ERICK HAWKINS 1909-1994
PIONEER OF MODERN DANCE
Erick Hawkins was a true dance radical.
He received the President’s Medal for the Arts
at the White House on October 14, 1994, in
President Clinton’s words: “For his boldness
and talent he commands a legendary place
in the American Modern Dance heritage...
truly a pioneer.” He was still working when
he died in 1994. Born in Trinidad, Colorado,
April 23, 1909 he experienced the spiritual
border where the Plains Indians met the
Pueblo Indians. He entered Harvard at 15, in
1924, earning a degree in Greek civilization.
He began studying dance with German
expressionist Harald Kreutzberg and then
enrolled at George Balanchine’s School
of American Ballet in 1934. He danced
in Balanchine’s Serenade and was the first
American student to teach at the school.
In 1936 Hawkins choreographed his first
work Showpiece for Lincoln Kirsten’s Ballet
Caravan, now the New York City Ballet, in
which his aesthetic of a non-abstract poetic
“...received the
President’s Medal
for the Arts at the
White House ”
idiom was already evident. Ballet Caravan
debuted at Bennington College in 1936
with the modern dance company of Martha
Graham. Hawkins became the first male
dancer to join Graham’s troupe in 1938. For
Graham he created unique male roles in many
of her dances including American Document
(1938), Every Soul Is a Circus (1939), Letter
to the World (1940), El Penitente (1940),
Deaths and Entrances (1943), Appalachian
Spring (1944), Cave of the Heart (1946),
Dark Meadow (1946), and Night Journey
(1947) generating a new passionate image of
masculinity in modern American dance and a
compelling physicality of style in partnering
for the Graham repertory. His Greek
experience also deeply influenced Graham’s
explorations into classic myth.
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