Daniel Nagrin

Daniel Nagrin was born in New York City on May 22, 1917, and became a major American male soloist who joined modern-dance character study, Broadway theatricality, social observation, improvisation, and teaching across a career of more than five decades. His training crossed several strands of American modern dance: he worked with Bill Matons and Anna Sokolow's Experimental Dance Unit, and studied with Martha Graham, Hanya Holm, Helen Tamiris, Elizabeth Anderson-Ivantzova, and Edward Caton. That unusually broad base helped him combine modern-dance weight and dramatic purpose with ballet preparation and theatrical craft.

Nagrin began performing professionally around 1940 and soon worked closely with Helen Tamiris, whom he married. In August 1942 they appeared together at Jacob's Pillow in *My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free*, a duet from *Liberty Song*. His early repertory developed alongside socially engaged American modern dance; his 1944 *Landscape with Three Figures: 1859* was centered on abolitionist John Brown.

From the mid-1940s through the 1950s, Nagrin moved between concert dance, Broadway, film, and national touring. His stage credits included *Up in Central Park*, *Annie Get Your Gun*, *Inside U.S.A.*, *Touch and Go*, and *Plain and Fancy*. He created durable solos including *Strange Hero*, *Man of Action*, and *Dance in the Sun*; filmmaker Shirley Clarke adapted the latter into a short dance film. His work in *Plain and Fancy* earned the 1955 Donaldson Award for best male dancer.

Nagrin and Helen Tamiris co-directed the Tamiris-Nagrin Dance Company during the 1960s. After Tamiris died in 1966, he continued as a solo artist and expanded his experiments with improvisation. In the early 1970s he organized the Workgroup, a collective-oriented company that treated improvisation as both performance practice and a means of investigating group action. His later solo repertory included politically and psychologically charged works such as *The Peloponnesian War*, *The Fall*, and *Jacaranda*.

Teaching and writing became increasingly important to Nagrin's later career. Arizona State University appointed him professor in 1982; he taught there through 1992 and remained professor emeritus. His books addressed longevity, performance presence, improvisation, acting for dancers, and choreography through the "specific image." Nagrin died in Tempe, Arizona, on December 29, 2008, leaving extensive archival holdings at the Library of Congress and New York Public Library and a foundation devoted to preserving and teaching his work.