Word: dancers
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...binding-that is dance today, the most inventive and least inhibited of the lively arts. Not even the new cinema has done as much as dance has to free itself from the rules, clichés and conventions of the past. In the regal prime of classical ballet, the dancer's craft was devoted to polishing and perfecting an established series of formalized gestures; choreography was as structured as a French garden. Today, however, a ballerina may have to arch on point in one sequence, boogaloo in another, then writhe on the floor like a snake on the make...
...want a mother figure, he wanted Dada instead. Ever since, he has been one jump beyond the avantgarde. He was among the first American choreographers to use musique concrète, the first to leave the structure of a ballet to chance. He rehearses in silence so that his dancers will not be influenced by the music. Themes? "Supply your own," he says. Yet for all his seeming whimsy, Cunningham is a dancer and choreographer with serious intentions. He wants to take chances, shift the angles of balance, create new patterns that will be as distinctly different as the mobiles...
...ALWIN NIKOLAIS, 56, is a Flipped-Out, plugged into a high-voltage fantasy world where stage and sound effect share equal billing with the dancers. In Vaudeville of the Elements, figures in bulging fluorescent balloons waddle and contract like pregnant accordians. One dancer wrestles with a space-age cobweb. Others, with illuminated lampshades on their hands and feet, do a close-order drill. Now the dancers are drunken caterpillars, now they are partnering their own distorted shadows. All the while, nine speakers ringing the auditorium sizzle, crackle and explode with electronic music; twelve slide projectors and 30 spots splash colors...
...routine. Erick Hawkins, 54, Graham's former husband, is a Freaked-Out who finds Method in the madness of portraying such things as a pine tree and a shy squash. His movements, though, are often so blandly repetitive that he would do better to imitate a dancer. Anna Sokolow, 55, is a Put-Down whose searing, bleak dances are a condemnation of society's ills. Try as she may, she can't seem to manage a smile. Last year she set out to strike an upbeat note in Time Plus 7 by having teen-agers frugging...
Sissy Stigma. Nijinsky, though, might have had a good chance. While the U.S. is developing more female dancers than it can productively use, there is still a dearth of male talent. Unlike Denmark, where women curtsy in the street when a ranking male dancer passes by, or Russia, where Bolshoi stars are accorded the same respect given to cosmonauts, the stigma of sissy still lingers in the U.S. Many dance schools offer free scholarships to any boy who will don tights; others patrol athletic clubs to recruit prospects. But the climate is changing: the ratio of girls to boys taking...