NS: [00:00:12] My name is Natasha Simon, and I’m sitting in the dining room of Lynn Levine Rico whose apartment I am in at 185 West End Avenue in New York City. And the date is September 26th – 27th, 2017. I’m just going to listen to Lynn, with some prompts. She’s the narrator of her story, and it is a story that...to start with is a simple question: what was your first impression of Alwin Nikolais?
LLR: Well, the truth was when I started studying at the Henry Street Playhouse, I was 10 and a half, and Phyllis Lamhut was my first teacher. After that Murray Louis [1926-2016] was my teacher, and I didn’t know Nik at all. But there was this man, sitting in a tiny, little office that was really a closet, in overalls, a jumpsuit, a one-piece jumpsuit, and we’d pass him when we were -- the whole group of us kids -- running in to take class, Murray’s class. And I’d see him all the time. He had white hair. He was just sitting there in the overalls – it struck me. And I thought he was the janitor. I didn’t know who he was, I had no idea, but he was always in there, and so that was my very first impression. I didn’t have a clue.
NS: And then, you were introduced to him, or how did you discover that, in fact, this janitor -- (laughs)
LLR: Right.
NS: -- without the broom --
LLR: Yeah. (laughs)
NS: -- was, was Alwin Nikolais, was Nik?
LLR: Well, while I was taking classes as a child, the company, Nik’s company, had performances. They did their New York season at the Henry Street Playhouse. And very early in my studying, I had decided that’s what I was going to do with my life, I was going to dance. And I can talk more about why I thought I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up but... When they were doing a performance, I wanted to see it. We lived in Queens at the time, and I nagged and nagged. I was good at nagging and my mother and I came to the performance. And that’s when at the end of the performance, Nik came onstage, and I realized that that’s who --
NS: (laughs) Your jaw dropped, and you said, --
LLR: Right.
NS: -- “What is the janitor doing?”
LLR: (laughs) I just looked. You know I, sort of, just accepted it, oh, that’s Alwin Nikolais. And I -- I didn’t think, I was wrong or anything, I just stored that fact away.
NS: I want to unpack a lot of what you just talked about. How did you find yourself at Henry Street? Because you’re in Queens, you’re growing up in Queens, you go to school in Queens...
LLR: My only experience with dance had been the local ballet teacher, who was teaching in somebody’s basement. And all the little girls took ballet classes and you were -- and everybody else wore a tutu, and I didn’t want a tutu. I thought that you were supposed to be doing something, and it seemed like we stood still holding on to the backs of chairs or whatever served as a barre in this basement, and it didn’t feel like we were doing anything. And I think I may have even had some ballet classes in a church basement at one point before that. None of it impressed me. There was a lot of standing around. And then if they asked you to do something, it didn’t -- it wasn’t fun. It was all very small, so, that -- I didn’t really have that --
NS: What do you mean small?
LLR: -- the movements were small, you know, the sur le cou de pied [00:05:00] and putting your -- your -- your foot by the ankle or something, it was all static. I mean -- small movements and -- and static, so it didn’t particularly interest me. I loved to move, I loved to run, I loved to move big and jump around and so I didn’t make any connection to ballet at all. And then one day, and by this time I was ending elementary school and a neighbor -- through a friend of hers -- knew of the Henry Street Playhouse and these dance classes, modern dance classes that were being held there. And she asked my mother -- she knew that it was the Lower East Side, and she asked my mother if she would share the driving with her. She would take her daughter, and my mother would take me. My mother’s response was, “Well, if Lynn wants to go.” So, the neighbor asked me if I wanted to go, and I said, “No.” I wanted to do -- in those days we called it -- acrobatics, but there were no classes for acrobatics, and it’s what today we know as gymnastics. And so (laughs) this woman said to me, “This is acrobatics.” And so I said, “Oh, okay.”
And I -- years later, my mother said she was a little uncomfortable with the fact (laughs) that that wasn’t quite true, but she didn’t know what modern dance was either. We didn’t really know. But once I got there at the very first class, there we were on the floor stretching and -- and rolling around, and I thought, well okay, this is acrobatics, so I was happy. And when we --
NS: And it wasn’t small, and it wasn’t static.
LLR: -- and when we went across the floor, it was really, it was moving fast, moving big, and I had a good time. I was fine with it. And at the first class, Ruth Grauert [1919-2020] came around and checked on all of the classes. I didn’t know who she was either. And she took me out of that class. The next week when we arrived, my mother was told I was going to a different room, and Phyllis was the teacher in that other room.
And -- and that was even more fun because there seemed to be not only a movement to do, but there was a way to do it. It seemed like -- like there was not a right and a wrong way, but there was -- there was a dis-- there was somehow, and I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but somehow there was something more than just the physicality of doing it. There was an inventiveness to it. I guess that was in the improvisation. But it -- you had to think about it, -- it -- it was more fulfilling. It wasn’t just physical -- even though I think my first impulse was that I wanted something physical. I loved physical movement, but this over time particularly -- I couldn’t articulate it at the beginning, but over time, I started to appreciate it not only because I liked moving but because I liked inventing.
And I liked that you weren’t copying a movement -- as -- a series of movements you were shown. You were... There was an idea behind the movement. It was big, it was small, it was slow, it was fast, it was staccato, there was something that qualified it. I didn’t know the word qualified particularly, but there was -- there was something that you were trying to accomplish that was beyond the physical. And years later by the time I started teaching, I -- I fully understood what that was, and that that was the basis for our way of moving. It was the definition of how you do something, not what you do. I didn’t know it then, but intuitively, it made it more satisfying to do.
NS: You were about 10 at this point. What year is this that you’re speaking about?
LLR: Well, around ’50-- 1956 -- ’cause I was born in ’46 --
NS: When you appear in these classes, [00:10:00] what’s the format like for you?
LLR: It was identical to the adult classes. You came in, you did a warm-up on the floor and then we came across the floor and that took up -- I don’t think the classes were three hours then. Probably the warm-up and across the floor took an hour and then there was another half-hour or it might have been an hour, but I think another half hour of improvisation. And usually, -- you would also then set something. We choreographed something based on whatever subject we were improvising on. And that stayed the same right through my entire life.
NS: These are Saturday classes?
LLR: At first, they were Saturday classes and then when we moved into high school. That was through junior high school, and through the end of elementary school and junior high school. And then in high s-- no, I guess it might have been junior high school. I’m not good at the -- (laughs) you know those kinds of details. It increased to twice a week. We went on Tuesdays and Fridays as I recall. And then, there was a third driver, another person who lived -- another girl who lived in Queens. By this time, we were moving into Murray’s class for twice a week, -- the other person’s father joined the driving. He did the Tuesday ride and then my mother or the neighbor, would do the other day. I’m afraid it might have been Saturday also (laughs) -- And I think both mothers often came to keep each other company. And there were also drama classes. It wasn’t just --
NS: Did you take the drama class?
LLR: Yes. And at first, I liked that too. I don’t remember why. In part I guess, there was a certain laziness on my part. I liked doing it, and they were both easy. And I kind of made a decision one day, well what do I like better, what am I gonna concentrate on. And, I realized that I really liked the dancing better. And that I felt like I was doing -- at the end of each day, I had made a dance. And I loved being able to... I loved improvising, and I loved being able to set something and come up with a new, odd way of moving.
NS: You mentioned that sometimes there would be improvisation based on something you were learning in class and sometimes it was the composition later that you would set. What were some of the ideas that Phyllis or that Murray or later I assume Nik, would throw out to you as “concepts?"
LLR: Well, many of them were textures which defined a way of moving. So as I started to say before, there were speed things, slow and fast and hyper slow and super slow or -- or fast and then faster and faster still. There would be levels, all the same things that you did as an adult coming to study. There were textures, staccato and bounce and rebound and swing. Many things that I later, with Nik, started to understand more in terms of physics.
My first introduction to the words centrifugal and centripetal force were in dance classes. I had no clue. When I heard them in school in science, I -- I was surprised. I didn’t know they were science words. They were -- to me they were dance words, and -- and then we danced. The dance was an expression of the laws of physics in many ways. Motion was an expression of the laws of physics. We learned to feel the textures, to taste those textures before I could describe them intellectually. But they were there, and they were exactly the way it was approached for adults as well. And it was almost infinite. We talked about space, time, shape, and motion, and all of those were covered in great detail. So if we were talking about space, there would be spaces, volume. There would be space [00:15:00] as distance. There would be space as that environment that surrounds you, the three-dimensionalness of it and you could texture the space also. It could be, almost like a fog but not fog from the weather, but you could define what was in that air around you in any number of ways, which then in turn affected how you moved. And then space also became, -- it could be thought of in terms of shape. Because there was the inner space inside the body and there was the sculpting of the body and then there were volumes and space between you and another person. And that was part of the beginning of improvising with someone else and the counterpoint with somebody else’s motion, and that I particularly enjoyed, and it was the group improvisation.
NS: How many students were there in a class? Do you remember?
LLR: When we got to Murray’s group we were a small group, -- it was varied from six to eight. It was tiny. And in fact, I’m now friends with, after not having seen each other for almost 50 years, two other women and I have hooked up together. And we now get together almost once a month to, we’re all retired now, and, harkening back to those days, we --
NS: They were in your class? They -- this was --
LLR: We were all in Murray’s class.
