marcia wardell kelly

PART 1.

NS: My name is Natasha Simon, and I am sitting in my apartment on December 4, 2021. And sitting opposite me is Marcia Kelly, who is the narrator of her story. I’m just here to attend to the questions and possibly the prompts. It’s the first time I’ve conducted an interview in my apartment, so I’m sort of curious to find out how it works -- how the tape recorder works, and how Marcia works. So, let’s start with a question about your discovery of Nik. How did you discover Nik?

MWK: I discovered Nik in my sophomore year of college at the University of Michigan. The company [Alwin Nikolais Dance Theatre] performed at the university’s large performance auditorium. I was absolutely gob smacked by Carolyn Carlson [1943- ] that this woman could be incredibly facile, dance with such different qualities, could embody a technique that wasn’t read as technical, that was beautiful, and she had found a place in this multimedia event. I just was thrilled. And that was followed by a master class of course which was conducted by Nik. And he was just lovely, and delightful, and encouraging. And there was Carolyn in her leotard and I think maybe Michael Ballard [1942-1991]? He was still with Nik at that time, I think. I’m not positive. Anyway, they were standing in front of the class being demonstrators for this, that, and the other, and I just -- I said, “You know, this is for me.”

NS: Had you been in the Dance Department at the University of Michigan? Were you dancing at that point?

MWK: I was.

NS: Were you studying?

MWK: I was, but at that point – ‘67, ‘68, ’69 -- they did not have dance in any other department than education, i.e. physical education, and it was called a dance concentrate. I had gone to the School of Education to literally work on gymnastics. I wanted to be in the 1972 Olympics. That was a wild dream, but (laughter), I was very good at free-ex -- free exercise -- and I was sent to a dance class, as all gymnasts were, and I came out of that class saying, “Why am I trying to perfect ten forms when there are ten-zillion forms?” And I immediately changed to be a dance concentrate. I, I could not imagine myself spending my time doing so little -- so hard.

NS: (laughs) And so repetitively --

MWK: Yes.

NS: -- over and over and over again.

MWK: Yes, yeah.

NS: Yeah. So that, that’s your freshman year exposure to dance, and --

MWK: Yes.

NS: -- well gymnastics and then dance.

MWK: Yeah, I had danced before that but never formally. I -- in high school, which was also in Ann Arbor, I was part of the modern dance club only so that I could dance in the high school musicals.

NS: Ah!

MWK: So I danced in Unsinkable Molly Brown, and My Fair Lady, oh, what else? There was another one in there somewhere. But [00:05:00] I had never formally ever, other than probably two tap dance lessons when I was maybe ten years old, from a woman who had no other students but me, and I -- it was very strange, it was in Northern Michigan and I told my mother, mmmm, no. (laughs)

NS: How had you gotten there?

MWK: I think because I said I wanted to take a dance class but my mother had been taught how to tap dance by her father.

NS: Oh, okay.

MWK: Years, and years, and years -- when she was my age, when she was like ten. And he taught her --

NS: Was he a hoofer?

MWK: No, but he was a lover of life. He also died very young. But I think that was her concept of dance. If, if I wanted to take a dance class then a flat ball toe, a flat ball toe, one, two, flat ball toe. (laughs)

NS: Were -- was that -- I’m always curious about what happens in the home: what are kids exposed to when they’re growing up?

MWK: I was exposed to very few arts.

NS: Mm.

MWK: We lived in rural Northern Michigan, Traverse City. We had a family resort of fifteen cottages that we -- well, seventeen units I guess we had. Some were single and some were double units. They were little cottages, in a semi-circle overlooking East Grand Traverse Bay. We had 500 feet of beach, we had -- it was beautiful. But I worked there because our family ran it from age four until I went to college.

So there wasn’t a lot of art, but when I was in third grade, Louis Armstrong performed at the St. Francis school auditorium and my parents took me to that. And I just loved it, I thought it was terrific, just terrific. And everyone knew I went because the next day in school I fell asleep in class. (laughter) And I had to tell my teacher why, and you know, it was funny. She let me take a nap in the nurses’ room, but -- my real, my real arts education was Ed Sullivan.

NS: Ah-ha. Who did you -- do you remember who you watched on Ed Sullivan?

MWK: Oh, every--

NS: I mean, I can remember --

MWK: Everybody.

NS: -- like --

MWK: From Topo Gigio, to -- (speaking with accent) “It’s all right, it’s all right,” you know? (laughs)

NS: Yeah, yeah.

MWK: But I saw -- I’m sure I saw some of the early jazz dancers, I’m sure I saw, probably, early Jerome Robbins [1918-1998], some of the more modern ballet and show people, I think, made more of an impression. Though seeing the Dying Swan probably did it all. But yeah, yeah, that was my education. It was really was.

NS: Sunday night.

MWK: Absolutely.

NS: At seven? I think it was seven o’clock?

MWK: I don’t know.

NS: Oh, oh, right, because it’s Eastern Time.

MWK: Maybe here. But, yeah, I -- that was terrific. I loved it.

NS: So then you’re off to college.

MWK: Right, right.

NS: And you’re in the Education Department because?

MWK: There is no dance and arts.

NS: There is no dance -- but you’re -- but you’ve got the gymnastic bug and so you’re taking some -- you’re sent off to a dance class.

MWK: Right.

NS: And --

MWK: And I change.

NS: And then Nik appears the next year.

MWK: Well, several people appeared. I had some varied influences there. The first and foremost influence was my teacher Elizabeth Weil Bergmann [1937- ], who had just graduated from Juilliard [The Juilliard School]. And she had studied quite a bit with Betty Jones [1926-2020]. So Betty visited [00:10:00] several times and I also went to California, got a scholarship from school to do a summer session in Long Beach, and --

NS: What year was that?

MWK: (sighs) (paper rustling) I can tell you somewhere. I think it was probably ‘70 or ‘71?

NS: I have to check because I was in Long Beach in 1971 summer.

MWK: Oh my gosh, that would be too much.

NS: With -- and Betty Jones was one of the teachers.

MWK: Was Ethel Winter there? [1924-2012]

NS: Yep.

MWK: Oh my gosh.

NS: And that’s where I met --

MWK: Alfredo Corvino? [1916-2005]

NS: Alfredo Corvino, that’s where I started studying with Alfredo.

MWK: I studied with Alfredo when I came to New York.

NS: Yeah.

MWK: Yeah. Those three: Betty and Fritz [Fritz Ludin 1941- ] and Ethel Winter. I liked Ethel Winter. I had -- well, anyway, back to Liz Bergmann. She taught us Graham, Limon, Horton –- Alvin Ailey toured -- came by, taught. Betty Jones taught. The Graham Company came, Martha did not teach, but somebody taught. [Martha Graham 1894-1991; José Limon 1908-1972; Lester Horton 1906-1953; Alvin Ailey 1931-1989]. We had a -- quite a varied and --

NS: It’s a full menu.

MWK: It was a nice menu, it was a -- it was wonderful. And I, I really felt Nik’s freedom of movement, and the freedom of how you approached your body, and how you qualified what you did, was not a duplication of someone else. And at that young age, that was the distinction really that I saw and I just -- I thought it was terrific. My favorite word, terrific!

NS: Terrific! When you, when you say that he was -- I think your words were: “gentle?”

MWK: He was, he was very gentle.

NS: So his affect as a teacher at that point, that you remember him as a teacher was someone who -- fill in the blank -- was someone who when he, when he’s standing there and presenting -- either in technique or in an improv class, an improvisation class with you -- what are some other key words that you would use to describe him?

MWK: He paid attention to the students.

NS: He did.

MWK: He saw. And because he could see what was happening with individuals and with the class as a whole, he would encourage us in different ways. You know, “Think about it this way,” or -- it -- I rarely remember in the early days him saying, “Don’t do this.” It was more like “What if,” or “Let’s try,” or --

NS: “Suppose we do.”

MWK: -- “What it would feel like. What would it feel like if you’d, if you really put more energy in?” Or -- you know, it was a kinder, gentler way of teaching rather than having the sense that you, you had to be like him.

NS: Mm, mm-hm.

MWK: Or you had to fulfill a particular technical aim -- though we were -- but I think he recognized the, the individual approaches to fulfilling a desired quality. Like how I would do it would be differently approached than how you would do it.

NS: Mm-hm.

MWK: It’s something in, in your integrated wholeness of self would come at it in a different way. And I really thought he saw that and appreciated it.

NS: And, and it fit into your own psychological makeup as well.

MWK: Yeah, because I had no technical experience. I mean, from the year zero I didn’t have technical experience. I learned quickly how to be technical. I understood line; I understood a lot from gymnastics. [00:15:00] But, I used it -- I think I used it differently than some people who were peers. They came at it from a different place.

NS: Gymnasts or dancers?

MWK: Dancers.

NS: Dancers. When you -- so there’s Nik in his master class with Carolyn and maybe Michael and you left that class exhilarated.

MWK: Yep.

NS: And then you decided at that point?

MWK: Well, time would progress a bit. I was in school. I came from a family with a long tradition of women being educated, being educated and being able to be self-sufficient, and there were -- whether it’s said or not, I felt the expectation was that I needed to get my degree so I could teach because that was something that would give me security. But at the same time I was -- in my naiveté and my youthful energy -- I was flying through this stuff in school. And I think it was at the -- it was at the end of my junior year.

NS: What year are you talking?

MWK: (sighs) It would have been ‘69.

NS: Mm-hm.

MWK: ‘69, ‘70. The head of the dance department, Dr. Esther Pease [1911-1988]:she came from a long line of movement educators, you know: think University of Wisconsin, think that whole strata of teacher -- she actually asked if I would ask my parents to come in and have a conference with her. She encouraged them to allow me to go to New York because she felt that’s what I needed to do. And that left me without a year of college to finish my degree. But I had an aunt who lived in New York on the Upper West Side and her daughters were all in college so there was room in her apartment, and you know, bless my parents. My father especially. He also had connections. He was a Midwestern boy –- Normal, Illinois, you know -- (laughter) but he was a community recreation graduate of what was at the time some early form of CCNY. He left Illinois to go to New York to get his master’s degree in Community Recreation and he understood the importance of using your body and living in your body. So he and, he and my mother actually spent their first year of school-- of their marriage in New York.

NS: This was after World War II?

MWK: Yes. Uh, no. No.

NS: This is earlier.

MWK: This is earlier. So that’s another part of this story that is interesting. It all kind of dovetails in, but long story short, I went to New York. I went at the end of the school year, I had the summer. I took classes with whoever was -- I just wanted to feel like what it felt like. And I was frustrated because I couldn’t take classes at Nikolais [Nikolais/Louis Dance Theatre Lab] because their semester started in September. So I was really at a loss. Thank goodness my aunt was a lovely person and I could speak to her. But she said, “Marcia, you should just do what you want to do. You came here to do this, you should do what you want.” And [00:20:00] so, here it is August, the end of August, and I go down to 36th Street -- it’s the first year that they were at The Space.[1] They had moved from Henry Street, Nik and Murray, and they were at The Space. And I walked up to the steps. On the outside and above the steps it said Christ Church House. Christ Church House is where my father was recreational director after he graduated from school and my parents -- up in one of the upper little rooms that used to be the snack bar – FODA - was their apartment. So this, this circle occurred in the myth of our family, of my parents living in Hell’s Kitchen. I just knew I had to do it. Well, I go in, so I go in, and there’s an elevator there and there’s this --

NS: It’s like pulling the sword out of the rock. It’s like -- (laughter)

MWK: There’s this elevator operator, you might have remembered him, but he was this very old guy. And I said, “Have you been here a long time?” And he said, “Yes,” and then I said, “My father was here a long time ago in 1930-whatever it was.” He remembered my father. So, uh, you know --

NS: I’m going to cry.

