"Erick Hawkins: The Dancer and The Dance" by George Franklin
This is a chapter from George Franklin’s memoir, Portraits from Life: A Poet’s Mentors. This excerpt has been condensed and edited for online publication.
It seems to me that individuals, virtually all individuals, wish in some way to be acknowledged, which, broken down to its component parts, means that they wish to be seen rather than to be looked at, and to be listened to rather than merely heard. It seems to me that the world would be a more graceful place were one, as an individual, to attempt to remind oneself to really see people rather than simply to look at them, were one to attempt to remind oneself simply to listen to people rather than merely to hear them—were one to treat, in other words, others as sovereign individuals, as persons, rather than as personified objects to be either ignored or manipulated.
My first experience of being deeply moved by a work of art occurred when I was ten or eleven years old. I watched a televised version of Death of a Salesman featuring truly inspired, for me definitive and unforgettable, performances by Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock. As I watched, I felt myself being overcome by a kind of feeling I had never before experienced. I felt, on the one hand, devastated and overwhelmed, heartbroken by what I was seeing and hearing, but on the other hand quietly elated by it. One line in the play stood out for me above all others. It seemed to my still childish mind to articulate the essence of what the play was conveying. Willy Loman’s wife says, referring to her husband: “Attention must be paid.” I won’t belabor the fact that this line is about truly acknowledging another, about being fully aware, about being conscious and being one with Consciousness as love, as the intelligence of the heart. It is also, of course, about listening.
When the play was over I felt exhausted, but the feeling that it evoked in me remained. Indeed, it has never left me. Perhaps in a way it articulated my own desperate need at the time to be acknowledged. So many children, lacking parents who are able to provide such acknowledgment, feel the need of it. It seems to me that the capacity of children to be deeply moved by mature works of art is vastly underappreciated.
Years later, I saw what is now a legendary production of O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten, starring Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst, which I found overwhelming in much the same way I had found Death of a Salesman overwhelming as a child. Robards and Dewhurst entirely inhabited their harrowing roles. The performances of actors and dancers can themselves be acts of genius, and the performances of Cobb and Dunnok, of Robards and Dewhurst, were such acts.
Over and over again, even in mediocre plays, I have seen actors thoroughly invest themselves in their roles. I have literally only once had the experience of an actor mailing in a performance. I find the dedication of actors, their determination under all circumstances, to give it their all, both gallant and touching. There is something, too, about actors being physically before us in plays that adds a dimension not found in movies. Somehow, the bodily presence of actors whom we are engaged in scrutinizing, hopefully in truly seeing, entails a kind of vulnerability that we all implicitly share.
Performances of plays are, of course, ephemeral. They vanish as soon as they are over. Even legendary productions of plays live on only in the memories of those who have seen them, until they too vanish. There is something about actors’ wholehearted commitment to that which is not destined to last that is also a commitment to abiding, at least for awhile, in the present. Similarly, perhaps, all of our lives are in some sense performances that are not destined to last, and our investment of ourselves in them, even as we realize their transience—in some sense even perhaps because we recognize that transience—likewise involves a kind of gallantry.
Watching dramatic performances, unlike reading poems or novels, involves not only same-hearted listening, but same-hearted seeing. That seeing is largely focused upon actors who have the capacity to draw the audience into the play. They help us, in the words of the blinded Gloucester in King Lear, to “see feelingly,” to become same-hearted seers. Attending to live performances of plays thus involves, ideally, not only same-hearted listening but also same-hearted seeing
Watching plays or dance performances not only exposes us to the genius, or lack of it, of the playwright or choreographer, but also, again, to that of the actors or dancers who are charged with realizing their visions. The kind of vulnerability of the actor’s physical presence before an audience is greatly magnified in the case of dancers, who usually have no lines to speak, and who for the most part, in modern dance, have no roles behind which to hide. They are simply, bodily present before an audience, in a position of radical vulnerability that involves not only gallantry but also a kind of bravery.
