Over his long career, Daniel Nagrin played many roles, on and off stage. A dancer, choreographer, writer, and teacher, he achieved his greatest prominence as a solo performer, choreographing twenty-eight solos for himself between 1942 and 1982. The characters he created were usually contemporary men, often city-dwellers, and he set a number of his pieces to jazz music at a time when that was unusual in modern dance. In 1997, he wrote that “whatever I do—as a dancer—I do not try to look like something, I am someone doing something. I never do abstract dance” (1997: xv).