated the beauty of the naked body with intoxicated tenderness. He perceived human relationships with great sensitivity and believed in "the complementary polarity of man and, woman," as he once said. Presenting his dancers in costume, in leotards, or in near-nakedness, he evoked a sensuous feeling of wonder that extolled the humanness in the dancing human being.

Of course, Hawkins's choreography can be understood on two levels. One can enjoy the easy and natural flow in which his dancers move. Hawkins believed in letting the body move "all by itself," without tension, liberated from the willful will. One can admire the decorative costumes, sometimes challenging and weird, and the stunning masks that are primitive and ritualistic or highly sophisticated. And one may look for a story line in Hawkins's visual language, which can be very emotional in a quiet way.

But then one may also dig deeper. "I try to invent the movement from the unconscious around the poetic nugget or node," Hawkins said, "and later decide in my consciousness whether I use this or that movement that I invented or not." So Hawkins's work, with its archetypal and ritualistic images, may also be understood in its mythological and psychological implications.

Very few of us can remember Hawkins as King Lear in Martha Graham's flawed work, Eye of Anguish. At that time, in 1950, when he was forty-one years old, Hawkins seemed to be too young for Lear. But he told me that from studying King Lear he learned what true tragedy really is: We must not mistake the tragic for tragedy. Merely to report the tragic is to tell of a neurotic experience. What is needed is to understand the ritual of tragedy, the essence of its roots. Age has nothing to do with it.

Hawkins's work lies beyond the traditional concepts of pacing and phrasing. He wants to convey a sensation of poetic significance, a sensuous impression of fleeting thoughts. His imaginary world is one in which time is of no duration, and the West is as close to the East as it ever can be.

I have known Hawkins since the 1950s and have always felt that he was unique as a human being, a thinker, and an artist. He could easily be carried away, however, by the wisdom of his tongue-overdoing his messages in class and convincing his listeners before he had finished his argument. There was a remarkable intensity about him, but also a curiosity about others and the world. And he had tremendous willpower: After having suffered a stroke a few years ago, he rebuked nature and returned eventually to teaching, choreographing, and performing. His was a long journey--a tour de force with some detours de force.

I have always been impressed by Hawkins's straightforwardness, his erect posture, his equanimity. Only once did I see him lose his temper. Or was he dropping a mask? It was in 1963, when the Ford Foundation announced its six-million-dollar grant to George Balanchine's School of American Ballet and New York City Ballet. Hawkins was incensed; he railed on, spitting out his poetic fury about "those foreigners" who encroach on the native rights of artists born in the United States. His eyes were afire. It was then that I thought: If Hawkins had not become the unique dancer he did, I could envision him as an American revivalist. teaching the scriptures of Buddhism or Taoism or the philosophy of Confucius to the Native Americans in the Dakotas, in the mountains of Colorado, or on the mesas of New Mexico.