COMPANY HISTORY

The Erick Hawkins Dance Company, founded in 1951, has been touring the world since the 1960’s. With unwavering integrity and uncompromising working methods, Mr. Hawkins’ choreography was based on a collaboration of music, art and dance. His dances are performed to live music 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, pure and immediate.

Hawkins recognized the importance of basic premises in determining patterns of thought and action. Influenced by Eastern philosophical ideas, Hawkins’ new beliefs about movement, nature and man grew into premises that 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 the 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 Awards as “virtuosity without effort.”

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

Katherine Duke began studying with Erick Hawkins in 1983. She made her profession debut with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company in 1986 at Lincoln Center. Ms. Duke’s mercurial grace, purity of presence, and focused phrasing, as noted by Anna Kisselgoff of the New York Times, brought her critical acclaim. She was a teacher at the Erick Hawkins School and taught composition for Lucia Dlugoszewski. Ms. Duke performed as a principle dancer with the Hawkins Company until 1991 Jamake Highwater has written “There is little doubt that Katherine Duke represents the idealization of Hawkins’s four decades of creating dance.” In 1995, Ms. Duke returned to the Hawkins Company as a guest artist and teacher. At that time she assisted Dlugoszewski in setting Hawkins’ Journey of a Poet for Mikhail Baryshnikov. She served as rehearsal director to the Hawkins Company in 1999 and assistant to the choreographer in 2000. Ms. Duke became the artistic director of the Erick Hawkins Dance Foundation in 2001.

As artistic director, Ms. Duke is committed to Hawkins tradition of performing only to live music. She produced a spectacular concert of the Erick Hawkins Dance Company at Florence Gould Hall in New York honoring long time collaborator Ralph Dorazio in 2003. The Company performed in Broadway Cares’ remember project 2001-2004. She created a lecture demonstration for the Company called The Alive Dimension aimed at kids following Harvard’s Graduate School format. The Company also performed at Woodstock’s historic Byrdcliffe Theatre and University Settlement’s Theater in Beacon, New York.  In 2005 she produced why is the cherry red, a New York season at Lincoln Center which included seven performances showcasing nine of Hawkins’ classic pieces and premiering Fountain in the Middle Of the Room and Elusive Pierce. The Company also premiered Sheen of Water Dreamed at Wooster Arts Space in New York and performed at the Manhattan School of Music in 2005 and 2006 with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company’s music director David Taylor.

In an effort to preserve and perpetuate the musical, compositional, and choreographic legacies of both Dlugoszewski and Hawkins, Ms. Duke continuously facilitates the reconstruction of classic repertory for universities and professional companies. Ms. Duke set Hawkins’ Early Floating on Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project in 2002. She has coordinated the production of Hawkins’ works at the University of Richmond, Virginia, Sharing the Legacy Projects at Hunter College, New York, the Governor’s School for the Arts in Norfolk, Virginia, Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio, and Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas as well as for Wellspring/Cori Terry and Dancers of Kalamazoo, Michigan, Todd Rosenlieb and Dancers of Norfolk, Virginia, and Mid American Dance Company of St. Louis, Missouri.

Her passion to share the beauty of the technique and unique approach to choreography is realized through intensives, workshops, and commissions of new work for students and companies around the world. In 2006, the Company was invited to create Mountain with Shadow, a new work and original musical score performed by students of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The fall of 2006 brought the Company to Amsterdam to teach and set a new piece on the modern dance students of de Theaterschool in Holland. The summer intensive of 2007 was held in Santa Barbara, California. Ms. Duke created a student work, Merely Arrangements of Parts with an original music score. She also set excerpts of Hawkins’ Greek Dreams, with Flute for Santa Barbara’s Motion Dance Theatre. This intensive culminated with a performance joining Motion Dance Theatre where she accompanied the student work as well as performed the solo Fountain in the Middle of the Room at Santa Barbara’s Center Stage Theater. Two students from Holland apprenticed this fall with the Company and performed in a New York performance featuring the sculpture of Dorazio. The Company just returned from teaching its third intensive at the College of Marin, California and teaching at Texas State University, Northwest Vista College, and Texas A&M University while setting a new work, Soliloquy of Ashes, on the Shay Ishii Dance Company of Austin, Texas.