NS: -- Henry Street babies?
LLR: Yes. And Leesa [Leesa Rosen] and Fatima [Fatima Bien 1947- ] and I were all together. I think Phyllis remembers them. And then, there were -- there was this other girl whose father had joined the driving. She was then the fourth person. There was Ray Johnson [1946-1987]; he was the fifth. There was a girl named Karen Weiss, she was the sixth, and then in and out there would be one or two other people coming who didn’t stay as long but the core of the six of us were there for a number of years.
NS: Wow, how fortunate.
LLR: Oh, it was unbelievable to -- and to have Murray every week -- and eventually twice a week. Then, Henry Street Playhouse also had a music school. My friend Leesa also studied at the music school. I tried some music theory classes; I’m -- I’m not very musical. (laughs) Motion was my -- was my bag.
NS: What do you think Murray’s strength as a teacher was? When you -- when you talk, I mean your face just lights up right now. If we had a video camera on you, it would be that you’re glowing because the memory of those classes is -- special.
LLR: I would say very, very definitely those classes were a highlight of my childhood. I didn’t find school unusual or special in any way. You know you go, you wanna do well, but it -- it -- there was nothing... I didn’t feel like anything came out of me. I -- I was supposed to absorb and memorize what I was told, learn how to add and how to subtract, how to do long division or whatever was the current subject. I didn’t feel like I had any input into it now that I think back. Whereas in the dance classes, you were always making something. You were always -- you were an active participant, not a passive participant. And in terms of Murray, he had a generosity in his own enthusiasm that he shared with us. There was that strong sense of his faith in our ability, his ability to get you to try things that were unusual, to make it feel natural to just do something different, his enthusiasm, his sense of assuming we were whole people. You can’t talk about Murray without talking about his generosity. And that [00:20:00] struck me when,
NS: As a 10-year-old.
LLR: -- as a 10-year-old. And then it was so reiterated to me when we’ve had recent events to honor Murray how everybody who came in contact with him, who spoke at one of these events whether it was the Horse’s Mouth[1] or, a memorial to Murray, everyone had things they talked about to show his generosity, to show his willingness to get on board with whatever they were doing and to take everyone else onboard with him.
People in his company, and I was in his company, how he would take his company someplace, get plane tickets and take them someplace sightseeing because they were in a country where there was something special to see. He wanted to make sure everyone saw it. He knew us each as individuals. We weren’t a tool to do his steps, his dances.
He knew us individually. If we arrived someplace -- I remember we arrived in North Carolina once, and, he knew I loved crafts. He told me immediately what there was locally -- even though we knew that there wasn’t going be time to see everything. And in fact, he even went and bought me a handmade poncho because he knew I would love it. I remember Betsy Fisher talking about when she was going for her doctorate or her master’s, I don’t remember which, she talked about how he talked about dance with her and from the perspective of her research -- and on tour. He wanted us all to develop as individuals.
NS: And you -- you ended up soaking that in. I’m sort of backtracking chronologically. But it sounds as if what you’re saying too is that you -- as a 10-year-old and 12-year-old and 14-year-old -- that those qualities in him, he was able to translate in your -- for your experience as a -- as a child who’s growing up --
LLR: Yes. And also, that he translated it very much into pure dance terms. And that had to do with the technique and the approach that was used to teach adults as well as children.
That you -- you talked about, the how you were going to do something -- and that there was a right way to do something that wasn’t the same for everybody. “Right” could have many facets. And your experiencing of it and your tasting it was what he taught us to do in dance terms.
I remember very clearly the day he introduced inner space to us. And he talked about imagining the body as being hollow and that there was a molecule inside that would move around and that we could control where it went. And if you thought further about it as we started improvising, we controlled its speed. We controlled where it went in the body. We could make it ricochet back and forth. We could make it zoom from the top of your head down to out your toe. You could make it zigzag around. You could make it move very slowly. And then you could make it be heavy -- and it could get denser. And then, well, why one molecule? Why not a lot of molecules? That stuck with me so strongly that that became the basis for texture because you -- when you imagine that, you could really feel it in your body. I can feel it now. Sixty years later, I can feel it and I haven’t danced in years, but I can feel when my body gets --
NS: Gets --
LLR: -- denser --
NS: -- denser --
LLR: -- and --
NS: -- and denser or lighter, and -- --
LLR: -- and -- and -- and to feel the molecule just kind of breaking apart and becoming almost like a gas or it could become liquidy or -- And that idea [00:25:00] enabled all of us to feel motion, to feel our bodies transformed, and that transformed what came out of our moving. And later, it wasn’t necessary to think concretely about that thing inside because at a certain point, that becomes limiting.
But just that ability to make your body feel different textures and transmit that and then the idea because, uh, because he gave us performing experiences -- we did concerts. The idea of transmitting that to an audience was another unusual facet of studying there that we choreographed and then we did recitals -- concerts. And Murray would take our small vignettes, and he would stage them, which Nik did later for us as adults as well. And we would perform on the Henry Street Playhouse stage. The idea of kids routinely, frequently performing on that stage, we did concerts. And then on top of that Murray wrote lyric theater plays for us to do. So you acted in the plays and he choreographed for us. So here we were doing choreography done by Murray Louis.
I remember the first performance I was in. And I still remember some of the steps. It was Orpheus and Eurydice [Murray Louis, 1959], and at the Horse’s Mouth where we talked about our experiences, and I’m usually asked to talk about those early days because I’m one of the few remaining who were there so long ago. The person who had been Eurydice in that first performance. I had seen her out in the audience, so I mentioned it as a part of my little talk. And, and she is one of those two women that I get together with.
NS: -- how neat.
LLR: And that’s how we reunited.
NS: What was that like for you as a performer doing Orpheus and Eurydice?
LLR: Well, again, just as dance was my introduction to the laws of physics, it was my introduction to mythology. I never heard of Greek mythology, and Orpheus and Eurydice, well what’s that? Murray explained that there were these Greek myths, and -- and this was one of the most famous ones, and he told us the story and then we read the play he had written for us together. And that infused how we did the dances because we started to think in terms of ancient times. I don’t think I thought of it that consciously then, but thinking back on it, yeah. I mean, we imagined ourselves outside in -- in what was my vision of a Greek temple. And then also the idea of Hades -- when, Eurydice is taken to Hades, I had never heard of that either. It was the introduction to another world. There was physics, there was --
NS: Greek mythology.
LLR: -- mythology, and -- and that was part of Murray’s, Murray’s teaching us what we could become. I think that reminds me of that generosity that it wasn’t only about dance, so he introduced us to mythology.
He also introduced us to different kinds of music because in those concerts that we would do, the recitals, there would be some pre-classic, I mean Bach. I danced “Bach Suite” [Murray Louis, 1965] as a child. Here he was choreographing it for his company, and he gave us one little section and had us do it. There was lots of pre-classic music. There was percussion, there was found sound, there was of course -- he would take some of Nik’s electronic sound and give it to us. There was a use of our voices. He encouraged us to hear as much music as we could, to try different things to listen -- to see and listen -- and to be curious about everything.
He also talked about art, what was happening in the world --[00:30:00] whatever was -- you know -- and told us, “Oh, you have to go.” He said, “I grew up in New York City and and M was important to me, for the Metropolitan Museum, for Macy’s for --” I mean just he -- he was so much a New Yorker -- that he
NS: (laughs)
LLR: made us be excited to be a New Yorker like him. His whole point of view was see a lot, do a lot, observe a lot, explore a lot, experiment, and -- and know as much as you want. One of the things he would say, -- and this was by the time we were in high school, and I think my mother might have been the mother that’s put him up to this but -- -- I started saying, “I wanna dance, I wanna dance.” I mean I was adamant about that by the time I was in high school. “That’s what I want to do with my life, and I don’t want to go to college.” And that was unheard of growing up in Queens; we were all going to go to college in our neighborhood.
And Murray, [my mother] might’ve asked him to say something about this, and his way of approaching it was very simple. He said, “Nobody wants a dumb dancer. Go to school, you have to know more. How can you create a role if you don’t know anything? How can you -- how can you bring something to it if you don’t know anything? Stay in school.” It was very simple, and once it came from Murray that was it.
NS: Then it was it?
LLR: That was it for my mind, yes. Not because he was saying be in school, but because he was giving me a reason why it was going to make me a good dancer.
NS: So you ended up at --?
LLR: Well, I made the decision to stay in New York City to go to school. I decided to go to Queens College. I didn’t even apply any place else because I wanted to continue to study at Henry Street. That was absolute. And by the time I was a senior in high school, just the high school class with Murray the two times a week wasn’t enough and so I begged and begged and begged my mother to talk to Murray (laughs) to see wasn’t there some other class I could take. And my mother knowing that this -- and by this time, it was gonna be all her driving. That is the only way to get from school to class in time. She asked Murray, “Is there something else that we can take?” and Murray I think checked with Nik, and he said, “Well, she could come once a week to the adult class to Nik’s class.” So by that time, I knew who Nikolais was.
NS: That he wasn’t the janitor.
LLR: No. And so I showed up at class, and I was the worst in the class, and I would hide in the back. But I went once a week, and I struggled along, and he very mercifully ignored me, (laughs) and, you know, -- I think he was doing it as a favor to Murray or something. I learned by listening to what he was telling others which was good because I didn’t have to be worried about being criticized or not doing it well because I knew he wasn’t really --
NS: Aiming at all at you.
