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Chicago Today

May 7, 1970

Ballet for all-in Moog mood
By Ann Barzel

THE NIKOLAIS Dance theater opened last night with a near sellout in the Harper theater, evidence that the special wizardry of Aiwin Nikolais is attracting a general public.

His art is theater for the unimaginative and for the imaginative. The stodgy man-in-the-seat is delighted by a stage full of light and color, a kaleidoscope of moving shapes sometimes real pretty, even exciting, often explicitly funny. A more fanciful viewer can read his, own meanings into the spectacles, sometimes where no meanings were intended.

For anybody, the Nikolais presentation is an eyeful, a theatrical experience in which several media are blended. Nikolais is a master of lights and of projections of designs. He creates his own sound on the Moog synthesizer. He also choreographs movements for his well trained dancers, in the interest of accuracy, dance takes a back seat to the accessory arts - not far back, but back.

THE PROGRAM in the Harper consists of "Divertissement" [a sampler of four parts from early works]; "Tower," and the first presentation in Chicago of "Echo." It will' be repeated nightly thru Sunday with an extra matinee on Sunday.

"Divertissement" started with a scene from "Imago," illustrating the Nikolais style in which the range of the dancers' limbs is extended by attaching props. A section of the 1953 "Masks, Props, and Mobiles" had three dancers - in sacks assuming shapes of chairs, statues, goblins, and blobs. Before the last episode, also from this work, Carolyn Carlson, one of the best-designed young ladies in the dance field, performed a solo from the lonely "Somniloquy." The finale was a huge cat's cradle of ribbons woven by the group.

'Tower" Is a modern illustration of the biblical tale, taken from Genesis. Babbling dancers build a tower, the silly people scurrying mindlessly in their funny world. It's fun while it lasts, but the humor turns to horror in the one second it takes for the people and world to come to an end in one blast.

IN "ECHO" the new work commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts, Nikolais frees his dancers of props. In skin-tight tights and leotards, stretched over their skin-and-bones well attuned bodies, they made shadows and silhouettes that echo their movements.

The silhouettes swell, to giant size or diminish fancifully, they are multiplied on the screens that are the back-drop. Designs projected on the dancers blend them into the background. The sound composed by Nikolais is still bleeps, whooshes, and thumps, but the blobs of previous projections are replaced by the sharp lines of stripes and angles.
"Echo" is another fascinating work by' a master of several media, and if light and color are more important than dance, it is good to note that what dance there is, is expert.