MWK: I’m, I’m sitting, in myself thinking, okay. So I go up the stairs and I see this big studio. And I -- there -- I had to go up these other stairs to go up to Betty’s office.[2] And that was my first contact with the Nikolais School. And she was lovely and wonderful, and she said, “You know, you’re really lucky because I have one spot left.” So I signed up and in September we started. My main teachers were Phyllis, [Phyllis Lamhut 1933- ] Carolyn, a little bit of Bev Blossom [Beverly Schmidt Blossom 1926-2014], but she was on her way back to Illinois [University of Illinois] at that time. She came a couple of times. But it was mostly Phyllis. Nik was on tour, Murray Louis I had never seen before in my life. I didn’t know who he was, I had no idea who he was or anything. He was on tour.

And probably around November of that year, end of October, early November, Murray came back from tour and he was having a change over. Lynn [Lynn Levine Rico 1946- ] had to have a foot operation, two other people were leaving. Anyway, Phyllis had this [pause] guy come and watch class; I didn’t know who this was at all. He watched class. And after the class he came up to me and he, he said -- no, actually I was on my way up the stairs to see Betty after the class and Murray was standing on the stairs. And he said, “You’re Marcia, right?” and I said, “Yes, I’m Marcia.” He said, “How old are you?” I said, “Twenty-two.” He said, “Do you have a job?” I said, “I have a part-time job making belts with one of the people who was a student at the school.” He said, “Do you want to dance?” I said, “Of course I want to dance. Yes, I want to dance!” And he said, “Okay, come to rehearsal next Monday.” I didn’t know Murray, I did not know his repertory, I had no idea, no idea whatsoever. And that started it. It was a quick curve.

NS: That’s like, wow. (laughs)

MWK: It was a quick learning curve.

NS: Quick learning curve but also it sounds so almost preordained. It’s spooky.

MWK: It’s very strange. And, you know, in my naiveté I had enough sense to just follow it. And I remained quite naïve through much of my time with Murray. Probably --

NS: You were with Murray for about four years? Three years? [00:25:00]

MWK: Four.

NS: Three, four years?

MWK: Four. I left in the middle end of ‘75. So from ‘71 to ‘75.

NS: Were -- and those were, those were heady days. Uh --

MWK: I think it was really the best part of Murray’s career because he was still dancing with us. He was in his prime. The work that he was doing was various, he experimented with things. But for us, we had the opportunity to dance with him. Which was just such a gift. My first partner was Murray. And he did not want to rehearse. (laughter)

NS: Yeah, okay.

MWK: So I premiered with the Murray Louis Dance Company in Chicago. My parents in Michigan and all of my relatives were there.

NS: In 1970?

MWK: January of ‘70. No, maybe it was January of ‘71. Yeah. Anyway -- so Proximities [1969] was one of the pieces so I’m paired with him in all of the group sections and it was like really learning how to improvise with, with Murray. I wouldn’t know for sure how he was concentrating on things that night and I sure better be able to get up to that lift myself if I had to. (laughs)

NS: Because -- and here’s an interesting development: if someone were to be reading a transcript or looking at a piece of choreography -- by its very nature, when it’s choreography -- and that Proximities is performed in Illinois, and in Michigan, and in Wisconsin, and then goes down to Biloxi, and over to Jacksonville -- it’s the same piece of choreography. However what you’re saying is that Murray had a particular way of performing choreography that involved improvisation.

MWK: Only because he didn’t like to rehearse. But yes, it’s true, what I learned from him, which -- well, first of all, I was absolutely willing because I had been a gymnast. I wasn’t afraid of any of this stuff at all, of being lifted, of being thrown around. I didn’t -- I mean, I could go with it. But Murray didn’t like to be bored.

NS: Uh-huh.

MWK: So he would approach things differently and I had to go with it always to, you know, not have things fall on the floor. So, so it was always fun and interesting for me to actually experience that variety of approach because I mean, sometimes he, he -- the last thing he wanted to do was lift somebody and do this part of the piece -- except he was such a consummate performer that he would never let himself get that way.

NS: Yeah.

MWK: And not really, he couldn’t live that way within a piece, but his energies were different, and I learned how to understand the quality of his energy, and I could tell what was coming, and where his attention was.

NS: That’s a certain skill though, that I don’t know a lot of people have. I mean, people have that skill, some people do and some people don’t because they’re not able to read people’s energies and things. But you can. That’s, that’s a skill that you have.

MWK: Yes. It also allowed me to be less afraid because, you know, this was sort of a terror-stricken -- that’s way exaggerated. I shouldn’t say terror-stricken. I can’t say I was [00:30:00] without fear because this was a new world of performing on a level that I had never ever performed before in my life. And here I’m premiering with this company, with the head of the company as a partner in this dance. I mean, we were close. There were only --

NS: There were six of you.

MWK: Six of us! I mean -- it was very close and I had, I had to -- in my own self -- take responsibility for the choreography at a very early time in my development as a dancer, which was a gift because I learned not only about how to read energy but how to understand how one qualified their energy throughout a piece and throughout an evening, and how one colored and actually learned to speak with one’s body and one’s energy so that the choreography could come to life. Because that’s the only way I could figure it out.

NS: Uh-huh.

MWK: I couldn’t figure it out any other way than that. And as a result, I think I had maybe a more foundational perspective of time, space, shape, and motion -- not as an intellectual kind of extrapolation into movement, but I -- it helped me define all this stuff I was feeling and figuring out and trying to understand what it was that I was communicating and doing, because --

NS: You -- it sounds like you were also less encumbered by the thing, you know.

MWK: Yes. Yeah. And in a way I -- it was because I was naïve in many ways and I was really quite clearly forced into myself to understand it. You know, I couldn’t be clueless.

NS: Mm-hm.

MWK: I was too responsible a person to be clueless. (laughs)

NS: Well it’s not without discipline.

MWK: Yeah.

NS: I mean, you’re describing yourself as someone who -- it’s all very new and, and fresh, but it’s not without your sense of discipline and input and responsibility.

MWK: Right, right. But as a result of that, and also a result of being in Murray’s company with so few of us, and doing so many Artists In Schools, touring, you know, impact at that time, but I taught early on and I took to it like a fish.

NS: Teaching?

MWK: Yeah. I loved teaching.

NS: Why do you say that? I mean, when you say that you took to teaching, what’s the -- I mean there are people who have gifts as a teacher and then there are people who study methodologies of teaching.

MWK: Pedagogy.

NS: And Pedagogy. And then there are people who learn how to teach. So who are you as a teacher?

MWK: I was -- I wanted the class to, as a whole, have an experience. It’s experiential. So going forward and backward is an experience. All of, all of this stuff is an experience. So if it’s an experience then what can one offer that might be a hook for a student to identify and understand what they’re experiencing? And it’s a very creative form, teaching is, if one is interested in it in, in a way that has to do with -- I don’t know, is there -- maybe you know a word that describes experiential development. [00:35:00] It’s growth, it’s -- I don’t know what you would call it. It’s, it’s an increased awareness, it’s an understanding of what you’re feeling and sensing, and not feeling like sad, happy, what --

NS: What is the sensate --

MWK: Yeah, what are the pressures of gravity? How does it feel when it’s centripetal or centrifugal? What does it feel when your foot hits the floor hard or when it’s really soft and quiet? So that’s where I live and that’s what was so interesting to then try to communicate that.

NS: And also to have landed in a particular philosophy of movement and motion that allowed for those questions to come up.

MWK: And listening to Hanya. [Hanya Holm 1893-1992] Hanya talking about --

NS: -- and Hanya’s also teaching --

MWK: -- bombs going off, you know!

NS: But Hanya was also teaching at that point.

MWK: She was. Yeah, every week she was teaching. And, and really that and viewing – not dancing in -- but viewing Nik’s work, because, Nik’s work as a dancer is so different than Murray’s work as a dancer. In Nik’s work you’re part of an ecology of light, sound, theatrical space, the color of what you’re in, the, the quality of the costume -- it’s all a very different theatrical and performance experience than with Murray. Which really had to do with nuance, timing, very, very subtle aspects of choreography that we had to learn from Murray’s body in a way. When he choreographed, sometimes he didn’t remember the phrases that he just did, we were there to remember them, and then we would have to --

NS: You were the video camera.

MWK: Yeah, then we would have to flesh them out. Whereas in Nik’s work he -- I mean, many people have said you’re a different color on his palette, you know, he had different types of dancers, but I never quite saw it that way. I saw it more that we fit into the dynamic of that ecology and if he was working on a solo with you, whatever you had to offer to fill out that gestalt was what he wanted.

NS: Let me ask -- I want to stop you there -- the phrase you used is whenever he was working on a solo with you.

MWK: Right.

NS: So tell me about that process with Nik.

MWK: With Nik?

NS: Yeah. I mean, I’m assuming you were referring to Nik at that point.

MWK: Yes. Yeah.

NS: So what is it like when you’re in the studio with Nik?

MWK: Alone?

NS: Alone and he’s working on a solo.

MWK: Well it was interesting for me and maybe for him, I don’t know. But he had seen me dance with Murray, so he had a pretty good idea of what I was capable of or, you know, what kind of a tone of dancing I had or I don’t know, I don’t know how to describe it, but what characterized, I guess -- so anyway, he was trying to figure out in the first, especially the first solo that he did was in Aviary [1978], and he started out --

NS: You had joined the company for Aviary.

MWK: Right.

NS: And that’s 19--

MWK: ‘80, no, ‘78 and ‘79 or something.

NS: ‘79 or ‘80.

MWK: So he gave me a bunch of one-legged, [00:40:00] very extended, very long and tall-type-person -- movement to try. And he would do it, he would do part of it. He might do it small, but he would do it. And then he would say, “No, no, no, no, that’s Carolyn, you’re not Carolyn.” And it took him a while to figure out where I fit into the spectrum of, uh, I don’t know, the, the tangible thing that he could pull out for the piece.

And I think he, he finally did it by Mechanical Organ [1980], by Mechanical Organ he --

NS: That’s “the doll with the broken” --

MWK: “The doll with the broken neck,” yeah. That, that, that was the -- probably the best thing I ever did for Nik.

NS: But what you’re also pointing to -- and this is something that I don’t know very many people have explored this before -- which is a choreographer who is working with a dancer, and has a vision, and works with a specific person, that there’s an arc to that growth as well as the growth of a dancerwho’s being worked upon.

MWK: Right.

NS: And that if you’re a dedicated choreographer, then you’re always in dialogue with yourself to get to that specific person that you are -- meaning you, Marcia -- as opposed to you Nik’s vision of a dancer.

MWK: Right. It’s, it’s like: Suzie McDermaid [Suzanne McDermaid, 1947- ] could be one of the funniest people on stage, but I think Nik gave her the opportunity to be one of the deepest performers on stage as well. She has a --

NS: Which is a conscious decision on his part.

MWK: Well he -- in Tribe [1975], for example, she has a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful solo that she worked on so, so, so hard. And it’s deep. It’s a very deep solo.

NS: In what way?

MWK: [pause] I think it’s probably -- I mean, you can be very serious, a very serious comedian, you can be a very serious comedian. But she used her timing skills, and her impulse skills, so beautifully, so primally, and really… You know, when you see someone who has sort of fulfilled a role in the company as a certain kind of character; and it’s easy to overuse that if you are a choreographer. He was able to be very broad with her and it was a beautiful thing to see, really beautiful thing to see. I think that, um, it’s hard with someone, you know -- like Suzie, or like Robbie [Rob Esposito [1948- ], or, even like Jessica -- they were kind of categorized as either being long and loose, and tall and languid, or a very tight little firecracker, or, always ebullient, or -- I, I think that if one was serious as a dancer that you were given the opportunity to explore more.

NS: In fact you might even demand it of the choreographer as a performer.

MWK: Eh, I don’t know, it, it might -- no, [00:45:00] I, I wouldn’t demand it.

NS: No, I’m not talking about actually going up to Nik and saying, I want blah, blah, blah. No I’m saying that the, the energy with which you approach choreography demands --

MWK: Well yeah, it might, it might just open doors to exploration is how I would think of it.