LLR: Right. Exactly. And -- and so I could try to do what he was saying, and much of it, I didn’t understand --
NS: Do you remember anything that he was telling -- talking to others about?
LLR: Well, I remember one of the things that I really couldn’t understand or see was: he would have us walk across the floor, when we started to go across, and he would talk about how to do it. But I didn’t have any clue what he -- what he wanted. And he would point at someone and or point out someone who was doing it well, -- [pause] and I couldn’t see it. I didn’t know why it was good and why the next person’s wasn’t. And I -- it was not clear to me and I -- maybe if I could remember the words now that he was saying, now, -- it would make perfect sense. I -- as I stayed with him to study, I -- I think we were talking about creating a level across space -- one time -- and another time about [00:35:00] pressing through the space and another ti-- it probably was different every time.
NS: Sure.
LLR: But my eye was not that developed yet. If I knew what was I was trying to do, I think I could begin to get my body to do something, get my -- my -- my soul to do it. But I didn’t really understand what Nik was saying at the beginning, unless it was something more concrete. When he talked about shape, I remember classes in shape, and he would do this from time to time. Everybody would design three or four shapes for themselves. Then, he would have people go up one at a time, and he would say... The -- the point of it was that this -- this sculpture that you created out of yourself had to be consonant, which did not mean that it was symmetrical or balanced but that it had to be right unto itself. It had to be correct -- and correct I say in quotes. It had to make sense within itself. And he would then, looking at it, say, “Take your right elbow and move it out a little bit,” and the person would just shift their elbow. And then he would say something about the tilt of the head and he -- and as he would verbally sculpt them, those of us who were watching would go, “Ohhhh.”
And then when it was right, when the -- the shape suddenly glowed as one thing, and -- and -- and you were compelled to look at it. It wasn’t pedestrian anymore. It wasn’t a person being there trying to distort their body. It became a shape. It became a sculpture. It went from being a body standing there waiting for the bus to a sculpture. And you could see it when it happened. That’s when I st- those concrete things I understood. And he did that over the years and --
NS: And it also developed your eye --
LLR: Absolutely.
NS: -- as well.
LLR: That’s when I started to really realize, to really realize, what I was learning. That it was the intellectual side of it. I don’t know whether intellectual is really the appropriate word. It was that you had to think about what you were doing. There was a mindfulness to what you were doing and so it wasn’t absentminded. I have this feeling and, it’s not to denigrate ballet because it has great beauty and great value but for me, it was achieving physical feats. And the more absentmindedly you could do it, that may have represented being so good at it that you didn’t think about it anymore, -- if the physical was all that mattered. But here it was, you were thinking about it because your thought and your body together was what created that thing you were doing-- not just the accomplishment of getting your leg to a certain point or, moving your feet to a certain speed or, leaping to a certain height. None of those things were ever talked about -- just your height or your physical prowess.
One of the things that was very, very clear to me as a child, also and a little bit less so as I got older was that this was not about having the perfect body, -- which I didn’t, and it’s -- definitely not, you know, as a child and -- and even growing up, I don’t have the ideal dancer’s body. What I had going for me was I was flexible and I’m strong. But I don’t have long legs; I have a longish torso. But in class, none of that mattered. In class, it was what you did and how you did it that mattered -- the how, the how,
NS: The mindfulness of it.
LLR: Yes. And there was never this concept of, [00:40:00] well you’re never going to be a dancer, so you don’t count -- which in many serious dance schools, that is very much the case. If you are, you know, of a certain body type and quality, there was no reason for you to be there, when in fact, making professional dancers out of everybody was not the philosophy of the school. It was not Nik’s philosophy. I think from Nik’s point of view, it was -- what was so universally generous -- was his concept, his idea that there was this creativity within everyone. And that he had worked -- he had worked out a way of bringing that out -- from people starting from very simple improvisations that he would direct and -- and then give you one more freedom in it and one more till you were improvising without ever feeling self-conscious about it because he had set it up in a way that you could focus on what the subject was in that particular improvisation.
NS: But what you’re actually talking about -- if I can interrupt for a second is that it’s an interesting concept. Because I think that when you think about the word improvisation and it’s a big, long word and it encompasses a whole lot, the very idea that Nik would build step by step a pedagogy of improvisation is an important concept. It’s a very important point.
LLR: I think that he, of the people that I’ve experienced, he was one of the most successful people at having that pedagogy of both improvisation and choreography -- of composition. We didn’t call it choreography. It was always called composition. And it was the idea that what he was having us do was to help us build those skills. So if you’re going to be a painter, I imagine you practice brush strokes so that when you want to paint an apple, you have some control over that brush. But it -- it’s not just jabbing away at the canvas, but it’s -- it’s practicing different ways to handle the brush and -- and how much paint you put on the bristles and -- and how you twist your -- your wrist.
Everything takes practice, and improvisation, he would set it up in a way that you were practicing from the simple to the more complex, so you, along the way, learn how to play off of another dancer -- another person in the improvisation. How you could play off your own body if you were working by yourself or even with someone else. That you didn’t say, “Oh, now take a step to the right and then I’ll turn twi-- to the left twice and then I’ll -- I’ll jump.” But you -- you didn’t think about what you were going to do, you were at one with your body, and your body began to do the thinking.
But he helped you to develop that, that ability to think with your body. And it wasn’t the haphazard, you know, getting up there and -- and wiggling and undulating. It was very purposeful and very directed from -- but not directed from the limitations of what you could think of, but directed from what felt right. And I mean texturally felt right, what came before and where you were going later and what somebody else was doing if it was a -- a --
NS: So it’s an organic, uh, --
LLR: Process --
NS: -- quality -- process --
LLR: -- learning, uh, and to learning to do it organically. And, there was a naturalness to it. He had worked out a way to help you to practice those skills that enabled your [00:45:00] mind and your body to join together and work together.
One of the things that I remember Murray saying was the difference between a dancer -- and this talks about that concept of decentralization that we always have. That a dancer versus a model versus a person moving pedestrianly, is that the model -- the person moving as a pedestrian is showing nothing. The model is showing the clothes, not calling attention to themselves, but a runway model is showing the clothing they’re wearing. And the dancer is showing the motion they’re doing or an actor is showing the role that they’re playing.
That decentralization is knowing what you want to communicate. And, even if it’s not a literal thing, it’s knowing what you want. Knowing what you want to be seen and experienced by the onlooker and the audience, making sure that that is what you communicate. So you’re not moving absentmindedly, and no part of you is not consistent, no part of you is distracting. And that goes back to that shape exercise where he would move someone slightly, tilt your head, move your elbow, twist your hip to the left a little bit. All of those little things suddenly brought -- made the body a whole. There wasn’t some part of the body left out, and that was so common. When we’d be going across the floor, it was another time that you would experience that totality of intent. And the body -- to me, what I understood of that -- was the way to be: to have that totality was to have a totality of intent -- to have a -- in mind and in your body what you were doing and then you weren’t going to make a wrong move. If you’re showing a squiggly circle with your right arm, your left arm is not going to be pulling in the opposite direction because that’s distracting. If you intend to show two opposite things, then there’s a totality to dissonance.
NS: -- and an intentionality there.
LLR: An intentionality to showing the two things. But if you were showing one thing, then the other arm is going to grain towards that to help the audience to know what to look at. It’s like you become a lighting designer putting the lights on the right parts of the -- on the whole body is the lights to show the action that is supposed to take the focus of that instant.
NS: Can I jump? I’m -- I’m jumping ahead by about I don’t know how many years, but was what you’re describing also the, or could you describe Nik’s choreographic process? And then maybe also Murray’s because you were in both companies. I think what you’re also alluding to is -- and what I would be very interested in hearing is -- you are a dancer working with Nikolais, and he is choreographing, so his process is different from class or the same in class or -- ? Or maybe even talk about one of the pieces that you remember him choreographing
LLR: Um, okay.
NS: I don’t want to restrict you though.
LLR: The process for Murray and Nik in choreographing generally was different, but each of them had pieces that were the exceptions to the way they generally worked. For Nik, as you were asking the question, I think the difference in working with him in the company when he was choreographing versus in class, was that in class, he was setting up an idea. And how you interpreted that was maybe different from everybody else, but [00:50:00] everybody’s interpretation had a validity. Unless, of course, somebody was doing something that was just completely out of left field but... Whereas when he was choreographing, he would, again, verbally use some cues as to perhaps what he was looking for, and then he would choose what worked. Whereas in class, you were the -- the chooser. And, there could be many solutions. But he would pick the solution that he wanted, and he would often have people improvising on something specific and put -- a common thing would be for him to have an extension of the body. I mean some people call them props, -- but for us, they were extensions of the body. And he’d bring this out, and he would imagine… We’ll use Water Studies [1964], the, uh, which we called schmattas. It was a donut-shaped tube of, um, Helenca. And in those days Helenca was a new product and -- newish. And I think they were using it for maternity, -- for the stomach part of the tummy of the maternity outfits. And he imagined what could be done with that. Everybody would get one to work with and -- and you would explore and experiment, and what captured his eye was what would be kept. So people might try some things that didn’t work for him in that circumstance or what he had in mind.
