Nikolais Laughs at Choreographic Labels

Alwin Nikolais didn’t have to wait 75 years to become a feisty disabuser of isms . But now that he has collected one of the Kennedy Center Honors, the umpteenth award in his long career as a choreographic innovator, he laughingly goes right on repudiating all the labels stuck on him.

Nikolais, whose company performs at Royce Hall, UCLA today through Saturday, doesn’t really dispute the tag that several dance critics have fixed to his brand of abstraction--that of illusionist.

“But isn’t art, by its very nature, illusion?,” asks the wispy, white-haired father of multimedia, as he looks out at the smoggy haze of Beverly Hills from his hotel suite.

“The minute we try to spell out a category, we destroy the creative Rorschach in the viewer’s eye. What ideally happens in my dance theater, or in any arts endeavor, is an intermingling between the artist and the viewer. A kind of love affair.”

Like George Balanchine, with whom Nikolais was going to collaborate had he not died, Nikolais believes in abstraction as an end in itself. He focuses on motion, not emotion. His works celebrate the art of trompe l’oeil by way of motion, sound and light. They need not suggest anything “but the value and intelligence of the thing itself,” he says.

“Look at music, for example,” says the one-time pianist who played for silent movies in his hometown of Southington, Conn. “Chopin called one of his preludes ‘Raindrop’ and Beethoven thought up ‘Moonlight’ as a subtitle for a sonata. But you can be sure that these pieces stimulate each listener’s own fantasies. We don’t need programs to have rich, imaginative experiences.”

Still, Nikolais concedes that some of his works carry deliberate metaphors. The 1978 “Gallery,” for instance, suggests the prewar German Expressionism of Kurt Jooss and its macabre atmosphere of mini-robots acting out the power struggles of a corrupt society. The only item on the Royce Hall bills that comes close to having a message, however, is “Blank on Blank.”

The title is a pun based on the French word for white, which is blanc. And Nikolais chuckles as he admits to consciously doing a work about “nebbishes: people who can’t make commitments, people without vitality, nonentities.

“If you remove light, color and sound--which is what I’ve done here--you have nothing. To those who harangue me for my extravagant use of light, color and sound, I give what they clamor for. White on white. Nothing with nothing.”

What launched him on the idea of total theater with an anti-narrative track back in the ‘50s was his reaction to the then obligatory Freudianism that fired the collective imagination of other leading choreographers--especially Martha Graham and Antony Tudor. But Nikolais wasn’t having any.

He admits to always being fascinated with body movement--not the possible content a Tudor might read into it, but the visual experience of it. In the process of inventing his total theater, he resorted to painting and camouflaging the human form, going so far as to dehumanize his dancers.

Excerpts from his breakthrough “Kaleidoscope,” with its “painted” dancers interdigitating with discs and poles, appear on the Friday UCLA agenda--”as a reminder of something relatively old,” he says, and as an example of those early explorations.

But apart from rejecting narrative content, Nikolais also resists defining sexual identities.

“People are not just the sum of their genders,” says the originator of unisex, who costumes his male and female dancers as lookalikes. “If we’re so hepped on sex and can only recognize each other when we’re in heat, then we surely can’t see each other as people. I guess that’s a good enough reason for being anti-Freudian. Besides, dance-watching can be very confusing to someone who just sees T&A.;

“Art is an intuitive, interior process,” Nikolais says. “It’s always a surprise to me. I don’t want to mess around and formalize the thought. I simply have a compulsion toward it.

“Give me an Egyptian chastity belt and an old washboard and I’ll make something of it. I have no choice.”