MURRAY LOUIS (1926–2016)
Jack Anderson reports in the New York Times that the dancer and choreographer Murray Louis has died. The founder of the Nikolais/Louis Foundation for Dance, along with the choreographer Alwin Nikolais with whom he was an artistic collaborator and companion for over forty years, Louis was known for his nimble movement style and incorporation of comedy into his work. One of his best-known works was Junk Dances, 1964, in which he and Phyllis Lamhut played a husband and wife who live in a trashed alley.
Born Murray Louis Fuchs in 1926 in Brooklyn, he was placed in an orphanage by his father during the Depression and graduated from Samuel Tilden High School in 1943. During World War II he enlisted with the Office of Naval Intelligence in San Francisco, where he also settled after his discharge in 1946. There, he studied with the major modern choreographer Anna Halprin. Halprin encouraged him to study with the German choreographer Hanya Holm at Colorado College, and it was there that he met his future collaborator Alwin Nikolais. Nikolais headed the dance program at the Henry Street Settlement Playhouse on the Lower East Side and Louis danced in his productions while studying speech and theater at New York University. In 1953, he established his own dance company.
Throughout his life Louis staged works for the Royal Danish Ballet, the Hamburg Ballet, the Scottish Ballet, the Limón Dance Company, and the Batsheva Dance Company. In 1975 and 1978, Rudolf Nureyev was a guest artist with the Louis company, and Louis choreographed the “Vivace,” solo for him. In 1987, the pair were the subject of a PBS documentary, “Nik and Murray,” as part of the “American Masters” series. They merged their separate dance troupes in 1989, dubbing the new company Murray Louis and Nikolais Dance. Louis was also a writer and published two collections of essays, Inside Dance (1980) and On Dance_ (1992). Louis was a recipient of the Dance Magazine Award, two Guggenheim fellowships, and grants from the Rockefeller, Mellon, and Ford foundations in addition to being a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French government.