And he -- so he wasn’t always -- you didn’t always know what he wanted. Sometimes he wanted to see what it could do. He had in mind maybe an overall piece he was working on. He didn’t necessarily tell us about that because he may not have even had it in his mind yet -- at a verbal level yet. But he would choose from amongst what he was seeing. Our effort, at that point, was to come up with as much variety, or at least in my mind, I was trying to find variety beyond the obvious to pique his interest. So we were using improvisation in that way.
And then sometimes the timing, depending on the gestures that he would choose and the shapes or the motion he was choosing, sometimes it would not get set in its timing or counts. And we would be improvising the timing within the group in the final piece, and sometimes he would then set something a little more specifically or it could vary in between improvisation and then set moments. I think that was more the way he worked when he had dancers that he had trained -- at his first company with Phyllis and Gladys [Gladys Bailin, 1930- ] and Murray and Bill Frank and Dottie Vislocky [Dorothy Vislocky, 1927-2013] and Coral Martindale [1935- ]. When those people were in the company, he had trained them and I think he left more of the refinement of the specifics of the motion to them. Because they were going to not read his mind but they were going to complete his sentence -- so to speak.
Later on he once told me at one point when he actually held auditions, which was something he didn’t do, but he, he was replacing a number of people in the company. And when he started -- once he had this new company and he had not trained most of the people - people came to an announced audition. He told me that “Well, now I’m setting the movement more specifically because I need to.” He felt he needed to. And I was a little surprised he confided that in me. I don’t think it mattered that I was the one who happened to be sitting next to him (laughter) when he said it. I often felt Nik was thinking, always thinking about something that was related to what he was doing. His -- his mind never stopped. You -- you would see his fingers, kind of going, and I -- I felt like they -- they were a manifestation of the fact that I don’t think his -- his mind ever relaxed. And he always had associations, unusual associations, [00:55:00] you know, Rorschachs in his mind. And I happened to be -- right sitting next to him when he said -- I think he was kind of talking out loud and then… Today people walk down the street with earphones on and they’re talking on the phone, and you don’t know, and you don’t think it’s crazy. But in those days when you were talking out loud by yourself, it didn’t look good, so I was a handy body. (laughs) But he did change the way he worked to accommodate the -- the different training. And I --
NS: But did you bridge the two experiences because --
LLR: Yes.
NS: Yeah?
LLR: Yeah.
NS: Okay.
LLR: More of my experience was in, well, he was still using the let’s see what you can do, which was the improvisation part by setting us up in a circumstance or usually with a prop. I remember when he did Cross-Fade [1974], which had very, very, very tall, wide scrolls -- and we had to hold them one end to the other, which for me was very difficult. It was a just little too wide for me, so I couldn’t get good leverage on holding it. And he would want us to -- and he had said, “Let me see you passing from one side of the stage to the other,” and here there were 10 of us carrying these scrolls and moving horizontally. And then he’d say, “Well, let me see some diagonals,” or “Let me see the scrolls start to curve inward,” and people would do it differently. Somebody might curve it slightly, somebody else might curve it very, very tightly, and somebody else would just make the ends of it meet and would have a kind of fat full circle. Or someone else would get a narrower one, so everybody... He would say something that was open-ended enough that different people could try different things. And, that was improvisational with this -- this thing.
And so he was still working that way, but it was in a very -- it was guided or controlled by what he was saying and what you were holding or wearing or, standing in or, standing on top of or -- or attached -- how you were attached to somebody else. I think a lot of times it would go on for a while without him saying anything because I think maybe he would, -- you know, you’d go a good 5 minutes, and he wouldn’t say anything or 10 minutes even because maybe a lot was happening that he was considering. And then if nothing was happening, he would start to say things, or he’d -- from the outside see something that he thought maybe could happen. There would be a certain point where there was all this flatness and then he said to start curling and then at a certain point, he -- he would say, “Well, what happens if you tilt them?” And then -- “Oh, wait, your feet show then,” or, “Oh, wait,” you know? That’s an example. I don’t remember if that actually happened. But there would be things that right away he’d say, “No, no.” And that was exciting because you -- you really felt like you were contributing to the final outcome.
That was one of the things that I loved about being in Nik’s company was that you -- again, I think I had said this earlier -- that you were an active contributor. Not only -- an active participant, but you were a contributor to the final product. You -- you were not, you weren’t a casual bystander just coming along and -- and reading the words after the fact. You were there. The -- the dancer was necessary.
Think about all the different art forms, right; in a play, the writer is in a room by himself when he writes those words, a composer composes music and then the musician comes in later and plays it. A painter, he paints by himself. It’s not usually a group activity. Choreography, even for all choreographers, is a group activity. That’s one of the things that attracted me to dance. I have a great love for crafts, and I have tried many different kinds but it’s a very solitary process. You do it alone, and I love doing it, and then -- and there’s that satisfaction of delving into something [01:00:00] over great time.
And everything I learned about creating and making with Nik and Murray and everyone else that I worked with -- with Phyllis and Carolyn [Carolyn Carlson, 1943- ] and so many [others], dancing in everybody else’s choreography at Henry Street -- you learn something from everyone, and particularly of course from Nik, the process of creating. I use that when I’m working myself if I’m designing jewelry or, or…weaving. But there’s that one thing that is a -- a group effort.
And that’s --
NS: Dance.
LLR: -- dancing. You’re always with someone else. I mean, you can choreograph a solo for yourself but because you can’t see it, you always have to, at least, turn to someone else to be an extra eye.
NS: I’m -- I’m struck too by what you’re saying --
LLR: Let’s just go back one second to --
NS: Oh, sure.
LLR: -- you were asking about working with Murray. With Murray, it was a more traditional dance approach because he was a dancer himself still dancing. He would try a phrase himself; it would come out of his body. And that was exciting also because it was always that challenge to make something of a movement that was somebody else’s. And try to capture what their essence was, and I really enjoyed that. It was a different process. It got different. And I’m very grateful to have done both. With Nik, when he was setting things, he would get up and [do] what we would call marking. If he was going to choreograph a phrase, he would kind of mark it and he did this in class also. Sometimes, he would get up and demonstrate something at a marked level. And usually, he’d rely upon someone from the company who was in the class to fulfill it for everyone else to see. And -- but to do that instantaneously as he said it, or as he kind of demonstrated a little bit what he had in mind, and verbally would say -- you were -- you were supposed to be ready to do it. And that was -- I found that terrific fun also.
I liked doing that, and I liked demonstrating for him because getting it fast -- getting it right and getting it fast was – was that extra challenge. Was that thing that, you have to keep challenging yourself, and for me, that was my challenge -- how well could I fulfill the motion that somebody else seemed to want, the phrase that they wanted, -- the gesture that they wanted. And how well could I do it, how interestingly could I do it, how quickly could I capture it, how quickly can I translate what they’re saying like a simultaneous interpreter sort of.
NS: I’m going back to your -- what you were saying... Well, it’s two-fold but I want to continue chronologically in some ways, and -- to go back to: you’re in college then you leave college -- I mean then you graduate from college and you are now a performer with Nikolais, or --
LLR: No.
NS: -- what happened?
LLR: After college, I stayed at Henry Street through college. And I have to admit, I, I gave my college education a bit of a short shrift -- 'cause my heart was on Henry Street. That’s where I wanted to be and I picked my classes by what had a schedule that would let me get out by twelve noon to head to Henry Street. I was traveling from Queens, they were building the Long Island Expressway at the time, so traffic was horrible. I was lucky enough that my family let me use the car, and I would go very early to school, so I could find parking close enough to school that I could dash out after class and jump in the car and then sit in the construction traffic trying to get to Henry Street. Most days, I missed the warm-up --
NS: Oh, shoot.
LLR: Which fortunately, because I was flexible, I managed (laughter) not to injure myself. I would just pop [01:05:00] in there as they were going across the floor. Or lie down in the hallway outside and had to --
NS: Quick --
LLR: -- go real fast, uh, uh, Energizer Bunny warm up and -- and jump in there. So I graduated and stayed at Henry Street, and there were tons of performing experiences right there.
Al Wunder [1943-] and Virginia Laidlaw and another girl, Sandy O’Neill and we did a Saturday program every single Saturday for children at three o'clock. It was Al’s idea to do it and Al choreographed a lot of it. And to be able to perform every week, when you’re in your training years was phenomenal. Also, we did student concerts constantly and everybody choreographed. Choreographing was never -- choreographing my own pieces was not something Iwas particularly interested in. I loved working in everybody else’s choreography because they all worked with some variation of that continuum of -- from setting steps to exploring improvisationally for the person who was choreographing and letting them select. There was that variation, and everyone who came out of the school worked in -- in those ways, and you’ve got that very mixed experience.
So by the time I was in the company, which was a year later, I didn’t join the company right away. There were no openings, but as soon as there were, I went into Murray’s company. In fact, it was when Phyllis left Murray’s company, and I had graduated the year before. But throughout the time of college and that first year, the performing opportunities at Henry Street on a real stage -- with real lighting -- it was just unbelievable and --
NS: And that cyc [cyclorama] and the plaster cyc --
LLR: Oh, wonderful. I must have danced in a good couple of dozen different choreographers’ works. The longer you were there, the more people like to use you. So, just the juggling of people’s rehearsals and school and everything, I think I -- I was a scattered kid, but I became organized to get through those years. Even though we were in the middle of the city and I was going to school in one place and, by that time, I had a studio apartment near the Playhouse, it wasn’t in a conservatory environment, -- but it -- it felt like that.
