The Erick Hawkins Dance Company, founded in 1951, has been touring the world since the 1960’s. With unwavering integrity and uncompromising working methods, Hawkins’ choreography was based on a collaboration of music, art and dance. His dances are performed to live music often composed especially for each piece along with commissioned sets by artists and sculptors. Known for a fluid, effortless style of movement, each dance is energetic yet poetic, serene and harmonious. The Company continues today to develop dances based on Hawkins pioneering movement theory, which harmonizes body, mind, and spirit.

Hawkins technique emerged from an intense examination of the principles of dance. Hawkins felt the whole approach to the principles underlying Western dance were based on erroneous concepts pertaining to how one perceives the body and its relationship to the world. Insights into Zen philosophy and the essence of Haiku poetry caused Hawkins to begin to experiment with the principle of immediacy in dance, exploring movement for the sake of beautiful movement, implicit and pure. 

Hawkins recognized the importance of these basic premises in determining patterns of thought and action. Influenced by Eastern philosophical ideas, Hawkins’ new beliefs about movement, nature and man guided his search for new ways to train the body. He sought a “Normative Theory” where normative meant the best standard one can set up through intelligence and perception. Synthesizing the Eastern thought of a potentially harmonious relationship of man to nature and the value of Western scientific thought in relation to art, Hawkins felt that the quality of dance must be effortless in order to achieve a oneness of body and soul. 

Hawkins’ revolutionary “free flow” technique emphasizes awareness of weight, placement, impulse, effortless flow, and alternative possibilities of movement dynamics. Because the technique releases tension in the body, not only is more energy available to develop strength and movement flexibility, but also intellectually it frees one to think about what one is doing. Erick Hawkins understood beauty.  It is the concept that underlies his technique and choreography described by Charles Reinhart at the 1988 Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement as “virtuosity without effort.&rdquo