Lucinda Childs

In Street Dance (1964), Childs created her stage on a street in Manhattan where her audience was the occupants of a nearby loft. The six-minute dance was based on its surroundings and the performers blended in with what was occurring on the street. Every so often they would point out different details about the appearance of the buildings and the assorted window displays. Although the audience was not completely able to see what exactly the performers were pointing to, they could hear the explanation from a nearby audio tape. Childs discusses the performance stating that “the result was that the spectator was called upon to envision information that existed beyond the range of actual perception...".[7] Childs approached this piece from all different angles exploring dialect, architecture, and staging. The piece asked its viewers to look beyond what was in front of them and instead use different senses to visualize the unseen. This dance has only been performed three times, the most recent being the 2013 Philadelphia revival.[8] In the revival, the dancers used stop-watches for timing purposes.[8]

This was the first piece Childs had performed on a traditional stage in collaboration with Philip Glass and Robert Wilson. Up until this, her other works had all been performed in ‘alternative spaces’ such as churches, museums, galleries, and sidewalks.[1] This was also the first piece that Childs had worked with a composer on. Einstein on the Beach (1976) was a five-hour-long production, normally beginning at six-thirty in the evening and finishing around eleven-thirty, and did not tell a story.[9] The story was meant to be up to the audience to decide and that became an essential part of the piece itself. Childs solo in Act 1 scene i was structurally linked to the three visual and musical motifs of the opera. Childs also embodied many different characters within this solo through her gestures.[10] The choreography for this piece came about through structured improvisation guided by Robert Wilson.[9] Einstein on the Beach (1976) was a transition for Childs and a springboard into her most well-known piece, Dance (1979).

In her collaboration with Philip Glass and Sol LeWitt, Dance (1979), the minimalist quality of her choreography is evident. In this hour-long piece, the dancers move across the stage in pairs repeating the same balletic, geometric movements for 19 minutes and 55 seconds. Then the sequence shifts to a soloist who again, repeats the same combination of movements for 17 minutes.[11] Each couple and soloist moves along the stage in a grid-like pattern. A projection of a filmed version of Dance (1979) allows the audience to view the piece from multiple angles at once, adding to the sense of a grid and geometric, abstract patterns.[12]

Dance (1979) was composed of three ensemble sections containing eight dancer or four couples, then there were two soloist sections.[12] Childs first took the composition Glass had made and analyzed how the music was constructed and designed her own structure of movement to interact with it. Childs choreographed this piece to come together with the music at points, and to counter it at others. The two structures were similar but not a true reflection.[1]

Childs had the couples on stage during this piece as she feels the couples heighten the spatial relations between the dancers and the audience.[12] Having two dancers on stage versus one opens up and charges the space with energy.[12] The dancers were also accompanied by a film projected on the screen in front of the dancers. The dancers were visible from behind the screen, dancing in sync with the dancers in the film. The film aspect of this collaboration came from Sol LeWiit. In the original staging, the filmed dancers were the same as on stage.[12] In the 2014 remount of Dance (1979), the dancers portrayed in the film are the original dancers, while the live performers have changed. LeWitt filmed the original dancers from various angles. Close-up shots, long shots, and overhead shots were used to create the abstract, almost ghost-like projection.[1] The most frequent way to combine the dancers on stage to those in the film was a horizontal split-level, so the couples on stage were dancing along below the film. For the solo sections, a vertical split was used to show the front and back of the dancer at the same time.[1] Childs describes the use of the projection as the dancers becoming the decor, the scenic element, instead of using a piece of abstract art which was the original suggestion before LeWitt came up with the idea to pair the dancers with a film.[12]

Childs’ latest work was composed in two parts, composed by David Lang and danced by Wendy Whelan. The cellist, Maya Beiser, sits on stage playing Lang’s music while Whelan dances. The second part of THE DAY (2019), was “The World to Come.” This section of THE DAY (2019) was about the idea of life after death as perceived by the Jewish religion. The piece was started around September 11, 2001, which later informed parts of the piece.[13] Spoken word about the loss experienced at that time overlays the music. The messages were alphabetically arranged in the piece. The piece in its entirety is 30 minutes long with text coming in every six seconds.[13]

Childs began choreography in the second part as it was more abstract. Each structure in the first part, with the text, took on a different meaning depending on the props used and Childs was able to drift the structures in and out of relating directly with the text or not.[14] There were a lot of props in the first half, and it was all mainly performed through improvisation.[14] While not set with specific movements, the first part of THE DAY (2019) was set in the way of prop movement. Childs and Whelan explored how to move each prop and let that be the focus of how the rest of the movements should flow, letting the material be similar but a little different every night. The focus of props in this piece goes back to Childs’ first interest in creating movement by manipulating objects.[10]