New Life for Nikolais.

The Nikolais/Louis Legacy Workshop held this summer in Salt Lake City was the Lollapalooza of dance festivals. In a collaboration between Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company and the Nikolais/Louis Foundation for Dance that began in 2003, when Louis selected the company to perform the Nikolais-Louis repertoire (see "Pathbreakers" and "Preserving the Nikolais Legacy," Sept. 2003), the three-week workshop brought together musicians, lighting designers, photographers, and four generations of dancers. It was a tribute to Nikolais' work and all the people who were changed, formed, and informed by it. Central to the organizer's mission was the handing down of Nik's vision and philosophy as a living art.

After a week of receptions, films, photo exhibits, and panel discussions, the practicum settled into the hard work of technique, composition class, and studying the Nikolais repertoire. With 150 participants and a faculty, that could be a who's who of Nikolais alumni (Murray Louis, Phyllis Lamhut, Gladys Bailin, Claudia Gitelman, and Nikolais' stage director Ruth Grauert, among others), all four rehearsal studios at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, along with its main theater stage and black box, were inhabited by someone in some stage of internalizing the Nikolais/Louis technique.

Murray Louis, 80, still teaches class, and, other than occasionally cupping his hand to his ear, his senses are as sharp as his insights. Whether jumping up to tease a young student about commitment, or suggesting the students are simply "cleaning their nails," Louis helped the dancers discover what is "intruding on their work" and "how to include what is characteristically there."

Joan Woodbury preaches from the same pulpit. "Nik was always talking about 'the unique gesture.' This is not a technique of steps, it is about an approach to movement," she said.

In another studio Dianne Markham, who performed with the Murray Louis Dance Company and now teaches at the North Carolina School of the Arts, worked with advanced students. Teaching the classic tenets of time, space, shape, and motion, she helped students develop their improvisations into compositions.

They began with each selecting three body parts and a subject matter. "The subject matter can be anything that has a [quality] to it," Markham said, "like non-sense, smooth, caffeinated."

Students then created a common vocabulary by making an individual phrase and teaching it to their partner. The dancers now had movement material they could vary or repeat. Next Markham began shape studies, asking students to create three shapes to anchor to a beginning, a middle, and an end. "So they are linking the material, and developing it from their phrase," Markham later explained. "This is the essence of the work, something they can take with them."

The dancers took the phrase home to work on, bringing it back the next day for critiques. Markham gave astute feedback they could apply immediately. She sprinkled her comments with instructive stories, cautioning students not to ask the "what and why" too early in the process. "Remind yourself," she said, "of what made you want to explore the question in the first place."

Shanna Dever, a graduate student at Florida State University, decided to attend the workshop after Alberto Del Saz, artistic director of the Nikolais/Louis Foundation, visited FSU last spring to teach and set the Nikolais work Pond on the students. Dever said the workshop changed her appreciation of that piece. "Now I understand the how and why of the movement."

At one point during the workshop, alumni dancers began an improvisation with teachers, then students, joining in. It lasted an hour and a half. "It was magical," said Dever. "Then I understood the roots of the work [and] why it was necessary to bring all these people together to explore it."

Del Saz emphasized that the bottom line for the workshop is learning a skill. "Whether it is space or shape or time or motion, each piece requires a different quality. But the principles are the same. Slowly the students get the idea and the skill of how to approach movement. So in the end. they learn how to craft a work and have a sense of aesthetic value." Nik would have been proud.