• Asia and Alwin NikolaisInterdisciplinarity, Orientalist Tendencies, and Midcentury American Dance
• Angela K. Ahlgren (bio)

The dancers in Alwin Nikolais's Kaleidoscope (1953 and 1956) appear in fullbody leotards that bisect their bodies in blocks of black and white.¹ Makeup covers one half of their faces in white and the other half in black. At one moment, a group of these harlequin-esque dancers wield large oar-like paddles painted with rough, bold strokes, evoking indigenous patterns of the South Pacific. At another, two dancers balance a long pole between them, sometimes on the tops of their flexed feet and at other times on their shoulders, as they balance in a yoga-style boat pose on the ground. To music listed simply as "ethnic" in the program, they move in a slow unison so as to keep the pole balanced between them, evoking the slow and flex-limbed precision of Southeast Asian dance styles. Dance historian Rebekah Kowal has written that they "resemble Thai court dancers," while dance critic Anna Kisselgoff likens them to "Javanese dancers."² Kaleidoscope's flashes of Asian dance and movement styles, coupled with so-called ethnic music sources, foreshadow the Asian aesthetics Nikolais developed further in Totem (1960) and Imago (1963). Alwin Nikolais (1910–1993) was a twentieth-century American choreographer, designer, musician, and theatremaker whose choreographic works blurred lines between dance and theatre. He began choreographing in 1936 and premiered his final and 118th work in 1992, the year preceding his death. Between 1948 and 1970, Nikolais taught dance classes and formed a dance company at the Henry Street Playhouse in the Lower East Side of New York City. He stated that he favored motion over emotion in choreography and often extended his dancers' bodies through props [End Page 73] and objects. He began these body-extending experiments in the early 1950s, around the time he began to conceptualize his art-making as "total theatre" and to experiment with electronic music composed in the style of music concrete, a Bauhaus-inspired genre in which the composer uses and manipulates "found sounds."³ Because Nikolais often masked the provenance of his inspirations, musical or otherwise, Asian influences like those in Kaleidoscope can become "invisible-ized" and difficult to trace.⁴

Like his modernist predecessors, Nikolais used many sounds and gestures that came from Asian performance, African music, and other so-called ethnic sources, especially in his 1950s and 1960s choreographies. While the dancers seldom directly imitated particular forms, a focused eye and sensitive ear can detect Japanese drumming, gamelan music, and Kabuki-influenced makeup (and more) in pieces such as Kaleidoscope, Totem, and Imago. Nikolais's work departs from earlier character-driven, Orientalist costume dramas by choreographers like Ruth St. Denis and José Limón, yet it continues the practice of appropriating Asian performance. In what follows, I contextualize the Orientalist tendencies of midcentury white American choreographers such as Nikolais within the global circulation of Asian performance in the Cold War era. Japanese theatre and music ensembles toured extensively in New York in the 1950s, and the Southeast Asian ensemble music tradition of gamelan also influenced modernist Western composers both before and after the introduction of gamelan ensembles in the United States during this period. That Nikolais incorporates these influences into his work during the 1950s and 1960s is both an aesthetic and a historical phenomenon. I show how the Asian aesthetics within these dances belong to a historical moment in which the meanings produced by "Asia" in the arts were shifting. Thinking through this issue together with insights from musicology, dance, and theatre complicates and broadens conversations about the circulation of Asian aesthetics in American modern dance while resisting the urge to "reify a binary divide between passive victims and Western thieves."⁵ As Michelle Liu Carriger argues, binaristic thinking between appropriation-as-bad and appreciation-as-good can simplify complicated historical connections and erase any agency the non-Western Other may have had in circulating their own artistry. Here, I hope to demonstrate that Nikolais's use of Asian aesthetics added a layer to an already sedimented field of appropriation that cannot be discounted and that his borrowing also depended on the...