NS: Well, you’re describing something that is akin to it, but without the sort of,
LLR: Without the living arrangement.
NS: Yes. Yeah.
LLR: And the fact that our campus was the entire city, -- which harkens back to Murray saying always, “Explore, explore, go out, see, see everything, see everything, do everything, keep your eyes open, always wonder what’s around the next corner.” So here we had all of New York as our campus, the tight-knit group at Henry Street with people who stayed for years. You worked with the same people and grew together. Going back to the -- the classes again, I remember composition class. And that was for me, composition class was hard. I didn’t -- again, I was back at that thing of not understanding what Nik was talking about. But this time, it wasn’t just the one day a week I was taking his class. I was now in college, and I was in the adult division, and most of the people who were studying there, they were studying full time. They were not in school. A couple of people were Debbie Gerson -- Ray Johnson [1946-1987] and I were all in school together, or not in the same school, but we were all the same age. But most of the people were not in school. In fact, Ray I think was going part-time at that point.
We all kind of grew together, and we -- and we’d go to composition class. [01:10:00] And at the beginning when we’d come out, Nik -- the composition class was very long, and Nik would talk about what he was looking for. I thought, “Gee, he knows what he wants, but I don’t -- I don’t understand what he’s saying. And we’d come -- what is the assignment?” I understand what he’s talking around about, but what does he want us to do? Somewhere along that half hour of talking, -- what was the -- what part of it was the assignment? (laughs) And we’d come out, and, people would be saying to each other, “So what’s the assignment, what’s the assignment?” And then we come back the next time, and some people would show things, and maybe some people were understanding or just trying and exploring because I think he, on purpose, didn’t want to be too specific. Then you’d start to understand from what people were doing and what he commented on.
I still remember one assignment I remember that stays with me, I didn’t understand it -- what he wanted of that at the time. He said it was ritual, and now, that’s a word with a lot of -- for me, it has a lot of both emotion and richness to it. But at the time, it was dry for me, and I remember struggling to come up with something that wasn’t a superficial interpretation -- I mean superficial understanding -- of what is ritual, right? That was my immaturity. So under certain things, I think I fully absorbed as a young person, but even as I got older, some things took me still longer. And -- and I guess that’s part of what Murray used to say, “It takes 10 years to be a real professional dancer or 10 years of being a professional to be a good dancer” and --
NS: He also used to say -- and I remember this from -- from my days at the Playhouse. He would say, “What you’re learning now isn’t going to show up for another year in your body. You know, it’s going take time for it to percolate there.”
LLR: I remember him saying things like that, and I know technically, that was very true. A lot of times you’ll be struggling to do something at the end of the season, you know, at the end of May and then you’d come back in the fall and you could do it. Now, I never knew whether that was because when we had time off, I went and took class wherever I could, every place, especially once I wasn’t in school anymore. Once I wasn’t in college, I had the time. And I -- I looked forward to exploring what else was happening in every school I could try. You’d go to Cunningham, [Merce Cunningham, 1919-2009] you’d go to Ailey, [Alvin Ailey, 1931-1989] you’d go to, uh, Maggie Jenkins [Margaret Jenkins, 1942- ] who came out of Cunningham also. People who were descendants of other people -- Zena Rommett [1920-2010], Corvino [Alfredo Corvino, 1916-2005] I mean, you’d try everything. Everybody ran around everywhere, which Nik discouraged. So summers were a good time to do that, so I never knew for sure, well, did I learn something over the summer somewhere else? I think -- I think it was a combination of both.
NS: Do you remember your composition for “ritual?” Or anybody else’s?
LLR: -- not with any pride. Yes, I remember one, a little -- I -- I don’t remember the specifics of it, but I remember Susan Buirge’s [1940- ]. It was painstakingly slow and very stark. And I was crawling out of my seat because I still had, in those days and all the way through college, still had ants in my pants till long after I retired from dancing and then, finally now I could take something slow. But, it was hard for me to watch something slow, and -- and I didn’t really know that -- whether it was “ritual” or not. I remember it, but I don’t know whether it solved it or not.
And I was thinking about that the other day, and I think now that we’re talking [01:15:00] about it, I think there was no right answer. I know that I grew up always thinking you had to do -- do it right. You had to solve the problem. You had to -- you know, pleasing the teacher was something you did, pleasing your boss, pleasing your teacher. But that was one of those times that I think there was no right. Maybe the success was also in the eye of the beholder. And I, as a viewer, was not ca-- I -- I couldn’t do it. And I couldn’t -- I -- I couldn’t receive it either. I wasn’t the right audience for it now.
NS: For -- for “ritual?”
LLR: Yes. At the time at least. And I’m trying to remember what Carolyn Carlson might have done. I think with Carolyn, and whatever she did was always -- that’s the solution. She was a muse for Nik -- and I think in some ways for some of us as well. I mean, she was certainly an inspiration for us, her dedication, and working with her. She was another one whose work I got to dance in. I danced in Mimi’s [Mimi Garrard, 1936- ] works as well. And with each person, you got to experience something that might not have come out of your own body, and that broadened the experience. So that conservatory, we’re going back to that notion of staying with the same people that -- and working not -- oh, it wasn’t a technical school.
It was a creative school. You got to gain from other’s creative development, from everyone else’s creative development, enhanced your own. And that brings me to something else that we talk about as a group -- as part of the Legacy Group -- the Nikolais Legacy.[2] For me, Nik’s own work is his historical legacy, and his pedagogy is the living legacy. However, there is the unfortunate circumstance that there is no conservatory experience for anyone --
NS: Such like Henry Street.
LLR: -- as intensively. And -- and there are people who -- who are teaching now, and you know, thank God that they are. I just wish there could be a way that they could come together. Marcia’s [1948 - ] written this wonderful book [3] that brings together so many of the concepts. And Peter and Tito were teaching and Jessica [Peter Kyle 1967 -; Alberto del Saz 1960 -; Jessica Nicoll 1959- ] teaches, and they all have such a creative approach to teaching, which was what was important to Nik is that you’re not teaching by rote, you’re teaching -- you’re teaching others to teach themselves -- to draw for themselves. And that applies to people from other art forms who would come and study with Nik. I think people who were interested in painting or music or acting because the concepts, the principles were so universal. They don’t only apply to dance. I just wish there were more experiences. And -- and maybe it does exist in colleges where people sleep there, but I don’t think so because they’re more eclectic in schools --
NS: I think you have to look at being in a particular place at a particular time that makes it very, very important. I think that if you study or if you look at various periods in history, and you look at say, Greek. Greek drama hasn’t happened like that ever, you know? Or Shakespeare’s time where the language was so rich at that point, and Shakespeare probably [01:20:00] wasn’t the only playwright then.
LLR: Uh-huh.
NS: Or, um, in the ’30s in -- or in the late ’20s and ’30s, in dance, when you had the giants in modern dance who probably shared ideas even if they were antithetical to each other, you know?
LLR: Mm-hmm.
NS: And you can look at Henry Street too and say that was -- that was a real cauldron, you know?”
LLR: Yeah.
NS: And -- and then to -- to sort of extend the metaphor and say well then, Nik as an alchem-- I’m not -- it’s not original to me but the idea of Nik as an alchemist who is able to conjure from so many different sources, i.e., sound and sight and motion and architecture and texture.
LLR: Yeah.
NS: I -- I don’t know whether it... I’m sure there are places in the world where something akin to that exists now. But --
LLR: Yeah.
NS: -- I think really, you were very fortunate to have had that experience at that time.
LLR: Yeah.
NS: And I don’t think it... It’s not around us now, you know?
LLR: Yeah. It -- it’s not in --
NS: Current
LLR: -- and I think one of the sad things is that if historically, those -- those kinds of -- environments will come back again, um, and that, uh, are unique unto themselves and define themselves. Um. There -- there’s a validity and a universality to what -- to Nik’s principles in particular -- that may get lost --
NS: Hmm.
LLR: Because, if -- if the time passes and no one happens to, uh, either be from that heritage or come up with some of the same, uh, pedagogies, same way of -- drawing it out of people --
NS: Hmmm.
LLR: -- then it -- it may not happen. It -- will be a loss if it doesn’t happen. If -- if what he developed pedagogically gets filt-- filters through the sand and -- and --
NS: Yeah.
LLR: -- and it doesn’t get built on. I think -- I think a lot of it is simply the -- the circumstance of -- of a -- a group, a fairly tight-knit group that stays together over time. And that’s -- that’s a -- the --
NS: At a particular moment too. I think you have to put it in time.
LLR: Yeah. I mean that was a very fertile time for modern dance. And, I think one of the things that maybe defined some of what Nik did, in both a positive and a negative way is he was able to... Because he had a theater to himself and he had this diverse background of music and -- and lighting and sound and -- and that kind of eclectic interest -- he created a -- world unto himself. But he also didn’t collaborate very much with, um, the outside world --
NS: Yeah.
LLR: -- the way Merce did where --
NS: Yeah.
LLR: -- Merce said, “Okay, I’m not a composer.”
NS: Yeah.
