Theatre History Studies

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...