Erick Hawkins

Frederick "Erick" Hawkins was born on April 23, 1909, in Trinidad, Colorado, and died on November 23, 1994, at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. He pursued classical studies at Harvard University, where he majored in Greek civilization and graduated in 1932 as a member of the Class of 1930. A performance by German dancers Harald Kreutzberg and Yvonne Georgi prompted him to travel to Austria to train with Kreutzberg. He subsequently studied at the School of American Ballet and went on to dance with George Balanchine's American Ballet.

In 1937, Hawkins created his first choreographic work, Show Piece, performed by Ballet Caravan at Bennington College in Vermont, with music by Robert McBride. The following year he became the first man to dance with Martha Graham's company, and in 1939 he formally joined her troupe as a male lead. That same year he appeared on Broadway in the musical Miss Pocahontas and in The Devil and Daniel Webster. Among the Graham works in which he danced a leading role was Appalachian Spring in 1944. He and Graham married in 1948.

Hawkins departed Graham's company in 1951 to establish his own troupe, and he and Graham divorced in 1954. Also in 1951, he began a creative partnership with experimental composer Lucia Dlugoszewski, whom he married in 1962. They remained together until his death.

Following his departure from the Graham Company, Hawkins moved away from dance rooted in psychological realism, sociopolitical themes, and narrative, developing instead a practice informed by ritual, mysticism, and the kinesthetic responses of dancers. Influences on this direction included Native American dance rituals and folklore, Japanese aesthetics and Zen philosophy, and theatrical and philosophical traditions from East Asia and ancient Greece. He also pursued an approach to dance technique grounded in kinesiology and anatomical study, advocating somatic practices and a sensory awareness he described as a "thinkfeel" relationship between the body and its movement. Where Graham technique emphasized contraction and defined positions, Hawkins favored muscular release and fluid movement.

Hawkins was committed to performing with live music and toured with the Hawkins Theatre Orchestra, an ensemble of seven or more instrumentalists and a conductor. Composers with whom he collaborated included Dlugoszewski, Henry Cowell, David Diamond, Ross Lee Finney, Lou Harrison, Alan Hovhaness, Wallingford Riegger, Toru Takemitsu, and Virgil Thomson. His visual art collaborators included Isamu Noguchi, Ralph Dorazio, Barbara Morgan, Helen Frankenthaler, and Robert Motherwell.

Among the honors Hawkins received were a Guggenheim Fellowship in Choreography in 1977 and the Scripps Award at the American Dance Festival in 1988. On October 14, 1994, one month before his death, President Bill Clinton presented him with the National Medal of Arts. He was survived by his wife, Dlugoszewski, and his sister, Murial Wright Davis. Following his death, Dlugoszewski served as artistic director of the Erick Hawkins Dance Company until her own death in 2000, after which Katherine Duke was appointed to that role in 2001.