NS: Mm, mm.

MWK: I just feel so fortunate that I worked with Murray and Nik when they were younger, when they were healthy, when they were still fairly involved. It was after I was with Murray that he started having auditions or whatever. Really I never had to audition, though when I went to, into Nik’s company, he had auditioned some people to be in that company. But at that point I was an elder. (laughter)

NS: So go back to the solo that he’s working on with you for Aviary.

MWK: For Aviary.

NS: And he’s -- and he said, no, no, no, that’s Carolyn -- then he finds you, right?

MWK: Well I, I think he didn’t even really find me in that one, but he knew, he knew what – the kind of dynamic he wanted and he figured out how to get that dynamic to happen. I mean this was really early on and it was a pretty strange solo. I felt a little bit like a frantic hen. (laughs) Or I’m not sure exactly, but it’s, it’s a funny little solo, I’ll tell you that. (laughter)

NS: What words did he use to help you along --

MWK: Oh, I can’t remember.

NS: -- or to ask of you or -- you know --

MWK: I don’t remember. I don’t remember. But if you did something he liked he said, “Yeah, do that! Do that again, do that again!” He would set up problems: go from here to there with, you know, four different places on the floor and have your leg always doing this all the time.

NS: Always pumping up and down, up and down, or something.

MWK: Or something like that. You know, there would be a challenge and either you would fulfill the challenge or you would not. (laughs) But that was just part of it, that’s how he did it. So you didn’t feel badly because you did a tour jeté incorrectly.

NS: There is no such thing in the Nikolais universe.

MWK: There’s no -- there’s nothing like that there so you just had to do the best you could to figure -- help, help him figure out how you as a dancer could best fulfill what he needed.

NS: In Aviary, cause I know I wanted to ask you about that piece because of the discussion in one of our legacy meetings[3] about the process -- and that you had said, (and I think I’m correct in saying) that what was fascinating for you about Aviary is that it had so many different elements to it in, in terms of choreography -- in what you had earlier just now described as the ecology of a Nikolais piece -- and I think that’s your first experience with Nik.

MWK: Yes, he had -- an improvisational jazz group who was creating a score for him simultaneously along with the choreography. This was all in Wisconsin in a different place than his home studio. And he had to develop everything for this piece there within a fairly tight length of time -- I don’t remember exactly what it was, but it wasn’t a long time. And it was a lot it was a lot, and I thought it was just wonderful.

NS: When you were in the studio and he’s choreographing Aviary [00:50:00] are the musicians there as well with you?

MWK: Uh-uh, no.

NS: No, so they’re working --

MWK: Not till later, not till he’s -- he might work with them in different -- like this is a, you know, “Use your elbows with very quick and tight jabbing sounds,” something like that. Or there were different qualities of sound that they were working with. But then when he’d have a section finished, he would put us together with the music that was being sort of improvised and maybe had a little bit of form to it. But then he would see how it really worked with that section, let’s say it was a section of a quartet or something. And it worked or it didn’t work. Or he would ask them to do something else, or to tone it down in this part, and make it louder in -- he was like orchestrating his whole thing.

NS: Orchestrating the whole --

MWK: The whole thing.

NS: And he has yet to put you in costume or light you yet.

MWK: He has experimented with some lighting because we had --

NS: At that point.

MWK: -- we had a whole section that had to do with shadows behind a scrim with us jumping into the air and disappearing into the air as shadows, silhouettes, so we had that section that was -- he kept working on that. And we had these cube -- these Plexiglas stools that we kept having to alight on. We had to alight and hold shapes like land on one foot and hold shapes (laughs) and the lights would move around and, you know, there was a lot going on in that piece. (laughter)

NS: Did he say, “Here are some stools, I want you to –-“

MWK: No, he said, “Here are the stools.”

NS: He said here are the -- you walk in and there are stools.

MWK: “Stand on them, with one leg, and do some -- do this –-“

NS: And arrive there.

MWK: -- yeah. “Now, now, you do these few steps here and then you jump up and you’re there” -- and you hold it, and you’re holding it, and you’re holding it, and there’s one foot, and you can’t see anything. And the -- first of all it’s a Plexiglas stool, so the surface of it is, you know, there are a lot of sensory things that are going on all at once so in order to succeed at this and not be a brick, you had to figure out how your body could fulfill what he’d want. Usually it meant by really -- it meant to relax -- it meant that you had to relax within form. Rather than hold form you had to relax within form. Which, is sort of an oxymoron, but it’s --

NS: Well an oxymoron yes, but also it takes another oxymoron to get there, which is you have to have a certain sense of adventure and daring to do that.

MWK: Right. And not fall apart after three hours of doing it. (laughs)

NS: Which is a hard task.

MWK: Right. Right. It’s very hard.

NS: Did people fall apart?

MWK: Ahhh, people would always have dips: like, “I can’t do this anymore," like, “This is too much for me to do right now,” and you wouldn’t really say that out loud, you would just kind of suck it up, and figure out how to do it, and do it. But it’s hard. Especially because there were people watching every step of the way, whether it was students coming through -- this was in the university so one was always --

NS: So there’s the added dimension --

MWK: Yeah.

NS: -- of it being a public --

MWK: Observed and filmed. It was being filmed so you couldn’t go below a certain level if you’re being filmed. No marking of anything. It wasn’t horrible by any means, but it, it was hard.

NS: It’s a challenge.

MWK: It was hard.

NS: It was hard to piece to figure out. And did you then once it was -- I used the term advisedly, but when it when it was codified, or in some way, then you took it on the road.

MWK: We did. And it only toured a bit. [00:55:00] It didn’t tour for terribly long. He took certain sections out of it as part of a divertissement. But yeah, I don’t think it was one of his favorite works. Honestly. I think it was something that he did and, they had a grant to do it, and he did it, and it was a useful piece.

NS: And you were new at that point in the company. Were there other people who were new?

MWK: Yes there were, there were several who were new. I couldn’t tell you exactly who would be new. Jessica was there, she was there, Lynn was there, Dale [Dale Thompson] was there, of course Gerald [Gerald Otte 1945- ] was there. I’m trying to think of the other men. There was kind of a -- I don’t remember if Nusha [Nusha Martynuk 1953- ] and, uh, what’s his name, [Carter McAdams 1951- ] anyway, yeah, it was, it was a fairly new company and many of the people were new. Dale was fairly new.

NS: So his process, Nik’s process is also new. When you listen to or read the oral histories of the originals, where he has the time to work on a piece or to just explore because it’s a laboratory, it’s not, --

MWK: Yeah, this was high pressure for sure. But, when you think about, you think about how much he had to control or try to grab hold of and control to serve a vision that was morphing into being… He had certain things that he had ideas about and then he had things that he wasn’t sure how you would do it. I mean, that’s just an amazing undertaking, especially that he had -- was not doing the score himself because usually he had on reserve, elements of sound that he would mix and put together to make what he would need, but he had this group of musicians to deal with, which is another big chunk for him at that point.

NS: Not the -- I’m thinking to the time that people described that -- a very specific arc of time in which he was in Florida to create Tent [1968]. But I believe he used his own music for that.

MWK: Yes, that is his own.

NS: So he had more control of the entire environment at that point --

MWK: Right.

NS: -- for that piece. Which isn’t to say that Aviary wasn’t something he undertook because it was also a challenge for him, you know.

MWK: Oh yeah. Yeah, ceremony of bird people. But it was interesting. You should know, though, that this was not my first experience working with Nik. Because back in ‘75 Nik was on tour in South America and Jessica was sick, so Murray’s company was off, and they sent me down. And also one of their technicians was sick. Jessica was sent home, I don’t know if the technician was. Well, anyway, long story short, I would, in rehearsal, learn a section or two of a piece, we would light the piece, [01:00:00] I would see where I would need to be, but I was also running a light board.

NS: Oh Jesus.

MWK: So I literally would be in costume, run the sections that I did not know yet on the light board, enter with them [the dancers] with the sections that I knew. I learned pretty much all of the repertory that was on that tour in that way. The techie came back, thank goodness. (laughs) But I was getting -- you know, I was getting light cues, and doing this, and you know, it was, it was quite an experience. And that I held myself together on that, maybe Nik remembered that. (laughs)

NS: Can I, can I say as an editorial that you have an extraordinarily facile, facile mind and body, to be able to, to pick up the choreography and the light cues.

MWK: Beth Bagnold [Lisbeth Bagnold 1947- ] and Gerald would work with me when possible and then I, I don’t even remember who was the head lighting guy at that point. But it was, it was just wild, it was wild.

NS: So did you, -- let me go back for a second, you got a call -- obviously Nik and Murray are talking on the phone every night or comparing notes and figuring out what to do -- and then, “Yeah, Nik – we’re off.” And Nik says, “Well if Jessica is sick, who can I get? Send me somebody.”

MWK: Right.

NS: And Murray says, “Well Marcia is a very quick learner.

MWK: (laughs)

NS: I’m sure that’s what he said.

MWK: Gosh. It was --

NS: Had you -- did you have your shots by then? Did you have to --

MWK: Oh yeah because --

NS: You had been abroad too I think.

MWK: -- Murray, Murray had been all over the place so, yeah. Anyway, so that was my first introduction to dancing with the Nikolais Dance Theatre. So yeah, it was wild.

NS: That’s in ‘75, right?

MWK: And it wasn’t till ‘78 that I started with the company as a whole. But I was -- it was, you know, I think back on it and I just, I’m in utter awe (laughs) of the fact that I even imagined it -- that anyone imagined one could do that but I’m sure it’s not so trying.

NS: It also helps if you’re very -- if you’re schooled, if your premise is in the value of improvisation as a principle that guides you.

MWK: Right. Well, you know the interesting thing about improvisation that I think I -- you bring up a good subject because when one’s learning a piece there’s a certain amount of accuracy that is required. That’s a given. Yet, in Nik’s work, you can actually -- I -- well at least this is how I managed it -- one can understand sort of the (I’ve used this word before), the geography, the landscape of the piece. And if you know what your path in the landscape of the piece is, or what the geography of that path is, and you trust your body enough to be able to try to realize that, it’s a different way of thinking about improvisation.

NS: What way?

MWK: Because your body is [01:05:00] conforming to something that already exists somewhere in time and space but that you may not know how to do, but you fulfill it because you know what it has to be. So I learned to trust that. I’m probably not describing it very well and it sounds a bit esoteric… It’s like when you’ve learned a piece and you’re reviewing it to make sure that you have all the -- and you’re doing it in your mind, and your body is partly doing it with you just so that you are actually rehearsing the piece in that way -- that rehearsal wasn’t of your whole body. And to allow your body to fulfill that, even though your body really doesn’t know it yet.

NS: Hasn’t been there.

MWK: Right. Right. You have to be able to trust its ability to figure it out and that then goes into gestalt. Okay, so the gestalt of the piece has a specific quality, it has a specific timing, it has a specific weight and measure to it that, that is something that one could describe. But then as a dancer you have to make it real, you make it exist in time and space, so that once you start to figure out what the gestalt of a piece is, you begin to have a little bit more freedom in your body to explore how to qualify it even more clearly within that gestalt. And that’s another aspect.

NS: Which is the framework. Which is the ecology.

MWK: The seed, the bloomed seed. It’s the fruit of the seed. I often think about improvisation as that, okay? So the ecology of an improvisation: you have five people standing in space, waiting for the first move, whatever that is, for the first impulse of motion, or whatever it is, whether it’s an atmosphere that’s being created. When you start getting those clues as to what is forming, what the gestalt is that is forming in this improvisation, then you have the freedom to let your body conform to what’s forming, and to explore within it. It’s not like you’re set out there in the desert, you know.

NS: Yeah, if you give yourself over to that gestalt, then the choices you make are going to be integrated into the whole.

