The great magician of 20th-century dance. created shape-shifting, otherworldly visual wonders through original experiments with bodies, space, light and sound.

In the April 1968 issue of Dance Magazine, we took a deep dive into the work of Alwin Nikolais.

Alwin Nikolais was the magician of dance, the forerunner of now wildly popular companies like Pilobolus and Momix and a pioneer in multimedia effects.

A complete man of the theater, Mr. Nikolais was at various times called a new P. T. Barnum, a choreographic Wizard of Oz.

Alwin Nikolais, who devised his own dazzling form of multi-media dance, was honored last evening in a memorial program at the Sylvia and Danny Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College.

ON the stage, floating in a puddle of changing lights, the figures move. They are human and yet not exactly human.

As an internationally known choreographer and modern-dance pioneer, Alwin Nikolais has received the Kennedy Center Honors, as well as medals from more than one Government.

AS A BOY GROWING UP IN a Brooklyn orphanage during the Depression, Murray Louis dreamed of becoming a doctor or a chemist; he craved certainty.

The camera has been recording dance and choreography, some of it custom-made for the screen, since the earliest cinematic days of Georges Méliès.

ALWIN NIKOLAIS'S dance company, absent for three years from New York, opened last night at the Joyce Theater, 19th Street and Eighth Avenue, with a bag of splendid tricks.

ALWIN NIKOLAIS is some kind of magician. He makes the theater into a palace of wonders and turns his audience into children staring, wide‐eyed and aston ished at his Aladdin's cave of jewels and baubles.

Alwin Nikolais's latest theater piece “Scenario”. It is another abstract adventure into the never never land of Mr. Nikolais's particular and potent brand of theatrical magic.

“I'm a compulsive choreographer,” he says, but he might also be described as a compulsive world traveler.

Murray Loui's new works his dance company presented in New York this season would have to be called among the most inimitable in the dance world today.

Murray Louis had had an old leg injury checked by his orthopedist earlier that day and all was well. “Just look at those knees, they're the most beautiful knees I've ever seen,” Mr. Louis said.

MURRAY LOUIS is a choreographer who can be uneven, but certainly this time around, as demonstrated by his opening last night at the City Center, he has come up with two winners as premieres.