Erick Hawkins, photograph by Barbara Morgan
Both gallantry and bravery were exhibited by one of my exemplary mentors, the one with whom I felt perhaps the strongest bond, the great dancer and choreographer Erick Hawkins. I was privileged to encounter Erick because my father had met and become close friends with him during a summer session at Bennington College. Both were in their mid-thirties. Erick was in the early stages of his career as a choreographer. Pictures taken of his dance performances during that time reveal an almost preternaturally beautiful young man. A number of years later, my father became the chairman of the board of his dance company for almost thirty years. My father had no real interest in dance but accepted his role out of affection and loyalty to Erick.
A brilliant student, Erick was granted a full scholarship to Harvard, where he majored in classics. Classical themes, motifs, and myths are frequently evoked in Erick’s dances. In striving to articulate, through dance, his vision of totality, Erick developed a deep interest in Eastern spirituality and aesthetics. A notoriously difficult book, F. S. C. Northrop’s The Meeting of East and West, which in part compares Western and Eastern aesthetics, became for Erick a kind of bible, one which he suggested that I and others read, but which was too dense and intricate for me to grasp.
Erick engaged in a lively epistolary conversation with Northrop. Two other major influences on his thinking were D. T. Suzuki, an early and brilliant exponent of Zen Buddhism, and the Catholic philosopher Jaques Maritain. The eclecticism of these influences suggests something of the intensity of Erick’s intellectual and spiritual search for an articulation of his vision of totality.
Erick developed an equally deep and crucial interest in kinesiology, in the emerging science of the study of the movement of the human body. These four strings or strands—the Native American, the classical, as well as the study of Eastern spirituality and of kinesiology—along with his far-ranging reading and his own unique and unknowable experience of life, were woven together seamlessly in Erick’s work as a choreographer.
For Erick dance itself was a spiritual practice. He wrote:
No relationship is ever separated from any other relationship… How we dance springs from our total philosophical view of our human life, and, insofar as our philosophical idea has partial gaps in it, our dance can be stiffened and set, can become limited or partially functioning. If the dance is to be of excellence and vitality, and if it is to be a metaphor of our existence, then we have to consider what good existence is, or even what existence is, period. So my conclusion is if you want to arrive at quality, at real intensity and real excitement in the dance, you have to look at real quality in existence.
A vision of totality is paramount here, as is an imaginative/intellectual/spiritual resistance to the fixed, the set, and the categorical, and an openness to the dynamic, to the fluid, to the freely flowing. But there is in addition a concern with ontology, with being itself, from which arises the question of what good being is, an attempt to look at real quality in existence.
F. S. C. Northrop was one of the first thinkers to engage in exploration of what are now called qualia, which pertain to the felt nature of our subjective, sensory intuitions of phenomena like the color blue, or of physical pain. Why we experience such subjective states as we do is now called by philosophers of science and others the hard problem of consciousness, because no current materialistic theory of consciousness can account for them.
Erick’s concern with quality, mediated through Northrop, was remarkably prescient. But Erick also thought of quality in a more general sense, involving the old, largely Greek philosophical question of what a good life is, and how to lead such a life. Ultimately, of course, Erick was engaged throughout his whole life in exploring how “real quality in existence” might best be expressed, incarnated, in dance, in the movement of the human body itself.
Erick’s life, in his single-minded, unwavering pursuit of necessarily provisional answers to these questions—answers expressed in dance--was stripped of all that was inessential. He lived a life of almost monastic poverty.
Martha Graham and Erick Hawkins in Appalachian Spring, photograph by Arnold Eagle
Dance is, among other things, the articulation of space by the human body. For Erick, it was essential that this space remain open and uncluttered, that it include even its correlative, emptiness. His focus was on movements that were proper and natural to the body as an instrument of discovery, not movements forced upon it from without. There was for Erick an essential connection between a clear sense of space and a vital, viable, clear sense of place—the place that was for the poet Charles Olson the polis undistorted by the ratiocination and the disfiguring force of a capitalism grounded in abstraction, a force opposed to the value of the concrete particularity of the world and direct - even fundamentally tactile - contact with it.
Erick, likewise, sought a space and a culture through which the body could move with the intrinsic dignity proper to it, and decried any penchant toward coercion and control that would force the body to assume, and often to hold onto, unnatural, fixed positions, the analogue of a Western culture wedded to the fixed and the categorical.