MWK: Well especially if you’re paying attention. If you’re paying attention to the other people and the people who maybe aren’t quite sure what the gestalt is yet and, and maybe you’re having an interaction that is pulling it one way or the other, it’s a very fluid kind of thing that’s going to be happening. But nothing is set in it. But the ones that you see, the ones that you -- when you actually observe an improv-- that’s why I think teachers are so smart to divide up classes and have them watch, and then do, and then watch, because you can see when something begins to become something, when an improvisation becomes something.

And I think that that idea of becoming something is absolutely integral to choreography. If you’re choreographing and you have an idea, and you have this sense of something that you want to create, you’re coming at it from a different [01:10:00] direction, you’re coming with a something, not having it turn into something, you’re obliged to explore what that something is, and that’s improvisation with a different slant.

NS: I’m going to jump ahead forty years to ask you (unfortunately COVID interrupted it) -- but I do believe I’m not taking liberty in saying that the piece of choreography you were working on with Jessica, and Tito, and Peter, [Jessica Nicoll 1959- ; Alberto del Saz (Tito) 1960- ; Peter Kyle 1967- ] has all those -- what you’ve just described in terms of choreography and improvisation -- is what you ended up doing a lot of exploration -- or not?

MWK: I did, I did. Well, first of all, these are consummate performers. They carry a great deal of dance wisdom with them and I felt like all I had to say was “What if you tried (laughs) duh, duh, duh, what would it look like?” or you know, I could use my imagination in a way that was I would say very nuanced, very nuanced, and they are all able to perform in a qualitative way that is extraordinary. So how do you validate that?

NS: Mm-hm.

MWK: Rather than see that as well, this person is sixty-five years old, and maybe they can’t jump anymore, why should you think that way? They’re, capable of working at a really what I would call a high level of expression. So, I’m glad it looks like that. That makes me happy you say that.

NS: And, and what happens for me listening to you is that you have ingested the feast that Nikolais was.

MWK: Oh yeah.

NS: And been able then to produce another menu for yourself.

MWK: Oh lots of times.

NS: And not only in dance.

MWK: Right. Everything that I’ve been challenged with or challenged myself with along the way, it’s all the same stuff, it’s all the same stuff. All the same thing. When I studied to do Chinese medical massage, which was basically acupuncture, meridian based, movement of chi through the meridians and points, it was a no brainer. I mean, I’ve been doing this my whole life.

NS: My question to you before is now why -- what was that choice that you made or why did you make that choice? To explore that?

MWK: Because I seemed to understand it already.

NS: And that tickled your fancy and you said I want to know something more about it.

MWK: Right, right. And I’ve done a lot of studying of somatics to a certain degree. I have opinions and questions about how somatics and dance intersect and are separate -- the studies of these two forms of exploration. I think there was a time when contact improv was in its heyday that [01:15:00] it was seen as a performance art and I disagree with that, I don’t think it’s a performance art.

NS: Why do you say that?

MWK: Because there’s not an intent to communicate and allow the audience to experience what the dancer is experiencing. The point of contact between the dancers is where everything is happening. And it’s not their responsibility to show us that contact. Or to be lucid in how… You might be able to observe really carefully and closely their entire energy field to feel what they’re feeling. It’s like an impossibility; it’s a private affair. And what comes of it is some really beautiful movement, but I wouldn’t call it performance art. I don’t want to put it down because I think it’s beautiful, but I feel that it’s different than the intent of including the audience. There’s always, there’s always an attendant, someone is attending a dance performance, or they’re attending a museum and looking at a painting, or they’re attending, and that means attention, and that means energy --

NS: Is exchanged.

MWK: -- is exchanged, yeah. And I, I really, I just think they’re different. I don’t think one is better than the other, they’re just different. And I think it’s an excellent experience for a dancer to be able to do contact improv, but to know the difference between a performance and the exploration.

NS: If what you’re also – and tell me if I’m on to something that you’re saying, is that there’s an intention in a performance to communicate, to engage with an audience, or with someone who is in observation. Which is different from someone who -- in a contact improvisation -- the fact that I’m watching it is incidental.

MWK: Correct.

NS: Yeah.

MWK: The other part of that is -- about the communication part -- is that I believe performers are lifted to a different level when they are performing, to communicate with an audience. And that lifts everybody to a different place, rather than just looking through a microscope and seeing this and that and the other, and that happening in -- wow, that split that way, how did it do that. You can say that but --

NS: Your involvement in it is not there.

MWK: No, it’s a different involvement, the involvement is the point of contact and it’s highly skilled. That’s just my opinion. A lot of people have different opinions about it but, but I don’t think it’s fair to an audience who perhaps paid money to have an experience. Now, if they paid money just to look at a screen or something and not be involved with it, that’s the audience member’s choice. But sometimes because dance is kinetic and because we communicate different [01:20:00] aspects of ourselves than our personality when we dance, there are, there are different exchanges that happen with an audience. And those exchanges, I think, are worth recognizing and also worth developing for the audience and the dancer alike.

NS: I mean, in very mundane terms, I’m sure you’ve had this experience where you come off stage from a performance and say, “That audience is just dead, I’m not getting anything from them.” Or you come off stage and you’re exhilarated because there’s this spark that happens between you and, and the atmospherics and the audience, you know, that --

MWK: Yeah, there are all levels of it. But I think, too, a lot of that, I don’t know, from the dancer’s point of view, one’s comfort with decentralization is important.

NS: Okay, so now you opened up that worm.

MWK: The worm.

NS: That worm. Can you talk about that? About the myth surrounding Nikolais and --

MWK: Well he wrote about decentralization, before Murray edited his writing about decentralization. So I, [pause] -- I think it’s extraordinarily important from his -- if you want to use the ecology word again, to realize that the forward facing part of the human being in his work is not related to that dancer’s personality or that dancer’s story, or the story that the dancer tells themselves, or any of the things that control that dancer’s life. It isn’t about that.

NS: Mm-hm.

MWK: It’s about how that dancer and the dancer’s energy extends itself, and interweaves itself, and interacts with the ecology of that piece. And to do that they have to be facile enough to have their attention go where it needs to go and not ask for any attention at all, but only give attention to what they’re doing. To me that’s the gift of decentralization.

NS: What I would like to introduce in what you’re saying is an interesting tension that exists between -- and it may be a question of semantics and the word -- from centering and decentering --

MWK: Mm-hm.

NS: I don’t think that as a dancer… To fulfill Nik’s concept of decentralization, one has to be a centered person.

MWK: You do or don’t think?

NS: You do.

MWK: You do. Yeah, I think it comes naturally to some people. I think for, for folks who demand in themselves a great deal of thinking about things, it’s more difficult. I think for folks who are more comfortable in their bodies, and -- that doesn’t mean skill.

NS: No.

MWK: It means that you’re more comfortable in allowing your body to feel what needs to be felt and engaging the mind through asking it to attend, and that request then obliviates all that other storytelling.

NS: Noise.

MWK: Yeah. [01:25:00]

NS: It’s all noise, yeah.

MWK: Right. And it allows you -- I mean, Nik’s idea of grain is genius because it allows your mind then to participate in visualizing what it is that you’re feeling. That’s the ticket to understanding how to take all of your energy and have it direct right, you know --

NS: To the smallest particle and to the largest landscape.

MWK: Absolutely, absolutely. And it doesn’t happen -- the thing that, you know, you can’t, you can’t rely on it happening 100% all the time. It isn’t that way, I mean, there -- it’s not like you do it or you don’t do it, it’s like that you’re always working on that to have it be that way; you are practicing that, you’re practicing.

NS: Did he talk to you about graining and decentralizing?

MWK: No.

NS: Did he -- did you ever have discussions with him about it?

MWK: No, no. Only listening to him when he was teaching or reading what he said about it. But he would demonstrate it really well. Murray demonstrates it a little bit differently, but, in the same way. I learned a whole lot when Murray put together his Dance as an Art Form film, because that was during my time.[4]

NS: Well, that was ’71-2-3 -- or something like that, that time.

MWK: So we did all of those things, and we did dances that illustrated it that were in his repertory, we did improvisations, we did all kinds of crazy things outside, who knows what we were doing, but we had to do it, we had to be it, we had to do that stuff, and it was -- that was a good sort of overview for me early on. But decentralization is -- it’s tricky -- because it’s not like the orthodoxy of this, you know, it’s not that, it’s demanded of lots of practices in many different ways, whether you’re Buddhist, or you’re doing Tai Chi, or you’re -- any of the mind -- quote “mindful arts” require it, but dance has the added communication factor that it’s not all internal. It’s not just where it grazes with the space of reality; it’s where you’re actually expressing it in your body. It’s an expression rather than just an action or a movement.

NS: And to be successful, is that the audience, the person who is engaged in the watch -- is moved.

MWK: Absolutely.

NS: And that’s the key because if the audience isn’t moved then it’s not -- it, it --

MWK: It’s not happening.

NS: -- it hasn’t happened.

MWK: It hasn’t happened and it’s not -- It’s rare. It’s rare. But, I mean, I can be moved by all kinds of things other than dance.

NS: Sure.

MWK: It -- music can be so moving. Acting is the same thing, you become this becoming of this something other than, gosh, your just – your mortal coil is something that is, is somehow working through all of this, of what you’re doing. I don’t think dance is all that special, but I think it’s worth recognizing that it’s an attempt at communication of something else.

NS: Yeah. Mm. It -- god, it’s a good place to stop but it’s also, it’s very provocative and I have a couple more -- and I want to [01:30:00] keep asking some quest-- do you want to keep going --

MWK: Sure.

NS: -- for a while?

MWK: It’s five.

NS: Oh, okay, well we’ve got some -- because I -- we could, we could go beyond everything that we’re talking now and start yakking for three hours or so.

MWK: Sure.

NS: But for the purposes of this project, one of the things that -- two things that have come up in listening to you that I wanted to get your take on too. One is that, you arrived in New York at a particular time in which both Nik and Murray were involved enough in teaching but it was not quite the laboratory that Henry Street was.

MWK: Correct.

NS: So it’s less isolated. It’s also, in terms of the context of the times, it’s really an explosion of events and time, both in dance, but also in the culture at large.

MWK: Right.

NS: So that’s happening. You’re there at The Space for Innovative Development and it’s got the Open Theater, Free Life Communications [an improvisational music ensemble] and the Multigravitational Experiment, Quog [musicians experimenting with new forms of opera], Space Videoarts and the Ralph Lee’s puppets -- I don’t know if Ralph Lee’s puppets were there -- but there’s a jazz group or there’s a music group, there’s a video group, there’s -- it’s a, it’s a --

MWK: It’s a hive.

NS: It’s a hive.

MWK: It was great.

NS: And, and not only [are] Nik and Murray there, but you mentioned that Hanya is teaching too, so you’ve got this, this arc of history that’s settled into, or that’s alit-- alighted into this hive. What’s that about for you when you’re, when you’re listening to Hanya talk? Or teach? When you’re taking class from Nik, or Murray, or Hanya, or Phyllis, you know, because you’ve got this whole generation now of people that are --

MWK: Well they’re all there and they were all vital. And I think that vitality was easily acknowledged by the openness of the culture, and the openness of the dancers who came there. I think there was a willingness to sort of accelerate understanding. So for example, I was teaching my second year in Murray’s company and it wasn’t that I was teaching something that I already knew. I was teaching something that was a dynamic that we were all experiencing by observing Murray teach, by observing Nik teach, but mostly Murray because that’s where I was spending my time.

But we had the opportunity to teach a lot of kids and, there are certain echoes of Henry Street in that, but it was more compacted. And like I say, there was an accelerant there. I think those of us who were around at that time felt that, “Yeah, I get this, I get this,” and it was okay that I hadn’t studied for ten years, from the time I was twelve or something, it was fine because I got it.

NS: Mm-hm.

MWK: I understand that. And we were able to figure out how to communicate that we understood and were allowed to do that because there was a certain trust that we understood it. You know, it, it was, I don’t know, I think accelerant is --

NS: Is a good word for it.

