Alwin in Wonderland

As vaudeville shows go, it might have been conjured up by Ed Sullivan on an LSD binge. Right there onstage in living, quivering color, a formation of UFOs performed an aerial ballet. A chap in fluorescent lemon leotards wrestled with a space-age cobweb. Next came a drill team of Martian types outfitted with glowing lampshades, then seven creatures in baggy sacks who squiggled like giant amoebas in heat--all to the otherworldly twaaang, ratatatat, whizzz and kapow! of electronic music. It was called Vaudeville of the Elements, Choreographer Alwin Nikolais' latest excursion into the twilight zones of modern dance.

Nikolais offers no explanations for what he calls his "esthetic Rorschach." He prefers instead that each viewer see what he will see. More than dance, it is an ingenious melding of motion (often frenetic), shape (usually grotesque), color (always striking), light (constantly changing) and sound (super-stereophonic) into new and fresh dimensions that bedazzle and often trick the eye. In Vaudeville, for example, a trio of dancers in hooped robes froze into off-center angles that looked gravitationally impossible, then somehow contorted their bodies to look like snails, then toadstools. By the projection of silhouettes on a backdrop, a slip of a girl was transformed into a creature of menace, revealing refinements of line unnoticed in the round. In the final act, the ten-member company, chattering like chimps, cavorted about the stage with sections of aluminum tubing, which they suddenly fashioned into a 16-ft.-high Tower of Babel with flags emblazoned IBM, A.M.A. and CBS. The results were at once fast, funny and evocative glimpses of man as both the victor and the victim of his environment.

Out of This World. Long regarded as a pioneer in modern dance, Nikolais has had to blaze his trails in the relative wilderness of Manhattan's Lower East Side, where even the off-off-Broadwayites rarely penetrate. Vaudeville was staged last week in the troupe's permanent home, a small (348 seats) theater nestled between a drugstore and a Jewish bakery and operated by the Henry Street Settlement, an institution primarily devoted to neighborhood social work. Despite this isolation, Nikolais has built a big following that now affords him the luxury of a 21-week season and an increasing number of performances on tour, on TV, and at such uptown palaces as the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center.

Nikolais, a mild-mannered ex-pianist, studied dance with Martha Graham and Hanya Holm before forming his own company in 1956. Now 54, he no longer dances, but concentrates on developing a theater of the "total happening," in which "man is taken out of this world and put into the universe." From that vista, the view is sometimes self-conscious and distorted, but the message comes through. Says Nikolais: "We've got to make our peace today with a lot more things than our fellow man."

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