Word: dancers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...creep). Anyway, Simpson is the son of a British army man stationed in Cairo and an Egyptian woman. They are long dead and Simpson, who bears some rather sick grudges from his experiences at English boarding schools, is a bitter and nationless failure. He is married to a young dancer who sleeps around on him. He is old, overweight, and cowardly. He is also a petty crook, who acts as a driver for rich businessmen, meeting them at the Athens airport, showing them the sights (including a brothel with which he has connections), and eventually fleecing them of their traveller...
...second time, it seems, wouldn't lead you more deeply into the piece, only let you take in more of its shell. Simply-structured choreography underlies Nikolais's dazzling surfaces. In Sanctum the eye is stunned by a painter's palette of light flickering over living massed forms--dancers bound in giant loops of fabric. Here Nikolais uses group unison, one of the most basic patterns in choreography. He matches simple movement phrases with blocks of time. Each dancer executes a phrase at the moment he senses is right, then proceeds to the next planned action...
...fast-moving comic caricatures, Nikolais's way of treating a potentially sexual situation. He has the couple move with such highly-charged energy that they forget their partner is of the opposite sex. At these times Nikolais emphasizes traces of movement rather than the precise shapes of movements. The dancer thinks only of getting as quickly as possible to the next phrase, leaving all that's behind dangling...
Nikolais tends to define the dancer as an energy-generator--as a friend said, "an electronic bleep." He views dancers as dimensional forms extending vertically, horizontally and diagonally in space, signposts for its immensity, variables in a world governed by laws of time and motion. The dancer is also an object in its own right for Nikolais, an immobile sculptural form no longer calling attention to the dimensions of space but to its own three-dimensionality. Noumenon takes off from this point, exploring how body-enveloping stretch material can transform the dancer into a frozen form in space. Here three...
...sort of moment you wait for in Nikolais: when the dancer is not a transmittor of energy and dimension, not an object, but a human being--or, more accurately, a performer, since Nikolais knows that on the stage one is never oneself...