LLR: “I’m doing this part of the program, and John Cage [1912-1992] will do this other part, or I’ll use somebody else’s sound. Rauschenberg [Robert Rauschenberg, 1925-2008] will do my sets, I --” um, --
NS: Yeah.
LLR: -- it’s -- he collaborated and as a result I think that --
NS: Hmm.
LLR: -- he -- I think that helped bring him out to the public much more.
NS: Well, it broadened it certainly --
LLR: -- broadened his public.
NS: Yeah.
LLR: And probably also, diversified him in some ways. Um, I wonder… It has crossed my mind, and it’s something, I’d be interested in discussing with the group, --
NS: Hmm.
LLR: -- did we at Henry Street and immediately after even at The Space[4], with so little outside influence -- did we become a little incestuous?
NS: And insular, yeah.
LLR: Insular.
NS: It’s a good question -- we should --
LLR: We all had little bubbles.
NS: Yeah.
LLR: I think about that, and -- and I know in my own life because I abruptly stopped dancing and went into a world that was foreign to me, you know, going into the outside business world, um, when it was finally time to move on (laughs) -- [01:25:00]
NS: Well let me ask you though. I mean you talk about the insularity, but, there is a part of the experience with Nik, certainly, that was broad, which is touring, you know --
LLR: Yeah.
NS: -- with Nik and -- and with Murray too. Can you talk a little about what it was like to be on tour with them? And -- and your experiences as a company member on -- on the road.
LLR: Okay. For me, very, very definitely if I had not been in a touring dance company, I probably would never [have] gone out of the five boroughs. I -- I -- that’s a bit of an exaggeration but not a whole lot. My -- my opportunity to travel came through dancing -- And, I had -- my family never took vacations. We never went anywhere except -- the only place we ever went as a family -- there were only the three of us, my mother, my father, and me -- we went to Washington, DC. That was it -- twice in my childhood.
NS: Aha.
LLR: I had never stayed in a hotel before, uh, touring. I had -- certainly never had the experience (laughs) of room service or sending stuff out to be cleaned or anything. I -- I was -- despite having grown up in New York City, and knowing my way around the subway system like the back of my hand, I was -- I was a country bumpkin. (laughter)
NS: (laughs)
LLR: And, so that was -- um, that was my introduction to seeing the world, and -- and, uh, first with Murray touring domestically. I had not been out of New York either really, except to go to Washington, the East Coast. And I think we might have been in Massachusetts once. (laughs) Uh, but it -- I -- just being away from home… Even though I had my own apartment, it -- that was just, I lived my life the way I was brought up to live my life. I -- uh, it wasn’t being out in a strange city, in a strange place. And, um, I found it frightening.
NS: Hmm.
LLR: I kept my mouth shut about it (laughs), didn’t -- didn’t say anything and I’m clueless here about: I don’t know what to do, I don’t know how to behave, I don’t know. And, uh, I said, “Keep my head down and just keep dancing (laughs), kick those little legs.”
And I’m glad I got to tour domestically before, um, then, uh, I was transferred to Nik’s company when he was replacing his company and I -- and then the first thing we did was go on a long European tour. And I had never been out of the country.
We went to Israel the first time, and the plane lands in Tel Aviv, and men come on the plane with -- with rifles, before we even taxi up to the terminal. And -- and they -- they stop and they look in everybody’s face, and I’m the only one from the company they ask any questions of: who am I, what’s my name? And at that time, I was also the only Jew in the company (laughs): what are they picking on me for? (laughs) So, and -- and that was my first tour.
NS: In what year was this?
LLR: Let’s see, I graduated in '67, went into Murray’s company in ’68. It probably might have been a little earlier than that. Maybe ’71 or -- or so. But don’t quote me on that.
NS: But you passed inspection, and you got off the plane?
LLR: Yes. And then I also -- they also opened your bags as you were entering. Now, here was my first tour and somebody had said to me, “Make sure you bring everything you need,” and in those days, they said, “Bring toilet paper and make sure you have enough Tampax.” Well, to pack well, I had like spread out these multiple boxes of Tampax on my suitcase. So then they opened the suitcase in the airport, these -- these young soldiers, and there is the top of my suitcase lined with Tampax. [01:30:00] And then they asked me, “What’s that?”
NS: Oh. (laughter)
LLR: But evidently, one of the soldiers knew -- (laughter) and I passed that.
NS: Oh God.
LLR: And then we went on from there. Then Yom Kippur --
NS: Oh God.
LLR: -- that you’re supposed to fast on Yom Kippur, and, uh, we were performing the day -- the day before and the day after. But that day, we were free, and I, I knew there wasn’t gonna be restaurants open, so I went out and bought some food to eat and I told others to do that. Well, the only one who believed me was Beth Bagnold [Lisbeth Bagnold 1947- ] so... I think she went out and got some things, but nobody else believed me. Well, there was somebody in the hotel we were staying in – it was a very tiny hotel, and one of the workers there went into the kitchen and got everybody else some food. But nobody who’s Jewish would serve food --
NS: Sure.
LLR: -- on that day. And I -- I remember being surprised because I -- I didn’t think that it in Israel... Uh, I thought there was more of a separation --
NS: Of church and state?
LLR: -- of church and state than there was. But I guess for the big holidays, you observed. Which I guess we did here for Christmas also in this country. And -- and the Sunday laws about no alcohol and --
We went along from there, then we disco-- they had to replace our passports because evidently, to get into -- on that tour, we were going to Morocco and it -- we all had stamps from Israel in our passports. So we got to Romania and the embassy in Romania took all our passports and had them reissued, so we had fresh passports from Romania. So all of this was, you know, brand new to me. I had no idea how to get myself from point A to point B. And here was my first --
NS: Talk about an education.
LLR: Yes, yes, and I would not have had that without dancing. Then we toured in South America and -- and, my exper-- first experience with the difficulties physically of touring because people were getting sick left and right with stomach bugs: Montezuma’s revenge --
NS: Altitude.
LLR: Altitude also. And I always... Even after a lot of tours, I always felt timid about the traveling. I always felt nervous before we would leave, not the performing but the, um, the -- the feeling on my own.
NS: Hmm.
LLR: And yet, the company coming from Henry Street days and then the company no matter where we were based out of when we weren’t at Henry Street any longer, the company was family.
NS: Sure.
LLR: On the road, you took care of each other. If somebody was sick, everybody else tried to get them what they needed --and check on them and, you know, help them on to the bus as we went to the next place or, and -- and cover for each other and they were your -- your -- the people you return to if you needed to talk or you had a concern. You -- you shared that with the -- they were your brothers and sisters. And because I have no brothers and sisters --
NS: It’s nice.
LLR: -- for me, that -- that was a very fulfilling part of being a member of a company.
NS: Hmm.
LLR: The company and family were synonymous to me. And as the companies changed because I stayed a long time, and then left the company and then came back, I -- um, when I went to -- to teach in Mexico, I -- I stopped performing for a few years and then went back, and it was a totally different group of people, but immediately, you became company. The minute you -- you packed your suitcase and you arrived at -- at that airport, you -- you bonded, you know? And you bonded even before obviously through rehearsals and -- and studying together and, it -- it was family.
NS: What was the reaction of audiences? What -- was it like to -- to talk to the sponsor afterwards, or what was it like for you [01:35:00] to talk to people in class that you would teach on the road --
LLR: I did a lot of teaching on the road. I was very honored that Nik entrusted me with teaching and representing him on the road --
NS: Um-hm.
LLR: -- and most of the time that I was in the company, I -- if he didn’t teach, I did the teaching. And, you know, unless there was a circumstance where there were gonna be multiple simultaneous classes, I -- was -- was the surrogate teacher. And, um, I -- I found, because you were taught to teach at Henry Street as part of the training, it felt very comfortable.
There were funny circumstances where we -- in places -- and this was in the United States where, when -- to teach some -- the sponsor picked me up and took me to a place where I was gonna teach. It was in a school -- college some place. I don’t even remember where we were. And the students were standing back in -- it was a small gymnasium, and they were kind of hanging to the back. And I was in the front, and you always were asking for a drum to be provided, but very often there wasn’t, so you’d go and find some garbage cans and turn them upside down, and I always carried my own drumsticks. And, so I was getting, kind of, set up and everything and -- and finally, I -- it was time to start, and they were just not coming forward, which was unusual. So I -- I said, “Okay, let’s begin. Come forward please.” And they came forward, and somebody said, “Your English is so good.” And I said, “Yes, why? What did you expect me to speak?” And they said, “Um, well, ar-- ar-- aren’t you a Russian company?” and because of Nikolais’s name. And I said, “No, Nik was born in Connecticut.” (laughter) So nobody had -- had prepped them on knowing who --
NS: Who was coming.
LLR: -- what this master class was. There was also -- I mean there (laughs) -- there were the cheap tricks too that --
NS: Sure.
LLR: -- very often the dancers that you would encounter in master classes, you know, you were a stranger, you were -- they knew there was this company that had come to town, and there was going to be a master class, and they would come enthusiastically. But they also knew that this was “Modern Dance,” and their background was ballet. One of the things I... (laughs) It was a cheap trick, but I used it often is I would start the class explaining that our way of working was based not on what you did physically, but on how you did it, a definition, a textural, motional definition of how we did it. And, then I would demonstrate that by -- by showing -- saying I can raise my leg, and, but that’s not a definition of how I raise it. I can raise it fast; I can raise it as if it’s very heavy, I can raise it to show the space between my leg, but I was demonstrating this, and I would make sure that my leg went very, very, very high as I did it. Because I knew that in --
NS: That’s what counted.