MWK: -- is a good word for it. It, it wasn’t consciously done; it happened that we were given more responsibilities than perhaps at another time.

NS: Mm-hm.

MWK: But we took ‘em. [01:35:00] It, it wasn’t like, “No, I can’t do that,” or --

NS: “Oh, I, I couldn’t possibly.”

MWK: No, not even, not even that, “I can’t do that,” it’s not like that. It was, it was very heady.

NS: Sure, “I’ll have it at, yeah.”

MWK: Yeah, it was a heady time. I think also, because Nik and Murray were becoming recognized, and they were becoming important in the field, and creating their own identities of -- less Nik because he’s always been the same in terms of his identity, of the kind of multimedia work that he does and experiments at that time. Murray was really defining himself, but as a soloist as well as a choreographer, because he was able and was at the prime of his dancing.

So all that was coming through all of us dancers at the same time. You know, we aspired to be like -- not to be like Murray but to, to somehow develop to a point where you could be as nuanced as he was and as skilled. And I, I, um, I don’t know, it’s the best I can describe it. But it was a different time, it was different than Henry Street, and it was different than it was later.

NS: Later. It also at some point then -- there’s Nik and Murray developing, becoming more widely known. They were coming into their own at Henry Street as well, but that the public is now recognizing.

MWK: Oh, the world was recognizing Nik.

NS: The world is. And that’s my next question. [It] has to do with the era in which you spent in Angers because at some point Nik becomes a hero of the French nation or something to that effect. He becomes the darling of a European aesthetic certainly.

MWK: I think a lot of really interesting dancers have likely come from those early years of Angers. It was like pulling teeth, you know, it was difficult to teach there.

NS: In what way?

MWK: The personalities of each of the dancers were highly formed. And, uh, one had to just give, you just, you had to just give. It was interesting, it was interesting. I wasn’t there all that long, it was a couple -- three months maybe. That’s not very long.

NS: But Nik said -- I mean, this is -- I’m impressed, I mean, Nik said, “I want you to go teach in Angers.”

MWK: Yep, yep. There were three of us there. Ruth [Ruth Grauert 1919-2020] was there because they were setting works and the like, and, myself, and Robbie. And they were putting together both repertory, I think, and their own pieces. Mostly their own pieces. So Nik would appear at certain times and they would do showings for him of their pieces and he would work with them. Then there was the everyday technique and improv that we provided, and a framework for doing their pieces. Ruth was helpful with that particularly. But it was a very different experience.

NS: The student in [01:40:00] Angers is different from the student in Santa Cruz.

MWK: Oh gosh, yes.

NS: In what way?

MWK: They were very self-directed. I think a lot of, at that time -- the American kids who came to The Space, as well as the ones that we met on the road, or when I was teaching at Santa Cruz -- is that when things got harder, more difficult, like when more was expected of them, they would just do something else.

NS: Huh.

MWK: And that never occurred to me, you know, as someone in the field, or learning, or -- why would I do something else. But there wasn’t always the will to, to --

NS: Uh-huh.

MWK: -- and it -- and I think the French students, though sometimes it was a little more ego than was easy to work with, they had a point of view. American kids, not so much. Some did.

NS: Why do you suppose that is?

MWK: Availability of possibilities.

NS: Experience and possibility.

MWK: Yeah.

NS: But there’s an abundance of opportunity or --

MWK: There’s an abundance but also, I think, the whole post-War, baby boomer permissiveness was a bit…it had come down to roost.

NS: Mm, mm-hm, and been internalized by the next generation.

MWK: By some, I mean not everybody. You know, sometimes the, the kid-- I learned this in Minnesota sometimes the dancers who had grown up in more isolated, more defined, and maybe even disciplined circumstances – if you’re a farm kid, you had to get up at four o’clock in the morning to start this and that before you went to school, blah, blah, or -- there, there are different ways of thinking about self-discipline, whether it’s imposed on you or whether it’s something that when you grow up just, it’s just there. Because that’s how you, how you live and survive. And I sort of came from that, it’s just there. I mean, our family ran this business.

NS: You had to maintain that -- those cottages, you had to --

MWK: You bet. I started, I started my time book -- we each had a time book -- when I was four. My dad pounded a nail in the end of the stick, and gave me a bag, and I would have to go down the road and back, and skewer the litter so that when a customer would be driving by, they wouldn’t see litter on the lawn in the morning and in the evening. Every day I collected the litter and that, that went to sweeping the walks, that went to collecting the garbage from the garbage cans, that went to cleaning cottages with a local woman, usually a farm woman, and I’d have to keep up with them. You know, I, I learned how to do that. I probably have made thousands of beds and cleaned thousands of toilets in my day, but you know --

NS: And not to mention how many times did you sweep the stage before or afterwards? (laughter)

MWK: That’s true. But, but there’s -- there is something to I think understanding work, what work is, and it’s not, other than life, it’s -- you know, you don’t go to work and you don’t live at work, and then you live at home? No, it’s a different --

NS: It’s integrated.

MWK: Yeah. [01:45:00] So I don’t know. I’m not saying that everybody was spoiled because the people who succeeded, I think, had that.

NS: Yeah, yeah.

MWK: Somehow or another.

NS: There are other, other avenues of inquiry, but I think for now let’s stop.

MWK: Sounds good. END OF AUDIO FILE

[1] The Space for Innovative Development: Built in 1903 ‘The Space’ was originally the Presbyterian denominational Christ Church. The Samuel Rubin Foundation purchased the abandoned building on West 36th Street in New York City’s garment district in 1970. Its purpose was to support experimental theatrical groups in need of rehearsal and performing space. Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis Dance Companies were the Space’s original tenants and were subsequently joined by the Open Theatre, Free Life Communications, the Multigravitational Experiment, Quog, and Space Videoarts.

[2] Growing up on the Lower East Side, Young was a member of one of the Henry Street Settlement’s many clubs. She eventually became the school administrator and co-director of the Playhouse with Nikolais. For further information see Helen Hall, Unfinished Business (New York: Macmillan, 1971) and Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier, The House on Henry Street (New York: New York University Press, 2020).

[3] The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) launched the Artists-in-Schools Program in 1970. In addition to dance companies, it funded artists' 2- and 3-week residencies in public schools throughout the United States. The program's stated purpose was to promote the integration of the arts into the educational curricula as well as to encourage the natural spontaneity and expressiveness of children. Schiff, Bennett, Artists in Schools, Washington, National Endowment for the Arts, 1973.

[4] The Nikolais Legacy Group: a group organized in 2012 to promote the legacy of Alwin Nikolais and to support the work of the Nikolais/Louis Foundation for Dance.

[5] Dance as an Art Form: The Dancer’s Instrument-the Body, Motion, Space, Time, and Shape. © Nikolais/Louis Foundation for Dance, 1973.

[6] Founded in 1967, Multigravitational Aerodance Group joined The Space for Innovative Development in 1971 as artists in residence. For further information see: Jayne C. Bernasconi and Nancy Smith, Aerial Dance (Champaign, Illinois: Human Kinetics, 2008).

PART 2.

NS: My name is Natasha Simon, and I am sitting in Marcia Kelly’s living room in Germantown, New York. And it is July 19, 2022 and we’re picking up our conversation from probably three or four months ago when we were sitting in my living room. We have some avenues of discussion that we haven’t explored yet and I’m curious about a couple of things, first off. In your biography, Marcia, you speak about having worked with Murray from ’71 to ’75, I believe it is. And then you worked with Nik in 1975, and then 1978 to ’81 -- But there’s a hiatus in there. There’s a three-year gap.

MJK: It’s a little bit less than three years but yes, yes. At that time Rob Esposito [1948 - ] and I were working on our own choreography. Mostly his, but some of mine. And we both left the companies[1] at that time to just explore. I was able to obtain a job at UC Santa Cruz for the year and I took it. We moved to the West Coast, and he worked on his company and I did choreography at the university. The opportunity to choreograph at the university was really great for me: to be outside of New York and working with students who were very different culturally -- a wide range of experiences, not all professional dancers by any means or even with the desire to become a professional dancer. Not at all. But I -- it was interesting for me to see kind of the -- the echoes of how Nik and Murray had affected the way I would see choreography.

NS: Can you be specific now about that?

MJK: Well, interestingly, I was interested in stage environment but also, I was interested in storytelling. And Murray is a storyteller whether abstract or literal. And, uh, Nik is just the huge media world that he creates all kinds of things to happen in. I mean, it’s – it’s -- but I didn’t want to feel derivative or anything like that. I really wanted to see what kind of stories came up. So that was interesting.

NS: By stories, do you mean narratives?

MJK: No --

NS: No?

MJK: -- more like kind of -- how to (pause) how to describe this? Working with archetypes of, uh, either characters that could be abstracted within certain environments or, um, folktales. I -- really, I was -- at that time in my life, I was very influenced by folk myths and indigenous stories and Irish music and Irish history. So that’s kind of the milieu I was imagining in. So it was -- it was interesting. [00:05:00] I think I only had one review that happened which -- the title of the review was, “Dance for the Thinking Person.”

NS: Oh no. (laughs)

MJK: And -- and I really liked that. I thought, “Okay, something, that -- I’m kind of onto that a little bit.” So anyway, that was a year. And Rob’s work never really got off the ground though he did put a couple of concerts together. And then after that -- I don’t know if it was after or before. I do get these things confused. But I also spent a semester at University of Utah.

Where else was I? Spent the summer at American Dance Festival on the faculty. Took a time off, spent a fall and winter in Maine. It was -- it was a very in-between kind of iffy, uh... My economics were rather flimsy at that particular time but it was good --

NS: Not unlike many dancers.

MJK: Oh, just the world, yeah. But then we got a call from Nik, because his company had a large turnover that I think happened after the unionization. And he was -- he asked both of us to come back as featured performers. So that’s when I went back to Nik -- after Murray.

NS: So -- but what you’re telling -- what you’ve just described, however, is that you were -- you arrived in New York. I mean, we’re talking about the previous interview, but that you’ve arrived in New York and that you’re immersed in this new art form for you. Not -- not new art form, but you thrust yourself into the -- the belly of the beast, so to speak.

MJK: Yeah, well with working choreographers.

NS: With working choreographers in New York City and -- and you’re sent off to tour the world. And to teach anyone from the age of 5 to 55 or beyond, in constructed classrooms. I mean, it wasn’t simply a catch-as-catch-can; this was part of the Dance Touring Program.[2] And so that you had this very heady experience for four years.

MJK: Yeah, and I was, during that time, I was 21, 22, 23, 20-- you know. I was a -- a young 20s -- it was mid-20s that Rob and I took the break from it.

NS: And the choice was to leave and to do your own work.

MJK: Yeah, yeah. The choice was to actually -- I -- had Rob not been in the picture at all, I probably would’ve stayed.

NS: Uh-huh.

MJK: But he wanted to do his own work and I was really happy teaching. I was happy to go somewhere and teach and, you know, develop long-term because you can teach master classes for a long time. One, two, three classes, but to be able to develop teaching over a full school year is something else altogether. And I appreciated the opportunity to do that. And I think it made me a better teacher --

NS: To have that -- that arc, as we say.

MJK: -- you know, for having that time to -- to do that. Right. Because you know how it was in the -- at Nik’s studio. Even if you were a regular teacher there, you maybe just had one slot a week that you would teach. And you were always following whatever Nik’s curriculum was, but this was -- it was a good opportunity for me.

NS: You also mentioned during that time the reviews -- the headline, “A Dancer for a Thinking --”

MJK: “Dance -- Dance for a Thinking Person.”

NS: -- A -- “Dance for a Thinking Person.” Can you unpack that a bit?

MJK: I don’t know. I --

NS: Especially because what I’m curious about is, I mean, [00:10:00] we can’t put ourselves into the head of the critic who’s writing that. But we can recollect what you were attempting in the concert.

