06/06/2025
Distinguished Professor Emeritus Fred Strickler, co-founder of UC Riverside’s Department of Dance, passed away on May 31, 2025. Born on August 5, 1943, in Mount Clemens, Michigan, Strickler studied modern dance as an undergraduate at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.
In 1967, he met the dance historian Christena Lindborg Schlundt, one of the first members of the UCR faculty, who offered Strickler a position teaching modern dance technique and choreography in what was then the Department of Physical Education. Strickler taught dance at UCR – including modern dance, tap dance, composition, and production – for the next forty years.
In 1972, Strickler collaborated with Schlundt to found the Program in Dance, which evolved into the present Department of Dance, and he played a key role in the development of its undergraduate curriculum and later served as a resource to students in the MFA in Experimental Choreography program. He served numerous times as the artistic director of UCR Is Dancing, the annual showcase of student choreography. In 1995, he was named the Distinguished Humanities Research Lecturer by UCR’s Center for Ideas and Society. He retired in 2007.
Over the course of his career, Strickler choreographed more than 130 dance works in multiple styles, which he presented at venues that ranged from high school auditoriums to the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian Institution, and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.
Coinciding with his start at UCR, Strickler studied with the modern dance artist Bella Lewitzky; he became a featured dancer and choreographer with the Lewitzky Dance Company until 1975. In 1974, he co-founded Eyes Wide Open Dance Theatre, a Los Angeles-based modern dance ensemble, which lasted until 1980.
In the 1970s, he began to experiment with tap dance, which he had initially studied as a child at the Jimmy Rawlins Studio in Columbus, Ohio. In 1979, he co-founded the Jazz Tap Ensemble, which toured the United States, Europe, and Asia. In 1984, the Jazz Tap Ensemble toured Southeast Asia as U.S. State Department cultural ambassadors. In subsequent years, he was a guest artist with the Southern California-based company Rhapsody in Taps. Strickler was a major figure in what is often considered the tap dance renaissance of the late twentieth century.
Strickler’s virtuosic tap dance artistry – distinguished by his extraordinary musicality and skillful exploration of the complex interactions of rhythm, sound, and movement – was acclaimed by audiences and critics alike. He performed often as a soloist, including his choreographic version of Morton Gould’s Tap Dance Concerto, which he premiered in 1983 with the composer conducting, and which he went on to perform with such orchestras as the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Pittsburgh Symphony, and the Long Beach Symphony, as well as at UCR. In 2001, he danced the Concerto at the Labor Day Celebration with the National Symphony Orchestra on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., for an audience of 70,000.
On television and in film, Strickler’s work was featured in the 1980 award-winning documentary Tapdancin’, by Christian Blackwood; in Jazz Tap Ensemble: USA, produced in 1983 for Channel Four at the Riverside Studios, London; in The Jazz Tap Ensemble with Honi Coles, which aired on KQED, San Francisco in November 1986; in the 1989 Gregory Hines PBS special Great Performances: Tap Dance in America; and in the 1999 award-winning film by Bridget Murnane, Four Dancers.
Before his death, Fred was preparing his archive with UCR Librarian Emerita Dr. Lizbeth Langston. When completed, the archive will be deposited at the Ohio State University.
Strickler’s legacy lives on in the department he helped co-found and in the generations of students he trained, many of whom are themselves now dancers, teachers, and choreographers.
