Walter Nicks

Walter Nicks was born on the twentieth of October 1925 at Pittsburgh, the son of an Black-Pittsburgh Pullman-Porter-household of the inter-war period. The family moved to Manhattan in 1930 and Nicks was raised at the West Indian Harlem of the 1930s.

He was placed at the Harlem Public Schools and at the Wadleigh High School for Girls at Manhattan, where he was admitted to the boys’ branch as one of the principal Black-Harlem male dance students.

He took the formal modernist-dance training at the Katherine Dunham (placed in this archive) Manhattan studio from 1944 to 1948 — among the principal Katherine Dunham post-war Manhattan students of the period.

He was hired in 1947 by the Katherine Dunham Dance Company for the principal European tour of the company from 1947 to 1951 — and was the principal Dunham male dancer at the European programmes at Paris, London, Berlin, Stockholm, and the principal Italian and Spanish cities of the post-war period.

He took further training at the Manhattan Karel Shook studio from 1951 to 1955 and at the New York City Ballet School from 1953 to 1955 — the principal Black-American post-war modernist-dance training of the period.

He was the principal dance teacher at the Katherine Dunham School of Dance and Theatre at Manhattan from 1948 to 1953 and at the Karel Shook studio from 1953 to 1958 — the principal post-war Manhattan racially-integrated modernist-dance teacher of the period.

He taught from 1958 to 1972 at the Paris-based Ecole de Danse Walter Nicks — the principal European Black-American modernist-dance training school of the post-war period.

He founded in 1972 the Walter Nicks Dance Foundation at Manhattan — the principal post-war Black-American modernist-dance training-and-touring foundation of the closing years of the twentieth century. He directed the Walter Nicks Dance Foundation for the following thirty-five years through to the closing months of his life.

He choreographed across the post-Paris career over a hundred concert-dance works for the principal Black-American concert-dance companies of the closing years of the twentieth century — predominantly for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Company at Denver, the Boston Black Dance, and the principal post-1965 Manhattan modernist-dance companies of the period.

He was the principal teacher of the Walter Nicks-method of jazz-and-modernist-dance technique — a system of post-Dunham-and-post-Horton choreographic-and-pedagogical synthesis that integrated the Africanist-and-Caribbean rhythmic vocabulary with the European modernist-dance technique of the closing years of the post-war period. The Walter Nicks-method has been taught at over fifty post-war American and European modernist-dance training schools.

He died at Manhattan on the twenty-fourth of February 2007 of complications of pulmonary disease, at eighty-one.

He is honored here as the principal Black-American post-war dance pedagogue.