• 亚洲和 Alwin Nikolais跨学科、东方主义倾向和世纪中叶的美国舞蹈
• Angela K. Ahlgren（生物）

Alwin Nikolais 的Kaleidoscope（1953 年和 1956 年）中的舞者穿着全身紧身衣，将他们的身体分成黑色和白色块。¹妆容一半是白色，另一半是黑色。有一次，一群丑角式的舞者挥舞着大桨状的桨，画着粗犷、大胆的笔触，让人联想到南太平洋的土著图案。在另一场比赛中，两名舞者在他们之间平衡一根长杆，有时在他们弯曲的脚的顶部，有时在他们的肩膀上，因为他们在地面上以瑜伽式船姿势保持平衡。对于节目中简单列为“民族”的音乐，他们以缓慢的一致移动，以保持他们之间的平衡，唤起东南亚舞蹈风格的缓慢和灵活的精确度。舞蹈历史学家丽贝卡·科瓦尔 (Rebekah Kowal) 写道，他们“类似于泰国宫廷舞者”，而舞蹈评论家安娜·基塞尔戈夫 (Anna Kisselgoff) 则将他们比作“爪哇舞者”。 的亚洲舞蹈和动作风格的闪光，加上所谓的民族音乐来源，预示着尼古拉斯在图腾（1960）和意象（1963）中进一步发展了亚洲美学。Alwin Nikolais (1910–1993) 是 20 世纪的美国编舞家、设计师、音乐家和戏剧制作人，他的编舞作品模糊了舞蹈和戏剧之间的界限。他于 1936 年开始编舞，并于 1992 年，也就是他去世的前一年，首演了他的最后一部作品和第 118 部作品。1948 年至 1970 年间，尼古拉斯在纽约市下东区的亨利街剧场教授舞蹈课并组建了一家舞蹈团。他说他在编舞中更喜欢动作而不是情感，并且经常通过道具扩展他的舞者的身体[完第 73 页]和对象。他在 1950 年代初开始了这些身体伸展实验，大约在那个时候，他开始将自己的艺术创作概念化为“整体剧院”，并尝试以具体音乐风格创作的电子音乐，这是一种受包豪斯风格启发的流派，其中作曲家使用和操纵“找到的声音”。³由于 Nikolais 经常掩盖他的灵感来源，无论是音乐作品还是其他作品，像Kaleidoscope这样的亚洲影响可能会变得“无形”并且难以追踪。⁴

像他的现代主义前辈一样，尼古拉斯使用了许多来自亚洲表演、非洲音乐和其他所谓的种族来源的声音和手势，尤其是在他 1950 年代和 1960 年代的编舞中。虽然舞者很少直接模仿特定的形式，但专注的眼睛和敏感的耳朵可以在Kaleidoscope、Totem和Imago等作品中发现日本鼓、加美兰音乐和受歌舞伎影响的化妆（等等）. Nikolais 的作品脱离了早期由 Ruth St. Denis 和 José Limón 等编舞家以角色为导向的东方古装剧，但它延续了挪用亚洲表演的做法。在下文中，我将在冷战时期亚洲表演的全球流通中，将像尼古拉斯这样的世纪中叶美国白人编舞家的东方主义倾向置于语境中。1950 年代，日本的戏剧和音乐合奏团在纽约进行了广泛的巡回演出，而东南亚的加麦兰合奏音乐传统也影响了这一时期在美国引入加麦兰合奏之前和之后的现代主义西方作曲家。尼古拉斯将这些影响融入到他在 1950 和 1960 年代的作品中，这既是一种审美现象，也是一种历史现象。我展示了这些舞蹈中的亚洲美学如何属于艺术中“亚洲”所产生的意义正在发生变化的历史时刻。通过对这个问题的思考以及来自音乐学、舞蹈和戏剧的见解，使关于亚洲美学在美国现代舞中流通的对话变得复杂并扩大了，同时抵制了“具体化被动受害者和西方小偷之间的二元鸿沟”的冲动。⁵正如 Michelle Liu Carriger 所言，将挪用作为坏和欣赏作为好之间的二元思维可以简化复杂的历史联系，并消除非西方他者在传播他们自己的艺术时可能拥有的任何机构。在这里，我希望证明尼古拉斯对亚洲美学的运用为已经沉淀的不可忽视的挪用领域增加了一层，他的借用也依赖于……