He choreographed dances. He composed electronic scores for them. He designed dazzling scenic effects and flooded bodies with ever-changing patterns of light, making it hard to tell dancers from objects and objects from dancers. Everything in his productions was apt to be in a state of perpetual metamorphosis.

From the 1950's until his death in 1993, Nikolais was a one-man multimedia wizard.

A well-chosen sample of his wizardry is on view through Sunday at the Joyce Theater (175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea), a tribute to the Nikolais Dance Theater presented by the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company of Salt Lake City.

Joan Woodbury and Shirley Ririe, the Utah troupe's directors, worked with Nikolais on many occasions. Their program was selected and artistically supervised by Murray Louis, Nikolais's longtime collaborator, and Alberto del Saz, who danced with the Nikolais company for 20 years.

It is a nice coincidence that Halloween comes during the Nikolais engagement. Just as Halloween celebrations can be occasions for magic acts and masquerades, so Nikolais's productions are theatrical tricks and treats in which wondrous shapes go bump in the night.

Yet some of Halloween's now genial witches and goblins can trace their origins to dark legends. Nikolais's productions also occasionally hint at dark forces in the personality and in the environment. The dances at the Joyce, choreographed from 1953 to 1987, show many facets of Nikolais's creativity.

In the finale from "Liturgies" (1983), 10 people with linked arms seem a single quivering organism, then split apart and recombine in unpredictable formations. Dancers in the "Lythic" episode of "Prism" (1956) wear stiff, tubular costumes and hop like animated pottery statues. Juan Carlos Claudio and Brandin Scott Steffensen are totally encased in stretchable fabrics in "Noumenon Mobilus" (1953), and the choreography makes their bodies bulge and flatten and expand and contract.

"Crucible" (1985) is unusually elaborate. You soon realize that a reflecting surface accounts for many of its visual effects, but you still gasp at their audacity. Isolated limbs come into view, shrinking and growing larger at every moment. Shapes keep being turned upside down and right-side up in one kaleidoscopic pattern after another.

The dance delights the eyes, its shapes becoming ever more recognizably human, making it possible for the mind to interpret the choreography as depicting an evolutionary process. In "Tensile Involvement" (1955), the way bodies became entangled in elastic ribbons suggests the webs of emotional and societal relationships in which we are all snared.

Two works deal directly with human predicaments. People wearing white street clothes in "Blank on Blank" (1987) often appear to be in distress, their bodies and presumably their feelings freezing into rigidity.

"Mechanical Organ" (1980), a suite of dances that has some athletic masculine movement and unduly repetitive ensembles, is most interesting for two choreographic portraits.

In "Doll With a Broken Head," Melissa McDonald rolls and flops her head, her body parts looking disconnected. This "doll" may well have been a woman whose personality had come apart. "Two Not Yet Together" features Ai Fujii and Mr. Steffensen playing people sitting on separate benches, longing to draw near but hesitant to do so, until they at last gently touch in a shy and sweet courtship.

The magic of these productions can delight theatergoers of all ages. Lovers of Harry Potter's wizardry might well be enchanted by that of Alwin Nikolais.

Source: NY Times