Erick’s esthetic, like that of Taoism, with which he was familiar, was not one of grimly holding on but of joyfully releasing and letting go. Much of Western culture seemed to him to be governed by precisely the kind of coercive force mandated from outside or above that he condemned, by an attitude prizing a kind of tortured virtuosity, which, in the case of dance, regarded the body as an obstacle to be overcome, to be broken into shape, and eventually, when thoroughly broken by age and debility, to be discarded.
For many years Erick was not only the principal but the sole male dancer in Martha Graham’s company. During much of that time they were married. Graham’s dances were often rooted in classical myth. The extent to which Erick, with his training in the classics, may have influenced her work is seldom if ever discussed. At some point, however, he felt the need to strike out on his own as a choreographer.
The bodies of Graham’s dancers, like those trained in classical ballet, were constantly forced into painful and unnatural positions, which frequently resulted in chronic injuries. Erick came to feel that there there was something deeply flawed and perverse about any aesthetic that brutalized and damaged the bodies of dancers.
Graham is rightfully regarded and lauded as a revolutionary, as the most influential exemplar of an emergent modern dance, and is rightly praised, too, for developing a specifically American dance vocabulary in contradistinction to classical ballet. Ironically, however, with respect to the stress it put on her dancers’ bodies, Graham’s choreography was not a departure from the European tradition, but an exacerbation of it. Notoriously, she once forced a dancer to hold a position that resulted in a broken back. She herself cultivated the autocratic allure of great European choreographers for whom the body was an instrument not a vehicle, an instrument of flesh and bone strangely unconnected to the whole human person.
For too many of her dancers, like their counterparts in classical ballet, the body and mind were locked in a kind of perpetual struggle that causes constant suffering—a suffering that can always be justified and dismissed in the name of art, and which too often became a perverted version of a sacrificial myth. In the case of classical dance, despite its own indispensable beauty and sublimity, such has become a necessary creed. Graham’s aesthetic too, created, if not the ravishing illusion of grace afforded by classical ballet, then a kind of high drama, an agonistic spectacle, often expressing intense struggle, a drama dependent to an uncomfortable degree on the more mundane reality of a sanctioned cruelty.
Erick sought an aesthetic responsive to the American ideal of freedom, an esthetic unfolding, again, without obstruction from within, not enforced from without, that honored the dancer as much as the dance. A clear, open sense of space oriented to discovery rather than definition, and a clear sense of place privileging the concrete and particular over the artificial and the abstract, were necessary for the health of the human body, a whole body undivided either from the mind or from the heart, which is naturally, for man and woman, the measure of all things. For Erik, the alignment of spirit, breath, and body was a prerequisite for a clear, open relationship of the whole person, alert to discovery, to the exploration and understanding of places and spaces both inner and outer. It is entirely apt and unsurprising that one of Erick’s first articulations of his dance aesthetic is a brief, typically laconic, manifesto called The Body is a Clear Place. He deemed it essential that man and woman accept, not recoil, from full embodiment, an acceptance that also involves the embrace of a world that is in no way alien to the body as a vehicle of the spirit.
One of the first pieces of Erick’s I saw at the Joyce Theater was Plains Daybreak, which remains for me, if I had to choose, Erick’s quintessential work. Its venue is the American West, which was Erick’s place of origin. Its time is, of course, dawn, or rather the moment just before dawn. The curtain opens to reveal a number of figures wearing glorious animal masks created by Erick’s longtime collaborator, the sculptor Ralph Dorazio. It is not quite true to say of this opening tableau that it reveals figures wearing masks; rather it reveals and somehow realizes the emergence into being of these totemic animals themselves. Together, a tremendous sense of presence, and of making present, accrue to and emanate from these figures. At the same time, the masks they wear—as Erick was fully aware of—are reminiscent of the origins of Greek theater in which mute, masked dancers, later to evolve into the choruses of Greek tragedy, ecstatically moved to sounds that seemed to spring from the original source of music itself.