MJK: Well, the interesting part of the review was that this gentleman who was reviewing it kept asking himself, “What’s happening?” (laughs) You know? “What is happening?” And I could really relate to that. That made me really happy that someone was asking, “What’s happening here?” And the interest was glued to understanding what was happening. And you can be as abstract as you want, but I -- as you know from -- (laughs) from our -- just other discussions today -- it’s that thread. I -- I’ve always been interested in that thread that goes through a piece from the moment the light is on until the light goes off. How does that thread --

NS: Manifest itself?

MJK: Yes, yes. How does it manifest and also, how does it engage the person who’s in the audience?

NS: Which actually leads me to a question now about the book that you’ve written which is entitled A Dancer’s Pocket Guide to Embodied Performance.[3] And (pause) it’s a very provocative book. It’s very generous. I would -- I’m talking now as a critic of the book and saying that it’s a very generous book and your authorial generosity comes shining through.

It’s also a very provocative book in that it -- I -- I make notes, you know, saying, “Well, how could this be?” Or, “What was this?” Or, “Why does she say this?” And at the same time that she’s -- that I’m asking myself these questions, I’m realizing that you have taken what Nik has spent his life doing. You know, as a choreographer, as a -- as a theatrical choreographer, as someone who embraced theater. So it leads me to a couple of questions that I have from the book itself and what you were just talking about when you were talking about the thread in your own choreography.

MJK: Mm-hmm.

NS: The -- the connection from beginning to end. And at some point very early in I believe it’s the chapter on stasis, you mention -- you write, “Stasis is fully embodied presence. It is without past or future and gives no clue to previous or following movement.” Okay.

MJK: (laughs)

NS: Can we talk about that? Because that would seem to contradict the idea of the thread in the choreography.

MJK: It would seem to.

NS: That’s -- that’s why I said seem.

MJK: Okay. It would seem to but actually, these moments if one is experiencing what one is expressing: if you’re experiencing what you’re expressing, then there is not a separation from millisecond to millisecond to millisecond to millisecond to millisecond to 5 minutes to 15 minutes to a half-hour piece. So that if you are -- have trained yourself or identified within yourself your ability to stay in the body, and if you can do it without anticipation or regret, you’re there. And the point of the Pointillist painting begins -- Or the thread, the beginning of the thread begins. I just thought and felt that it was essential to Nik’s work to [00:15:00] understand stasis. And it -- it resounded in me in that that is the opportunity that you are fully there without obligation to express anything other than the fact that you are fully there. And you’re experiencing the fact that you are fully there.

NS: Which answers the next question for me in some respects about -- and speaking simply as a -- or even complicatedly as a historian, where -- where does context fit into the scheme that you’ve just described? The moment to moment to moment.

MJK: So, there’s a moment within that moment. Let’s say you’re in a -- a piece with -- a Nikolais piece where you happen to be still and 15 -- no, 9 other people (laughs), get it right – 9 other people are doing something else. You are holding an amount of time and space with your still body doing “nothing” but being there. And that’s essential because it’s part of the context. So you’re able, then, if you remain part of the context in a sense of stasis, you can move into motion very easily because you’re aware of everything. You’re aware of yourself, you’re aware of the context of where you are, you’re aware of the motional qualification that’s happening around you, and you’re able to almost simultaneously become part of it if -- in motion rather than in holding the space -- an understanding of where you are. That’s kinda out there, but it’s experiential. Basically, it’s experiential.

NS: It also reflects how you -- when you use language, and that’s -- that’s my big bugaboo -- has to do with translation. Which is it’s very hard -- I think you’ve succeeded quite well in the Embodied Performance. I’ve said this before that in -- in -- in an attempt to get to the -- to the right word. Because in point of fact, we -- what we’re doing as dancers is -- it’s not oxymoronic, but it’s -- it’s contradictory --

MJK: Yes.

NS: -- to put a -- to put language --

MJK: Language is too slow.

NS: -- in place of motion.

MJK: Yeah, language is too slow. It has to go through too many things -- too many synapses.

NS: And yet, it is also important to communicate it.

MJK: Right. And I think I learned that through teaching. I learned to understand what Nik and Murray both required of us in different ways. Murray required instantaneous understanding of what he just did, not what he said. Nik required that you be with his creative imagination in a way that was immediate and also very improvisational. So that you would try the things that he was imagining and he could then make choices. So it still required absolute presence to be able to suss out what he was trying to -- what’s he trying to get at? And you would try these things and do these things and try --

NS: Can you be specific or -- I know it’s hard to recollect and recall actual dialogue. But can you put word-- put words -- again, bugaboos on the words. But you’re -- if you’re in a rehearsal with Nik and he’s creating a piece, what’s he talking about to you? Or is he talking?

MJK: He is talking. He would talk and then watch, talk and then watch.

NS: So he’s talking. What is he saying at that point? What are some words -- is he throwing out there? Or is he mumbling to himself? Is he --

MJK: Oh, he would throw things -- I remember watching him work on -- in Aviary [1978]. There was a girl’s trio [00:20:00] and he was trying to get that staccato, quick kind of pecking, flitting, popping – very, very simple, quick and almost immediate reactive kind of, uh, motion out of it. And, he would try words; he would try words. “Oh, try pecking. Try pecking.” Or, uh, “Just tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, little, little, little, little.” You know, he would throw words out like that. I was not in that trio but I was sitting next to him and watching this and -- and how, you know, it wasn’t happening or, “Yeah, that, that, that, that. Do that.” (laughter) Or --

NS: Because that was the right peck.

MJK: That was the right idea. That was the right quality that he wanted. And then, he would organize it. “Oh, you up there, you over here, you down here. Try moving all of that at once this direction,” or -- or “Let it fold in.” Or -- or, you know, he would give simple directions but not tell you how to do it. And that -- that was the -- the key to working with Nik. You had to be willing to explore and figure out how to do it. So you used everything in your -- in the toolbox that he gave you in class. Now, how do you do it? How -- do you let go of time and be there? Or do you -- do you, um, really take the opportunity to fill out space to do what he needs to have happen? Or do you fill out space and then you -- it breaks down? Or do you disappear slowly behind a scrim or are you jumping out in a shadow off of a stool? And the shadow is jumping out of the proscenium? You know -- how do you make that work?

NS: As a dancer.

MJK: As a dancer. Because he’s trying to make it work. He wants this thing to happen and you then, you know, that’s your job.

NS: So can I jump ahead to --

MJK: Sure.

NS: -- this morning and say how -- because we just -- you showed two pieces of your choreography that you generously let people see. And we talked about it afterwards and talked about the choreographic process as well, and your threads, and the performance of those threads. How is your choreographic process now in working on the -- this particular showing -- these particular pieces -- what is it that you borrowed or took or rejected or enhanced from Nik? And let’s add Murray to the mix, too.

MJK: Sure. Well, out of necessity because I don’t have a theater to play with lights in and I don’t -- they were both solos that you saw this morning so the interaction was between dancer and self.

NS: And environment and space and time and --

MJK: -- and all of that, yeah.

NS: Yeah.

MJK: So that each -- each solo is very detailed but the detail came out of telling the story. In other words, having the -- the throughline whether it’s a literal story or not, but having the throughline not be broken. So there -- there’s a great deal of detail, great deal of detail that is qualified -- not just mechanical but very qualified spatially, in terms of weight and density, in terms of actually how physically it feels to, let’s say, open a part of the body or turn a leg in [00:25:00] or... It’s pretty embodied without being somatics -- somatically-centered. It’s not centered on having you, the audience, realize that the dancer is really in touch with their inner parts and circulation and breath which they are. But it’s in -- in service of a story. So, (pause) does that make sense?

NS: Well, sure. No, it makes sense. I’m -- I’m trying to -- I’m -- I’m centering or I’m asking the question of -- of Nikolais-trained dancers – and his legacy. So what is it in what you’ve just talked about that you inherited from Nik?

MJK: Detail. Detail. Murray, too. Murray’s choreography had a great deal of spatial flow and understanding of the workings of -- the kinetic workings of the body as a whole which was just wonderful. That was a physical experience that I had, but the -- the experience with Nik to me is that he would -- he would have an idea and he would create the gestalt of that idea on so many levels that even as I work with a single person on a bare solo, in a small space on top of the audience, to, God forbid classical music, the (pause) all of what I learned in Nik’s multimedia theater is compacted into the physical body. The embodiment of all of that it’s kind of -- it's compacted.

And I did it in these pieces particularly after a long hiatus, like a 35-year hiatus from dance altogether. But it was almost as if -- like I was saying earlier to you today -- I needed to make sure I understood how to communicate all of this stuff at once to dancers. So that when they performed it, they had the options that enhance one’s interpretation of choreography.

I think dancers are underestimated by many choreographers because the choreographers give them wonderful, huge physical movement to do. Even some, you know, social interaction, all this kind of stuff that can be very -- very intricate and wonderful. But when you see a masterful performer, you are taken within what it is they’re doing. And I don’t think it’s magic. I think it’s easily taught and easily understood when given the opportunity to do it.

So it’s been kind of an experiment for me. I mean Marguerite [Marguerite SanMillan, 1958- ]-- the second dance -- in the second dance you saw, she was a dancer, but she’s primarily from theater. So we -- we worked in ways that were very different than working with Yebel [Yebel Gallegos, 1985- ], who is an extraordinary dancer -- and for him, it was more like just how much further can we take this without losing the focus of the -- the choreography, the gestalt.

NS: Which is also what your focus is how far can I take this with him --

MJK: Yes, yes.

NS: -- without -- without spinning out of --

MJK: Right.

NS: -- beyond --

MJK: Right.

NS: -- out of the beyond. Yeah.

MJK: Yeah. Or having it become cliché somehow, or, how do you keep it so that it’s a living, breathing organism every time you do it? And, you know, every living, breathing organism is going to have to [00:30:00] step over a pebble every once in a while and how are they gonna do it this time? Or is that pebble there at all? You know? Or maybe --

NS: Or does that pebble become a freakin’ rock? (laughs)

MJK: Yeah, yeah. I -- and -- and I think that -- that holds the concentration of the dancer in way that is so much more internally fluid than saying, “You have to do this this way, “-- this that way. This the other way.” I mean, we know which parts are dealing with gravity, we know which parts are dealing with shape and -- and stuckness or fluidity. You know that. But the -- the dancer has the opportunity to choose and that’s what I learned from Nik.

NS: Choice.

MJK: Choice and make daggone good choices. Choice is really, really important and it has to be almost (pause) intuitive. It -- it needs to -- you need to learn to make choices on an intuitive level because you don’t have time --

NS: To think about it.

MJK: -- to consider. You don’t consider choices. They -- they present themselves and you either go with it or you go -- you know, you make a commitment and you go. And I don’t know. It’s -- it all seems kind of jabbery about it but -- but I think it’s an important thing for dancers to understand.

And that’s why I really wanted to write the book because I wanted to express my understanding of what it was to be experiencing their work and experiencing the philosophy rather than describing it. This is how it feels, this is how it functions in an embodied dancer. Rather than someone’s who’s up in their head trying to figure it out or someone who’s only physical. It’s a -- it’s a wholistic kind of view again.

NS: Which actually relates to the critic in Santa Cruz who is asking the question each time -- each -- at each moment of the dance. It’s like --

MJK: What’s happening?

NS: -- what’s happening?

MJK: Yeah.

NS: What’s happening? What’s happening? And then again, what’s happening? So that there’s a mobility. It requires -- it requires the dancer, the choreographer, the viewer --a mobility.

MJK: Well, it should actually invite the viewer to that mobility by being ultimately, physically, intuitively, God forbid, spiritually, but yes, present. Because that presence is the magnet that brings the audience to being present within the dance. That’s my -- my feeling. I mean, a lot of people think that’s probably too -- too much to think about, but -- I don’t think it is.

NS: I think what it requires of you and me is to be -- is -- is to be specific or concrete in the same way -- in -- in much the same way that you just described Nik’s process in Aviary. You know, that -- that -- because we’re using words, essentially.