LLR: That’s what counted to them and I had to capture their attention and their respect for what mattered to them before they would give me the -- the attention to consider what I was saying as worthwhile, and so... And then, to put the cherry (laughs) on top, once -- when I was finished showing five or six or seven or eight different ways to raise the leg, float it up and -- I would then continue talking, but I’d leave my leg in like practically next to my ear. And I would continue to talk about what we were gonna do and how -- and -- and why -- why it mattered. And this whole thing just took a couple of minutes, but I made it a point to just... And -- and I would just look at them as if I didn’t even know my leg was up there. And then finally, I -- I would kind of look at my leg (laughter) then put it down as if it was sort of like a puppet’s leg. And [01:40:00] I’d kind of keep this -- it was a cheap trick, and it became sort of a joke to myself and the one or two people who knew that I was doing this on purpose. And today when I – in recent times when I’ve tried to explain to people what was unique about our way of performing and teaching and -- and our principles of motion, I’ve explained to people -- I’m in my seventies now -- and explain to others, but I now demonstrate the same idea with my arm instead of my leg. (laughs) I couldn’t get my leg up to my hip anymore (laughter) much less to my ear. (laughter) So --
NS: Yeah. Well, we do get older, that’s true.
LLR: And -- and then, um, and -- at one point, we had toured in Mexico and then I got the opportunity to go back and teach. I was gonna take some time off. And I thought I was retiring from performing, and I was gonna take, uh -- and, uh, at that point, the head of the Ballet Folklórico [Ballet Folklórico de Mexico] had -- uh, was a friend of Nik’s and had asked for somebody to come teach and help start a modern dance company there. So Nik recommended me, and I went there, and that trick -- that trick came in handy, the leg trick, a few times. You know I was teaching something like five classes a day, six days a week, and students coming from everywhere. Because the owner of the Folklórico opened the classes up to every -- any and every dancer in the city. She required members of the Folklórico to come, and everybody else could come. She -- she didn’t charge anything for the classes. She opened it up to all so --
NS: This is Amalia, right? [Amalia Hernández, 1917-2000]
LLR: -- yeah -- Amalia Hernández. So there was a constant revolving door of new people to impress. (laughter)
NS: I hope that you alternated left leg with right leg.
LLR: No, my good standing leg was my right leg and my stretched leg was my left, and I just did it. (laughter) I don’t think I thought to alternate. (laughter) And then that was another experience because little by little, I learned some Spanish, and I had to teach a class in Spanish. Amalia had told me, “Oh, it’s no problem, everyone speaks English,” but that wasn’t true at all. Not at all. And it wasn’t possible to be translated. So I learned just enough Spanish. I had taken Spanish in school, but I couldn’t say a complete sentence. I learned enough to be able to teach class. Technique was relatively easy, the vocabulary was simple, but I had a very peculiar vocabulary in Spanish because it was all based on principles of dance and creativity. I couldn’t order in the restaurants.
NS: As the next step, what’s clear is that you go to Mexico, you’ve taught for a couple of years and then you come back and you rejoin a company and then you’re dancing. And then at some point, you make the decision that you’re going to leave dance -- that you retire from dance. Or is that a retire in quotation marks, or how did you handle that for yourself?
LLR: Well, I had decided to leave when I went to Mexico. I -- I had left the company. This was an opportunity. My choices at that point I had an -- I had an offer from Washington University and this offer from Mexico. And I knew that I would probably have a future if I went to Washington University -- uh, you know, a long-term job. But I still had that sort of that -- that feeling that New York was home and I grew up there -- and also that going to a foreign country and staying longer times -- I’d go for a couple of months at a time -- was an opportunity that I was terrified of, but I couldn’t turn down. So that’s why I chose Mexico.
After a couple of years, I missed dancing and I came back and --
NS: Now, when you say missed dancing, what do you mean?
LLR: I missed performing.
NS: You missed performing.
LLR: And, and -- and performing a lot. And it -- and it wasn’t so much that I loved performing. To me, my favorite times were the times [01:45:00] when a work was being choreographed. I loved rehearsals. I loved, um, uh, --
NS: Being in the studio --
LLR: -- dancing --
NS: yeah.
LLR: -- being in the studio even more than performing but performing gave -- touring gave you the opportunity to dance night after night. What was fun about the rehearsals, the choreography was interesting because you would contribute and -- and you were challenging yourself. And then in the rehearsals also was where you could take risks and try things in different ways because there wasn’t an audience because if it didn’t work, it -- it was okay. It gave you a freedom to experiment and hopefully improve. Or to try something that you knew would work but you had to work on it a while till you got it right. And it was just different going off in a corner and trying it by yourself versus doing it with the group –- or in the context of the whole piece, -- and with the sound. Mostly if I worked on my own I didn’t have sound. You know it was clumsy to have tape recorders in those days. So mostly you just went in a corner by yourself in a small space, and you were marking.
And I’m sorry I forgot the question. (laughs) But -- oh, how I retired -- So I had thought I was done, but I was missing the zest of moving -- and -- and -- and dancing and being in choreography. I -- I can’t remember if at that point was when Suzy McDermaid [Suzanne McDermaid, 1947- ] who had taken over a lot of my roles when I left. She got married, and she wanted to take six months off for her honeymoon because she married -- um, she was from California and married someone --
NS: Squire, yeah. [Squire Fridell, 1943-]
LLR: -- had married -- Squire in California. So she wanted six months with him and then she was gonna come back. So Nik agreed that if I would come back for six months, then she could have the six months off. Now, the real reason he agreed besides that we were both soloists was because we also fit the same costumes. That was the real thing. So she worked with me. She worked so hard to teach because several pieces had been choreographed when I was gone that I didn’t know at all. So she, she made notes, and she worked on it, and she and I rehearsed and rehearsed in her apartment. She had a studio, kind of a loft apartment and that she had kept when she went over -- to get married. And then she went off on her six months. At the end of the six months -- so I went on tour for those six months and, when -- and I had wonderful time. I had a new freedom from having -- been away. And -- and for some reason having been away, I -- I felt like I was dancing better than I had before. I think I’d gained some maturity while I was away and while I was completely responsible for teaching and -- and choreographing while I was in Mexico. And, um, and when I would come back from Mexico -- I’d go back and forth -- I would teach at -- at Nik’s studio -- anyway, so I was still part of the family. And then Suzy came back after the six months and so that was over and, and that was okay. And, she la-- lasted just a few weeks and she wanted... She said, “No, I -- I wanna go back to California.” So I had left, and I got it -- oh, the first time I left, I got a going-away party from the company. The next time after the six months, I got a going-away party. Well now, a few weeks goes by and now I’m back, (laughs) yeah, so... Suzy left again, and I was back. Um, I think I had only missed one very brief tour (laughs) or something. So then, I stayed for a few years.
NS: Oh, my.
LLR: And then it was time again. I said, “All right, enough is enough.” I think it was four years later or something. And I, you know, I -- I had gone from being the youngest person in the company to being the oldest -- and not the oldest but the second oldest. So that was a long time, and this spanned over about 10 years or -- there was the original four years and then a little time away and then --
NS: Back and forth back.
LLR: -- I went back -- back and forth. And, uh, and then there was the time with Murray before that. Um, so the last time I left, Ron Bundt, said to me, “This is the last going-away party you’re gonna get. [01:50:00] If you come back again, there’s no party.”
NS: (laughs)
LLR: But that’s -- that time, I -- I didn’t stay anywhere near the dance world. I came home, I took the dirty clothes out of my suitcase, didn’t even unpack the other stuff, you know, the things you always left in the suitcase. I slid it under the bed and went to a new job in the business world. And it was torture.
NS: And the reason that you did that was...?
LLR: Well, I was 35 -- I was afraid that I... Having taught nonstop during that hiatus from performing, I -- and having started teaching when I was 17 -- I had been teaching all the way through studying -- you know, uh, and then through being in the company on the road and then whenever we were in New York, I taught. I -- I think I taught too much when performing was -- when -- when dancing was my love.
NS: Hmm.
LLR: And, uh, it wasn’t -- if I had waited until I was really finished with dancing, or for the most part dancing, maybe I would have wanted to do it more. But I also had that fear that I’m 35, if I don’t try something else now, it’s gonna be too late. What if there are other doors for me to walk through? So it was -- it was, uh, a little bit -- it wasn’t that I didn’t want to teach. I thought that if I hurry and try something else, I could still go back and teach if I make that decision in six months quickly. I went into retail management. I went through Macy’s executive training program. I hated it, but once I got into it, I -- I felt like there wasn’t any going back. I -- I didn’t -- yeah, I didn’t think it would be possible easily to find a teaching job in New York to support myself. And at that point, I needed a full - a full-time job. And to this day, I know multiple people -- that are friends of both of ours who have to go from place to place to place. And I had to some degree in -- in the time I had been away in the training program and then starting the job and knowing I hated it, um, that I lost contacts, and I just felt like it was too late. I felt that I was trapped. If I had been a little more outgoing and more self-promotional, maybe I could have found a job at a university at that point. Um, but I also by that time was married, and we were living in New York, um, so I stayed with what I was doing.