Increasingly, gradually, light dawns on the plains, moving subtly through a variegated spectrum. As the first notes, or rather sounds, of a shimmering score begin to emerge, the animals, slowly at first, and then more vigorously, begin to move. Their movements become freer, more ecstatic, the more that light floods the stage, and the more prominent the radiant strains of the score become. The effect is somewhat like the crescendo of Ravel’s Bolero, a crescendo in which not only music but the totemic animals and the increasing light that floods the stage participate. We are witnessing a tremendous dynamism arising from stillness as the subtlest traces of pre-dawn light burst into the clearness of Blake’s “Glad Day.” We are watching, it seems, the dancing of the beginning of the world. Olson quite beautifully referred to himself as “an archeologist of morning.” In this dance, Erick’s dancers too, become, if not archeologists of morning, then ecstatic embodiments of it, reveling in the light of an always new day.
We remember that for Erick,
If the dance is to be of excellence and vitality, and if it is to be a metaphor of our existence, then we have to consider what good existence is, or even what existence is, period. So my conclusion is if you want to arrive at quality, at real intensity and real excitement in the dance, you have to look at real quality in existence.
American modern-dance choreographer Erick Hawkins, photograph by Jack Mitchell
Even during the period in which he was garnering respectful notices, Erick’s company, and my father, seemed always to be fighting a rear-guard battle, always to be on the brink of insolvency. This situation was exacerbated by certain of Erick’s core principles, principles that were not negotiable. He insisted that his company dance only to live music, never to recordings, which added considerable expense to an already overly strained budget. Erick viewed dance as a collaborative process, congruent with a “concept of totality” in which the bounds of the circumscribed ego were transcended. He commissioned scores by a number of composers, among whom were Virgil Thomson, Alan Hovhaness, Wallingford Riegger, Ross Lee Finney, Lou Harrison, Michio Mamiya, Lucia Dlugoszewski, and Ge Gan-Ru, and sets from Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Isamu Noguchi, and from his long-time collaborator Ralph Dorazio, who, as I previously mentioned, fashioned the ravishing animal masks worn by Erick’s dancers in Plains Daybreak.
Theatre, dance, and music are perhaps the most inherently collaborative of art forms, whereas poetry as it has evolved in the West is perhaps the least. Although he was less engaged with poetry than with music and with the visual arts, Erick viewed dance a “metaphor for our existence.” Moreover, though in different ways, rhythm is an essential aspect not only of music and of poetry, but of dance as well. Erick would have known, too, that in the work of the early Greek tragedians music, poetry, and dance all played an essential role.
Erick composed a number of works that entailed discursive or narrative elements which reflected Erick’s broad interest in myth and ritual, and specifically, again, in classical, American Indian, and Japanese myth. Erick was a close friend of Joseph Campbell, whom he met as a young man and was a particular admirer of his four part magnum opus The Masks of God. One of Hawkins’ late works in the mythic mode, The Killer of Enemies: The Divine Hero seems, in particular, an homage to Campbell and to his first characteristic book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
The majority of Erick’s mature works, however, were plotless. These works were often described by critics as “abstract,” a term that usefully suggests Erick’s affinity with abstract expressionist painters, but which he disliked. Dance for him was perhaps the least abstract, the most embodied of art forms.
As I continued to make my yearly pilgrimages to the Joyce Theater, I found myself, over the years, most drawn to these plotless works. They seemed to me to represent Erick’s aesthetic in its purest, most distilled form. To borrow terms from Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, I think that Erick’s instinct as an artist, though it included the Dionysian, the erotic, and the ecstatic, particularly in late works in the mythic mode like God, the Reveler, was essentially Apollonian and contemplative, more concerned with the beautiful than with the sublime. His plotless dances in particular seemed, like Japanese rock gardens, to operate on the principle that less is more.
Among such works of Erick’s that I remember most vividly recall are Black Lake, Angels of the Inmost Heaven, Classic Kite Tails, New Moon, and Summer Clouds People, which was dedicated to my parents. Alas, the specifics of these dances have faded from my memory. What remains is a sense of the numinous aura with which they seemed invested.
This essay is a chapter from George Franklin’s recently published book Portraits From Life: A Poet’s Mentors. He studied at Harvard with Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. He is the author of two books of poetry, The Fall of Miss Alaska and Contour with Shadow, as well as of a work of criticism, Some Segments of A River: on Poetry, Mysticism, and the Imagination.