MJK: Yeah. Yeah.

NS: I turn to your chapter on time. In which Nik says that time is relentless. But you then go on to talk about, “Each moment offers the opportunity to live simultaneously in past, present, and future.”

MJK: So… you… are experiencing who you are, which has taken a bit of time to develop as a person in your life; in your recognition of what’s around you; in your sensory awareness (pause) at the moment. And you’re willing to stay with it into the next moment [00:35:00] because it isn’t ever gonna stop. You don’t --

NS: It’s relentless.

MJK: You don’t turn off – you don’t turn off any of that. And you bring to it where you’ve been and who you are. And if you don’t bring yourself to it, then it’s kind of dry. It’s just (snaps) -- it’s like the sound (snaps) of that instead of the reverberations of that or the -- the, uh, I don’t know. Time’s pretty cool.

NS: When we were watching Yebel talk in the talkback afterwards and someone, I think, had been mentioning the humor and where that fit in, if it did. And his response was, “I don’t -- I -- I’ve thought about going -- leaning in,” I think was his term. “I’ve thought about leaning in but I’m not sure if I want to because –" I thought he was saying that he doesn’t want to give a roadmap, necessarily. He wants there to be this -- and it's not even a question of, um, teasing it -- of an audience. It’s that you don’t want to play it out or --

MJK: Yeah. Give them a little bit of leeway, you know?

NS: And -- and let an audience own it -- not me, necessarily. You know?

MJK: Yeah. He’s -- that’s the delight of working with a mature performer.

NS: Is what?

MJK: Him being able to comment on that.

NS: Was that in your experience, working with Nik and with Murray -- was there at any time that kind of dialogue between you and Nik or Murray? No?

MJK: No. Uh-uh. No, he -- he would hand over the responsibility to you. And if you really messed it up somehow, he would rechoreograph or whatever but he’d hand it -- he’d hand it to you -- to the dancer. He wouldn’t go through rehearsals and rehearsals and rehearsals of stuff. If you were creating it, you’d get the structure, you’d get the gestalt, you have the qualifications that you think you recognize within the structure that he has given you and then you -- you -- it’s like painting by numbers, you know? You fill that out until it all becomes alive together. And if you got stuck somewhere, he might in one of the times you showed it to him -- in the process, he would say, “Well, why don’t you do -- why don’t you just break out and run around that section a little?” or something like that, you know? He was not, however, hands-on in telling you how to perform every little thing.

NS: How is his different -- how is what you’ve described of Nik’s process... You know, he often is criticized for, you know, I don’t even want to use the term so I won’t. But people often make reference to him as a puppeteer. And he has even said, his first love in -- in the theater was as a puppeteer. And that, of course, is that these are inanimate objects that he’s using to create a narrative or a story or whatever it is that he’s doing as a puppeteer. But he’s not working with puppets; he’s working with people.

MJK: But even if you’re a puppeteer, the puppeteer can in a nuanced way allow the joints of the puppet to look like a human being.

NS: Oh, of course.

MJK: But (pause) apart from that his large group works were more mechanical in certain ways because he was moving and shifting groups and -- and props and -- and big things. But always within the piece, there would be a solo or a duet that then would kind of give you the seed of what the motivation of the whole [00:40:00] piece would be. And that’s where I learned from Nik in working with him on either solos or duets because he would give you great,great leeway to create the idea that he was proposing.

NS: If we were to expand that to say your relationship to Nik is such that he would give you things and you -- you’d run with it and you’d work on something and he’d say, “Keep that,” or, “Yes,” or, “Why don’t you move that -- that’s great. Now take it --” And he -- I -- I’m assuming that he replicated that process with almost everyone that he worked with. Is that that -- but did he ever find himself or were you ever part of a dynamic in which it didn’t work for him? (pause) And I mean, without naming names. I’m not talking about about the --

MJK: No, I’m trying to think. Because my experience was not over a huge length of time. Um, let me put it this way. He never required someone to learn a role that had been previously choreographed exactly as that person originally choreographed it. He would transfer the idea, the gestalt of that, onto the next person. And it would be theirs and it would be different. Always it would be different. And he was -- I thought it was because he was smart enough to know that if he really wanted the quality that that individual had to give to the piece, that it had to be altered to fit. And, um, you know, there was talk back -- there was always talk between people of different generations like, “You didn’t do it this -- why didn’t you learn it the way that, you know, somebody did it or… the other or the other or the other?” And it -- it wasn’t that you had a choice to do it that way. He would -- honestly, it was always, always new to me even when I was learning something from Gerald [Gerald Otte, 1945-] or -- or -- or for example, on a South American tour, we were doing Aviary and Jessica Sayre [date] had this amazing solo. She’s all arms and legs and flexible and she was on this stool pedestal thing where, you know, her -- it was all in slow motion. She was like this owl who extended and balanced and everything. And I had to learn all of her parts when she was ill during a tour, and I knew I could not do these pieces in that way. And I would learn it. And then I’d show it to Nik. And he would say, “Well, maybe do it this or that or...” you know, it -- it’s -- he was very generous that way. It didn’t -- everything did not have to be replicated. It wasn’t that solid. Whereas staging was pretty solid or groups moving in staging. If there were things that related to props, that stuff was solid. But you had to hold the quality of whatever it was that was the gestalt of the piece.

NS: Which actually relates really on a fundamental way to -- to Nik’s pedagogy.

MJK: Yes.

NS: I mean, you can have all the “technique,” but that if you don’t have an improvisational basis or a theoretical basis of what movement/motional choices you’re making, you’re not gonna be able to perform in a...

MJK: Yeah. Well. Okay, so you -- here you are, um, dancing on stools that are 14, 16 inches off the floor. And you have a partner on this stool that is rectangular and you’re doing all kinds of interesting, crazy shapes that have a lot to do with balancing and lifting and all of that [00:45:00] and oh my goodness: this theater has like a 10-degree rake. (pause) So you have to figure it out. It’s a different world.

NS: Well, it’s why he -- why the performance in -- in Tunisia was so successful, as well, outdoors. ’Cause you had to -- I mean, the universe is right there and yet, you have to create or -- you have to delineate boundaries, too. And how do you in -- in the face of boundlessness?

MJK: Right. You gotta stop somewhere. (laughter) You’re gonna -- yeah.

NS: Oh well, not according to the latest photographs from space.

MJK: Aren’t they wild? Oh they’re --

NS: Oh God.

MJK: -- they’re just so beautiful.

NS: Oh, it’s terrifying to me. (laughs)

MJK: Yeah. Oh, I don’t think they’re terrifying. I think they’re just gorgeous.

NS: Yeah, no, exactly.

MJK: Gorgeous.

NS: (pause) I want to go back to the past and the present and the future when you consider Nik as a choreographer and -- how he grew. Do you think... (long pause) I -- often wonder. I often wonder about Nik’s experience immediate-- during World War II and immediately thereafter. And that that had a whole heck of a lot to do with how he chose -- what he chose to do on stage.

MJK: Yeah, he wrote -- he wrote about that – I think. I don’t know if it was ever published but he told stories, too, about -- I don’t know if it was Dresden that -- just the ruins of bombed-out cities that he experienced, that he experienced just the display of the bombing, you know? The, -- the falling of the buildings. You know, walking through a street afterwards and seeing an old woman sitting on a stool and she had just one little chick left, you know? Gosh I -- I remember him telling these stories and -- and they would -- not very often, but he was definitely -had great impressions of the war. He had great -- they were -- they were impressed upon him I think in many ways. I think it came out in his music a lot. I th-- this is my opinion. I don’t know if he was -- if it was intentional, but there were often cataclysmic events in his pieces.

NS: I’ve often thought about Nik’s work in atomic terms. I mean the -- the successful ones and the non -- not-successful ones. I mean, I have -- I have the very distinct impression of both Tower [1968]and Tent [1968] as being very emblematic of his --

MJK: Yes.

NS: -- of his work. And -- and of course, he will -- I mean, everything that I’ve read from Nik is, “Oh, don’t be so concrete.” You know? You know? That I’m -- I’m in motion all the time. It’s not --

MJK: Yeah.

NS: -- it’s not ideas.

MJK: Yeah. It isn’t ideas but it is ideas. (laughs)

NS: But I think it’s ideas and I think his dismissal of some -- of “interpretation” is disingenuous. Because I think that it’s there. Let me as an audience member have it. It’s not that I’m denying the beauty of motion or the theatricality of light and stasis and time and sculpture and points in space. [00:50:00] I’m not -- I’m not denying that, you know?

MJK: No, I -- I hear you. It’s the contradiction of any kind of art, really. What’s the motivation? I mean, what -- is it -- is it just the times that we’re living in? Is it just representative of the impressions that you have on your emotional and, um... I don’t know. I think your soul is affected or at least you as a human being are affected by what you’ve lived through. And it changes how you see the world in a certain way. And it may not be intentional that you’re creating music that sounds like it’s a bombing of some place, but it may turn out that way. I don’t know. It’s -- people are very complex and I don’t think he had any, any sense that -- at least he never, ever taught that you were going to replicate something. He never told you what kind of idea that gestalt should be.

NS: Wait, say that again?

MJK: He never told you as a student what kind of gestalt you should make. He didn’t care as long as you were true. If you were true to that, that’s what he wanted. I think he liked a lot of stuff. He liked interesting things -- things that were interesting and different and magical and beautiful. He made a lot of beautiful dances.

NS: (sighs) And he also -- it’s that he was able to fashion them with -- with all of the tools that he had at his disposal.

MJK: Yeah. Really, he was a genius that way.

NS: Yeah.

MJK: And, you know, may we all be so talented to be able to create what we envision in our imagination somehow at some level.

NS: Let me ask you about that and another question I have often, which is when we consider a great artist, a great choreographer, that often, there -- there’s collaboration. Where Merce has John Cage and Rauschenberg and Graham has Noguchi and Stravinsky. And Balanchine has Robbins and Stravinsky or, you know, whomever. Um, and then there’s Tipton to put her into the mix.[4] And… Nik doesn’t.

MJK: No. He’s a polyglot. (laughs)

NS: What’s the -- what’s the effect, then? I mean, when you see several choreographers and, and say what’s the difference? And I’m not judging either -- anybody in -- in what the choreographic output is, but --

MJK: No. No, no, no. The difference -- I think it is different because you -- you -- you feel the signature of the person more clearly, I think. Who they are and what they’re capable of creating. And really what they’re interested in. It’s not what -- how good you are at what you’re doing. It’s what you’re interested in exploring.

And Nik was interested in a -- I think -- I have this feeling that when he went from Henry Street to The Space, he went from a small stage to a huge gymnasium with a huge, high ceiling and wide -- he could make it into this big theater. And everything changed. Everything got bigger, the colors were more vibrant -- well, [00:55:00] that’s technology, too. But the colors were more vibrant, the props were 10 feet tall -- There were scrolls that were halfway up to the ceiling.

I think it was very freeing for him to -- and it changed how he created. He -- he had so much more control of light to make a three-dimensional light mix that had a consistency to it that you could feel. And I think that that was a turning point in his -- his creative explorations. And they were explorations -- every one of those pieces. Do you remember Triad? [1976] The one with the mirrors --

NS: Yes.

MJK: -- that it had these triangular bent mirrors that could open up and dancers put body parts in front of the mirrors and they became Rorschachs and they did all kinds of different things. And scrolls and -- he just -- he was really freed, I think, in a way -- a spatial way.

NS: A spatial way. There. What’s interesting, too -- I mean, I can also put into the mix, into that particular environment is: one, it was also his world expanded at that point because he started touring the world. I mean literally, that it was no longer confined to the Lower East Side.

MJK: Right.

NS: That was -- that was -- that also happened almost simultaneously or -- or within --

MJK: Close.

NS: -- you know, close. Close.

MJK: Yeah, close.