NS: You also -- I mean what you’ve described up to the age of 35 have -- have packed in a tremendous amount of experience. You knew -- In -- dancing and dancing -- and teaching and teaching and performing and performing and, you know, training and training. I mean that’s a -- that’s a lot, a lot.
LLR: It didn’t give me experience for the normal world.
NS: Okay. (laughs)
LLR: And when -- the biggest shock to me when I got the first --
NS: When you became normal? (laughs)
LLR: Yeah, when I joined the real world -- is, in the dance world, everybody works hard by choice.
NS: Yeah.
LLR: I was stunned at how -- in the for-profit commercial world, it wasn’t that same family feeling, it wasn’t that same: everybody -- does the most they can. The first assignment I had was as a sales manager of a very large department -- accessories department in Macy’s largest branch store -- in Roosevelt Field -- and I get there, and I have a sales force of 45 people, and most of them didn’t wanna work. It was, -- no, that -- that’s not a fair thing to say. Not that most of them didn’t want to work but that they -- they were not necessarily pulling in the same direction as the company, and -- which is totally understandable. You know, it was that traditional, um, uh, uh, employer-employee, [01:55:00] uh --
NS: Hierarchy and tension.
LLR: Yes, hierarchy and tension, and I wasn’t used to having to ask anybody or be asked to do anything twice, you know? In the da-- in a dance company, if -- if somebody says, “Oh, who can bring those props?” everybody would run and do it automatically. They wouldn’t just -- everybody look at everybody else. You know it -- I wasn’t used to that, and here, I was responsible for 40 to 45 other people’s output as the manager. It was a shock.
And the values were hard for me too. The value system of -- of the company was also so different from what I was used to. Again, I was the country bumpkin entering a world I was not prepared for. And also, I was 13 years older than everybody else who was a new executive trainee then, department manager. I survived on physical endurance. And a little bit of maturity.
Where everybody else was fresh out of college, I had graduated 15 years earlier, and I was, I knew enough to respect the -- the sales associates I worked with and to learn from them how to run the department. And -- and I was strong enough to do my own stockroom work, which, uh, was a big part of it ’cause the -- I inherited a department that hadn’t had a manager for a very long time.
And all of the merchandise was just a hodgepodge in the stockroom. And part of my success was that I cleaned it all up after my shift would end and, um, I’d still keep an eye on my floor. There was supposedly a night manager who would -- who wasn’t the manager. But I would go in the stockroom and just clean for about -- it took me about two months to clean up the mess.
And I discovered that there was merchandise that sells well that was buried in the back that weren’t -- wasn’t out on the selling floor. I put that stuff out, and I didn’t know -- I wasn’t smart enough to know it would sell, but my sales associates knew. When I’d come out with this new box of stuff I had found and I’d say, “What should we do with this?” And they’d say, “Oh, those all sold out. Everybody loved those. Here,” and we – they’d tell me to put to them out on the floor. So I learned from them. And cleaning up my stockroom made me a star because I found all this stuff that was the right stuff to sell.
NS: That’s also -- I mean to -- to go back to dance, it’s like it’s the bottom shelf in Frankie’s --
LLR: Right.
NS: basement. [Frankie Garcia, 1929-2002]
LLR: But part of it was that I enjoyed the physical work of -- I happen to be in the handbag department, and those boxes were not very heavy. I could lift the whole carton myself. And I was -- I had just stopped dancing and I -- I -- I enjoyed the physical work. I really liked it.
NS: You know what, but what you do point to which is a very interesting, uh, notion that -- that runs throughout all interviews that I’ve done is that it -- that there is like an internal discipline that someone who dances has.
LLR: I think that that has to be true because dance training is so repetitive that if you don’t have the internal discipline to just keep doing it even though the reward is gonna maybe not show up until the next year, then you’ll -- you’ll turn away from it. Only it doesn’t feel like discipline at the time.
NS: No, no.
LLR: It’s drive. It’s an internal drive that provides the -- the fuel for that discipline. I never -- I never missed, you know, going to that extra party or something. I wasn’t interested in that as a kid because I was more interested in taking a dance class because I wanted to do it. It -- you know I -- I think -- I think that drive -- drive, you have it. Discipline you learn, drive grows na-- if you’re lucky, it grows naturally.
NS: If you can find the right place to be in the drive, you know?
LLR: Right.
NS: I mean I think that that’s partially what you’re talking about too is that you’ve -- you had that. You had the fortune of -- of having that drive in a place and a time and with people [02:00:00] with whom you had a great affinity for.
LLR: Yes. And -- and we all had had the drive and a similar drive for the same thing.
NS: Yeah. Yeah.
LLR: What I al -- what carries through in -- from dance while my physical stamina helped me as sales manager, what later on, after I left retail, and had a few other changes in life and then ended up working for a publisher in their production department. I -- very different parts of dance training became relevant.
In the production department, I was responsible for the printing and the mailing of promotional material. Now, I knew nothing about printing, but one of the things I had learned in -- in dancing was how to be self-taught, how to teach and how to design a curriculum for myself to learn something. So I had to learn about printing -- print technology and production technology and lettershop technology and…
So I went about it very systematically, and it wasn’t that hard to teach myself to -- to fi-- to break it down into -- into those elements, you know: space, time, shape, motion, texture. And then break each of those things down still further while there’s this -- the inner space, the outer space, the volume, the -- the, uh, distance, uh, -- all of the breaking things down and then putting them in a logical order to learn the individual things and to put them together, I learned from dancing, from learning how to dance and then from teaching dance and teaching dance as a part of Nikolais’s approach.
And then also, part of the job became, uh, we worked with a lot of designers from around the country in the direct mail industry and they were always trying to come up with new formats to -- of the printed pieces. And, uh, and -- and be-- because of understanding the gestalt -- the idea of the -- the essence or the gestalt of a -- of -- of a creative person’s intent, it was very second nature to me to be able to say, “Oh,”
To translate what they wanted that may have been way too expensive to produce, to -- to be faithful to that essence or to the idea they wanted to do and come up with a, uh -- talk to the printers, the manufacturers -- because I, by that time, had learned enough about printing and manufacturing that I could work with the -- with the printers to come up with a solution for what that person wanted to do even -- even if it wasn’t their original idea. So, to be a collaborator with some of the biggest names in direct mail was very much like collaborating with a choreographer and very fulfilling. I loved it. Although I spent those years in -- in, um, in, uh, retail and didn’t love it, when I got to the publisher in production, it was the right place for me. It really used a lot of the same skills, and even things like learning to print the way a press imposition is. It’s a big sheet of paper, and it folds up in certain ways where pages come out as cos-- consecutive page numbers for -- and --
NS: Isn’t it like the scroll that turns on itself?
LLR: No, no, it wasn’t. It wa-- Because in dancing you learned -- you practice everything on the left and the right, and -- and that you are -- you understand about symmetry and then also from understanding about sewing where you fold a pattern over. Everything you do in your life -- My mother always told me that “Whatever you learn will come in handy.”
NS: (laughs)
LLR: And here I learned to sew from my mother and the patterns and spatial orientation to understand three-dimensional space intuitively helped me to understand press impositions.
NS: Fabulous.
LLR: And --
NS: (laughs)
LLR: -- um, and the owner of the -- the publisher asked me one time. It was a -- a privately owned company, and we were [02:05:00] one of the largest direct mail publishers of newsletters in the country. But there was one boss, one owner, and he asked me one day -- I think he hired me because I had been a dancer. (laughs) Originally. He was just curious. He -- he was -- a little like Nik -- a genius in his field -- and, a contrarian in many ways. And so he hired me, and after I had been with him for a few years, he said -- um, he said -- asked me one day, “Well, what of your dance life do you -- work for you as a -- when you came to work here at Boardroom?” And I said -- I talked about the things we just said about teaching --learning how to break things down and into their logical, small bits, and then putting it together and how to identify what -- what is the essence. And -- and then I -- and then I also said and then also being able to understand what the designers were trying to achieve -- the copywriters and the designers. Um, and most of tho-- the -- he was from old-school direct mail and they were -- copywriters and the designers were from his generation. And they were -- they were big names in the field and then
-- and very set in their ways, and they all wanted to top each other about that being different and being different was expensive. My job was really to keep costs down.
NS: But to find a way to integrate the idea and into the gestalt. So I think -- I -- actually, I would like to -- I have to stop. We’ve talked for two hours and six -- seven minutes.
LLR: Right.
NS: So finis, thank you.
LLR: (laughs)
END OF AUDIO FILE
[1] Created by Tina Croll and Jamie Cunningham, From the Horse’s Mouth is a dance/theater production celebrating various dancers and dance institutions; Louis’ held in New York, NY May 3, 2015.
[2] The Nikolais Legacy Group, organized in 2012 to promote the legacy of Alwin Nikolais and to support the work of the Nikolais/Louis Foundation for Dance.
[3] Marcia Wardell Kelly, A Dancer’s Pocket Guide to Embodied Performance, Epigraph Publishing, Rhinebeck, New York, 2016.
[4] The Space for Innovative Development, an umbrella organization founded in 1970 to provide rehearsal and performance space for experimental theater groups.
© all rights reserved 2025, The Nikolais/Louis Foundation for Dance, Inc.
