Life's an archive: while preparing for this month's season at the Joyce, Murray Louis is assembling the artifacts of his past.

Murray Louis, dancer, choreographer--archivist? In a career that has touched many points in the artistic spectrum, Louis, at the age of seventy one, has taken on yet another project. He's channeling his energies into a huge task, in essence the preservation of his work and that of Alwin Nikolais, his mentor and lifelong partner, in the form of a comprehensive archive. The collection will be housed in the Vernon Alden Library of the University of Ohio in Athens, with funding provided by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. "My whole life has been dance," Louis says. "I'm into every facet of it."

In a flurry of activity, Louis is working on the details in his airy studio-office on Houston Street at Broadway, while keeping busy with his everyday duties as head of Murray Louis and Nikolais Dance, which will appear at the Joyce Theater this month [see page 30]. And at last, he's renewed his energy and purpose, which dropped to a low point following the devastating blow of Nikolais's death at the age of eighty-two. "Last May, Nik had been gone five years," says Louis, "and it's taken me that long to pull out of a tailspin. For the longest time I was operating on remote control. Now I'm not drained anymore. Suddenly I had this surge of energy." He sold their Greenwich Village town house, took an apartment, and embarked on a renewed life, though the bond with Nikolais will never be broken. "I still feel Nik all around me," says Louis. "I talk to him. I'm completely involved working on this archive, with material that goes back to when Nik arrived at the Henry Street Settlement Playhouse in 1948 and I joined him the following year. What is important for me is that it will allow the future to see what the past was, as it was, not just through the eyes and imagination of critics and writers."

Film, videos, photographs, flyers, posters, programs, music scores, costumes, props, among other artifacts--the accumulation of a half-century's work is building up in the Louis headquarters. Bulging black boxes stacked from floor to ceiling proclaim peculiar contents: "Pond four stools and rope," "The City drop," "Afternoon Aperitif and Hats," "Guignol masks"--intriguing signposts of fifty years of Nikolais and Louis dance. Costumes and sets will eventually go to the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts around the year 2000 or when it has space. "Curator Madeline Nichols is a very valuable person," says Louis. "I've done nothing without consulting her." The rest is being assembled by Louis and his colleagues for the Ohio repository, where it is due to be exhibited and to go online soon.

Says Louis, "We have early film footage, some going back to 1950--8mm stuff that you stopped and wound up every forty seconds--then on through all the film improvements to soft and hard video. We have an extraordinary collection of photographs: dancers, people, places; all of Nik's original music; tapes; all the scores I had written for him. Frank Garcia, our costume designer of thirty years, has taken charge and become our best archivist because he can identify everything through the costumes. I'd say, `Frankie, what's this?' and he'd know immediately."

There are boxes of clippings charting the artistic progress of Nikolais and Louis, from before the time Louis first danced for Nikolais to when they headed separate companies. "We sowed a lot of creative seeds across this country," says Louis. "There isn't anybody today who hasn't been influenced by either Nik or myself. We are a seminal force in the dance of America."

Although Nikolais's work has been extensively taped by Dennis Diamond (Louis did the narration) and others, Louis is still ambivalent about video as an ideal archival medium. "Today's TV screens give a distorted impression of what the dances are really like," he says. "In the future, when screens get bigger and the dancers look bigger, the nuance, clarity of movement, style, and subtlety will come through. But now, when you watch a little screen with six-inch-high figures, what in the world can that possibly convey except what's basically going on--a floor plan to allow people who are going to re-create the dance. When the screen allows you to see two-thirds the size of a performer, then it will be meaningful."

Anticipating that day, Louis is in the process of recording all of his and Nikolais's dance works, sometimes recreating them on stages or piecing them together from existing film and tape. "We've just finished filming Scenario," says Louis. "It had to be done head-on with two cameras. A hundred fifty light cues. It took over a hundred hours."

Two years ago, Louis closed the school where Nikolais's unique technique, based on the German school of expressionist dance, as handed down from Mary Wigman via Hanya Holm, was taught. Explaining his decision, Louis says that "dance tuition in colleges had soared. Students came to New York not to study but to keep in shape and get a job. Understandable. But we were getting a big influx of foreign students. Because of their poor comprehension of the language, many weren't able to grasp what we were really trying to teach, because the distinction of this technique is in the subtlety and in the interior understanding of the movement rather than its gross demonstration." To ensure that the Nikolais-Louis technique will continue to be taught universally and correctly, Louis is preparing a five-part box series that will include three videos and two books.

Recently Louis has been preaching the Nikolais-Louis credo by touring universities. He says, "I tried to raise the dance consciousness of the lions of America's intelligentsia," lecturing and illustrating his talks with short videos of his and Nikolais's work. "I knew they were interested by their questions--and we picked up four dance dates," he adds with a laugh.

He gives his company credit for his being able to return to dance after a two-year hiatus. "I kept in shape because my dancers helped me," he says. "On tour, my rehearsal clothes were shipped with everything else, and when we went in for morning warm-up, they insisted that I do it, too. They are my family."

As for choreography, a new work, Sinners All, premiered last year, proved that Louis had lost none of his creativity [Dance Magazine, February 1997, page 82]. At the Joyce this season, he will again perform his solo, Alone, not seen since shortly after Nikolais's death. And then there's his new piece, The Blue Room. "It really came from watching a television set and computers," he says, "that blue light with everybody focused at a machine. You're glued. You cannot move. Our whole world is going to take place within the blue room. We're going to eat, argue, dream in the blue room. We're all going to be sitting in that room endlessly, staring. If you take your eyes off that screen, you're dead." Speaking of his choreography, Louis says, "I don't have a style. I come out of dance itself. I operate the principles of dance the way I talk. I get a point of view. Each piece has its own identity. It's what choreography's all about." Waving a hand at the boxes of archival material, he says, "You know, there's no such thing as a future unless you have a past. And so my great past is giving me a great future."