NS: Um, that being one aspect of what’s happening for Nik at that point. The other thing that’s happening for Nik at that point is that he’s not alone in that space, either. When you think about --

MJK: No. There are many other creatives in that building.

NS: And I wonder what the effect was on him of, you know, up -- walking up the stairs and there’s Joe Chaikin’s Open Theater.[5] Or walking -- turning -- glancing out of the left, you know, and there’s -- I forget her name,[6] but she was flying in one of those nettings from the multigravitational so, you know?

MJK: The aero -- the aero -- aero dance thing, mm-hmm.

NS: Aero dancing. And that that -- that had to have had some influence on him.

MJK: Yeah, maybe. Maybe it did. I think it being -- just having that wonderful space and environment, it was key, really key to his ability to perform in opera houses all over the... It was a different scale -- a different scale on so many different levels. Because if you really -- a -- a popular, um, event happening in large cities, they usually put you in the largest venue. And he could meet that. He could meet that with the lighting. I mean, we traveled with a half-ton of equipment. We couldn’t do that now. Nobody could afford to do that now. The theaters that you go to have to be already equipped. And they would add to that some, probably, but it’s a different world.

NS: (laughs) I remember Tito [Alberto Del Saz, 1960- ] talking about when he brought a couple of Nik’s pieces to China. What specs they had to tra-- I mean, thank God the -- you know, there’s email because he couldn’t bring it all from here. They had to build it there. To a certain degree, they had to -- they -- they were successful to a certain degree, you know?

MJK: Yeah. Yeah.

NS: But yeah, I think that that was the explosion.

MJK: Yeah. It was really -- and he had a larger school that was an international school. People were coming -- began to come more than just the neighborhoods or Manhattan and Queens. I’m emblematic of that. I came from the Midwest, simply because I’d seen the work at the University of Michigan and taken one class with him. I was ready to be there as a full-time student. Which you had to be; there wasn’t any other option. [01:00:00] But I think that opened up -- also, it opened up... I don’t know. His -- the dancers were… different. He had not groomed them for a long period of time like the early days. And if he was lucky, he had interesting dancers who had different qualities. And he kind of made a choice, I think, at a certain time that he liked to have the little spitfire dancer, the tall guys, the long lithe dancers and he began to see those elements in his work. Which -- which I don’t think was quite as prevalent at Henry Street. I mean, he -- he had what was and it was a panoply of possibilities and the dancers were all different for sure. But his work began to have a palette -- a palette of dancers that --

NS: Then or --

MJK: No, I think more at The Space. Yeah. When it -- when dancers became a little bit more interchangeable, people came and left or had to be replaced, um, for whatever reasons. And --

NS: So then in essence, what you’re also saying is that the -- that the dancers enabled his choreographic output to be more, --

MJK: Repeatable?

NS: Well, or the largeness of it, the bigness of it. Which isn’t -- and I’m not making judgments about what was and what then became, and -- and what did. I think it’s --things were environmentally different is your point, too, and --

MJK: Really different.

NS: -- that therefore, the -- the artistic output is different.

MJK: Yeah. I -- I was in kind of an odd place because I was totally enthralled with dancing with Murray. I enjoyed every second of working in Murray’s company.

But I also really kept my eye on what was going on in Nik’s company whenever I could because that’s the reason I went to the studio in the first place.

Murray was a happy accident that happened to me and I was fortunate, so fortunate, to have been able to work with him. But it kind of primed me to look at Nik’s work differently after having really immersed myself in Murray’s physical sense of the big five, whatever it –- I read four, five -- whoever you are deciding what that is.[7] But, I just -- I loved watching Nik work and I watched a lot of Nik’s work. And also had the opportunity to do that crazy little, covering for someone who is sick and working on the boards and going in and doing part of a dance and then coming back and working on the light boards that I -- I -- I was forced in a way to see and understand what the whole of it was. And otherwise, I don’t think I could’ve figured out anything. I wouldn’t have been able to be very happy.

NS: Refresh my memory. Your teachers when you arrived at The Space were -- who was teaching?

MJK: Primarily Phyllis. Claudia. Beverly Blossom was there every once in a while -- Phyllis pulled the weight. She really pulled the weight. Sometimes, Michael Ballard [1942 – 1991]. Some of the Nikolais people who had been previous members. Lynn Levine taught but it was mostly Phyllis when I arrived there. Nik was on tour, Murray was on tour. Not until November when Murray came back from tour did either of them [01:05:00] appear that semester. So I had the whole beginnings from Phyllis and I think Carolyn came in and out, too. Carolyn came in –[8]

NS: I was going to say I think Carolyn was in there, too.

MJK: She came in and out, yes. She was not ensconced in Europe.

NS: She hadn’t been captured (laughs) by Europe at that point. So that in essence, you were getting -- the teaching was still the solid teaching from the get-go.

MJK: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Well, and Hanya [Hanya Holm, 1893-1992] was there. That was the other thing. Hanya was every Wednesday, so between Phyllis and Hanya, that’s a lot.

NS: That’s -- that’s like your core there where you’re going to get a real solid firmament.

MJK: Yeah, so that was -- (sighs). Wow. It was a -- a very fruitful time, I think, for everybody in a certain way. There was lots of change happening in lots of levels for many of the original dancers --

NS: I also think it’s -- that what’s key -- oh, I don’t know if it’s key, but what I think is important to note in your history is that like Nik’s journey from Henry Street to The Space that -- that you -- you have also had a -- a kind of journey that says, “I arrive in New York and -- and I dance, and then I leave and I still dance.”

MJK: And then I come back. (laughs)

NS: And then I come back because I mean there’s a generosity in leaving to be -- to be a teacher someplace -- the importance of being a teacher. The importance of taking pedagogical principles and applying them -- planting seeds to be poetic about it or something. It’s -- I think that’s -- that’s as much a gift that Nik gives to people.

MJK: Yeah. Well, it was good to come back because I had grown a lot. And to come back and dance for him, that was great.

NS: So he -- did he -- so he called you.

MJK: Yeah, he called us.

NS: The phone rings.

MJK: The phone rings, yeah. It’s -- he says something like, “Hi dolls, how’s it going out there?” or something like that. And -- and then he asked. You know, he said, “I really would like to have you two come back and, I’d like you to be featured artists. I could really use you being there,” or, “I’d really like to have you be there.” And we, of course, said, “Yes.” (laughs) Yeah. Having not known what had gone on and --

NS: And what was unsaid. He did not -- he did not talk about the --

MJK: Yeah. Yeah. I -- I don’t honestly -- the -- the whole union thing happened well after we left, but there was a changeover in the company at that time. And a -- many of the people who entered Nik’s company as we were going back had been my students at The Space when I was teaching at The Space. So I knew many of them as just their classroom teacher. But yeah, anyway, that -- that was -- that was good.

NS: That began another chapter for you.

MJK: Yeah, it certainly did. And then actually, when we left Nik in ’81, we went immediately to Angers[9] and taught in Angers.

NS: You, Ruth [Ruth Grauert, 1919-2020], and Robbie went to Angers to teach.

MJK: Yeah, yeah. So that was just, like, another sort of step away from that. And then after that, I went to the University of Minnesota and I was there teaching for [01:10:00] six years? Yeah, I think six years.

NS: And then, you -- according to your biography that you told me on our last session. But after Minnesota, you went -- you started to really explore other creative outlets besides dance.

MJK: Oh yeah. Well, I had children then. I --

NS: Which is a creative outlet, as well. (laughs)

MJK: Yes. Right. We had a -- a whole transformation into – into family life: marrying Jim and had three kids. I was not -- also, I was burned out in many ways. I’d had the divorce and I had a child as a single parent and then I married and we had family. But the -- the reality was that I didn’t want to have anything to do with dance for a while. I was really -- it was a lot --

NS: (dusts hands off)

MJK: -- and, yeah, exactly. So when my kids were old enough -- two? Three? To have a babysitter part of the time, I went to massage therapy school and I learned a meridian-based style of massage which was really interesting to me. So I sort of found myself in that world.

NS: I see a thread.

MJK: (laughs) Yeah, yeah. Then I became a mediator in --

NS: I see another thread there.

MJK: -- small claims court. And then I spent about seven years representing parents of challenged kids, kids with autism, special education children, I was the liaison between the parent organization of these really special needs kids and the school administration. So I was that person for about six years. And I didn’t -- I didn’t have the unbearable emotional toll that having a child like that places on a parent. And I could speak for them and -- and I got -- I was very happy to be in that sort of a mediation kind of place. I liked that a lot.

And then I capped it off when my youngest, who was a daughter, was a senior in high school, I -- I said okay to the PTA and I was PTA director of her high school for a year which was so much fun. I mean, that was great. But it was -- it was walking into a pretty dysfunctional situation where the -- they had not had a permanent principal for four years. They had had interim principals and there’s a real imbalance between the teachers and the parents and the sort of nonfunctional leadership. And Nik’s theories got me through that because I was able to perceive and see what was missing. The places where things were missing and the places where too much energy was being used. How can -- how can we -- how can I possibly help these parents communicate better with the teachers? So all of my PTA representatives -- I inhibited them by saying, “You may only ask questions. If you’re representing the PTA right now, I want you to ask questions. Don’t tell anybody anything and just see what answers you get.”

NS: I think you allude to that later in your book with curiosity. That that’s -- that’s sort of the guiding -- guide -- loads -- lone star -- lone --

MJK: Loadstar.

NS: Loadstone. Loadstar --

MJK: Loadstar. Load -- loadstar.

NS: -- is curiosity.

MJK: Yeah.

NS: Well, that does it, right?

MJK: Yeah. It does.

NS: And then -- wow. We should stop.

MJK: It’s time. You’re not gonna get to Vermont if you don’t stop.

END OF AUDIO FILE

[1] Alwin Nikolais Dance Theatre and Murray Louis Dance Company.

[2]Developed under the direction of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA, established in 1965), The Dance Touring Program was an important source of touring support for primarily modern dance companies in the ‘60s and ‘70s. By 1985 the NEA stopped its sponsorship of the DTP.

[3] Marcia Wardell Kelly, A Dancer’s Pocket Guide to Embodied Performance (Rhinebeck, N.Y.: Epigraph Books, 2016).

[4] Merce Cunningham, 1919-2009; John Cage, 1912-1992; Robert Rauschenberg, 1925-2008; Martha Graham, 1894-1991; Isamu Noguchi, 1904-1988; Igor Stravinsky, 1882-1971; George Balanchine, 1904-1983; Jerome Robbins, 1918-1998; Jennifer Tipton, 1937-.

[5] Founded by Joseph Chaikin [1935-2003] The Open Theater was an experimental theater group in New York City, active from 1963-1973. See: Joseph Chaikin, The Presence of the Actor, New York: Atheneum, 1972.

[6] Most likely either Stephanie Evanitsky or Diane Van Burg who formed The Multigravitational Aerodance Group in 1967. In 1971 the company was invited to join The Space for Innovative Development as artists in residence. For further information see Jayne C. Bernasconi and Nancy Smith, Aerial Dance (Champaign, Illinois: Human Kinetics, 2008).

[7]Kelly is referring to Nikolais’ stated “big four dance principles: space, time, shape, and motion. Murray Louis further clarifies Nik’s philosophy by writing that “this does not lessen the importance of such principles as mobility, dynamics, motor base, energy, motivation and so on, but allows one to focus on movement without any attached overlays, mannerisms, or attitudes.” Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis, The Nikolais/Louis Dance Technique (New York: Routledge, New York 2005), p.158.

[8] Phyllis Lamhut, 1933- ; Claudia Gitelman, 1936-2012; Beverly Schmidt Blossom, 1926-2014; Michael Ballard, 1942-1991; Carolyn Carlson, 1943-

[9] In 1978 the French Ministry of Culture invited Alwin Nikolais to form the new Centre nationale de la danse contemporaine (Cndc) in Angers, France to support the creation of contemporary choreography. Nikolais served as its first director from 1978 to 1981.