Dance Magazine makes its 1995 awards

Dance Magazine, April, 1995 by Joseph H. Mazo

New York City - Susan Marshall, Fayard and Harold Nicholas, and Carla Maxwell will receive the 1995 Dance Magazine Awards, which will be presented on April 17 at the Asia Society in Manhattan.

This year's award recipients suggest the diversity and energy of American forms of dance. Marshall, a young, individualistic choreographer, has developed her own vocabulary and style in order to present works dealing with human interaction and interdependence. The Nicholas Brothers brought their acrobatic, elegant style of tap dancing, an art derived from an American vernacular tradition, to Broadway and Hollywood musicals. Maxwell, as artistic director of Limon Dance Company, has helped maintain an important strain in American modern dance.

The current Dance Magazine Awards, first presented in 1954, were instituted to honor "significant contributions to dance during distinguished careers." Dance Magazine's editors and correspondents throughout the world submit nominations; and this year's recipients were chosen from among seventy-nine nominees by a panel chaired by Clive Barnes and including Lynn Garafola, John Gruen, Doris Hering, Joseph H. Mazo, Richard Philp, and Tobi Tobias.

FAYARD AND HAROLD NICHOLAS

Fayard and Harold Nicholas brought their flashy, airborne style of acrobatic tap to Hollywood musicals of the 1930s and 1940s, to the Broadway stage, and to theaters in the United States of America and Europe. Their style depended on elegant, musical tapping, and on making difficult acrobatic maneuvers, such as their trademark splits, look easy.

The brothers grew up in Philadelphia, where their parents played in the pit band at the Standard Theater. The youngsters saw all the acts that came through, and soon they began to dance. Although they started performing before 1932, their careers really began when they appeared at Harlem's famous Cotton Club that year; Fayard was fourteen years old at the time, and Harold was eight. The same year they made their film debuts, appearing with Eubie Blake and his band in Pie, Pie Blackbird, a Vitaphone short subject.

In 1936 they danced in The Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway, and made their London debuts in Lew Leslie's Blackbirds. The following year they returned to Broadway, dancing in Babes in Arms, a musical choreographed by George Balanchine. Although they have continued to appear onstage both individually and as a team, the brothers are best known for their films, which include The Big Broadcast of 1936; The Great American Broadcast (1941); Stormy Weather (1943); and The Pirate (1948).

Many movie musicals of the 1930s and 1940s were basically excuses for stringing together a selection of numbers performed by gifted popular entertainers; the Nicholas Brothers' film performances helped further to develop and to preserve a form of dancing that grew out of a vernacular tradition and was amplified and refined in vaudeville and variety theaters. Like Fred Astaire and Charles "Honi" Coles, Fayard and Harold Nicholas enriched and polished a specifically American dance style and transformed it into theatrical art.

SUSAN MARSHALL

Susan Marshall is an individualist in the celebrated tradition of American modern dance. She studied in her native Pennsylvania (she was born in Hershey), with various teachers in New York, and for two years at the Juilliard School. But she has said that she "began choreographing from the very beginning." Marshall knew what she wanted to do. She formed her own company in 1982 and began to develop a distinctive dance vocabulary that transforms gesture and pedestrian movement into an intense and often athletic style of dancing.

In the thirteen years since founding her company, Marshall has become an important figure in the contemporary return to narrative in dance. Although she avoids traditional dramatic structure, preferring to suggest a situation than to present a story line, several writers have likened her to a playwright. Marshall makes dances that reflect contemporary concerns, such as the desperate need to establish human contact in a seemingly uncaring society. "My works," she has said, "chronicle a series of interior states."

Marshall is engaged by formal values and her dances are neatly and logically crafted, but her movement always serves as a metaphor for some specific form of human interaction, and her dances are notable for their emotional impact. Each of her pieces has grown from the desire to explore a particular set of emotional circumstances.

Although she has received outside commissions, Marshall usually works with her own company. Together, she and her dancers have developed what is, in effect, a choreographic form of chamber theater.

CARLA MAXWELL

When Jose Limon died in 1972, he had not assigned anyone to take charge of his company and his will made no clear provision for the preservation of his dances. "The climate in the dance community," Carla Maxwell said in a speech of 1992, "was such that no one believed that a company, and in particular a modern company, could continue after the death of its founder." Yet it was decided to try to maintain the company, which embodied the work and the theories of Limon and of his teachers, Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman.