Oriente Occidente closes this year with a tribute to Lucinda Childs, the queen of American minimalist dance. Together with artists such as Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Childs grew up in that artistic movement, born and developed in New York between the 60s and 70s, known as “post-modern dance”. She followed the lessons of Hanya Holm, Helen Tamiris, Mia Slavenska and then attended Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied with Bestie Schönberg and Merce Cunningham. It was in the latter’s New York studio that she met Yvonne Rainer, a former dancer with the Judson Group. Around the composition classes held by Robert Dunn at the Cunningham Studio, a group of young avant-garde dancers and choreographers had formed in those early sixties, whose experimental venue, frequented by painters, musicians, writers and various artists, was the Judson Dance Theatre. Childs joined in ’63. In that context, dance was investigated according to new points of view: the subject and content of the scenic action were extrapolated, movement was studied in itself as the primary material of art, no longer necessarily linked to virtuosity and spectacular effects. Ordinary actions such as running or walking acquired interest as the vocabulary of a dance that – writes the American critic Sally Banes – was considered such no longer for its content but for the “context” in which it was shown. Objects taken from everyday life became part of the compositions and non-canonical spaces such as lofts, art galleries, streets or churches became possible places of representation. Beyond the peculiar technical mastery, everyone could participate in the performances, according to a “democratic” attitude of art in line with the politics of those years. Childs’ first solo creations followed the aesthetics of the Judson Dance Theatre: just think of the pieces “Pastime” (’63), “Carnation” (’64) “Geranium” (’65) “Museum Piece” (’65) or the extraordinary “Street Dance”, created for a composition class of Dunn in ’64. The relationship with the Judson ended in ’66 with “Nine Evenings: Theatre and Engineering”, an event in which many artists from the Judson and some engineers from the “Bell Telephone Laboratories” participated.
Already in ’68 Childs had begun to speak of “minimalism”, a meaning that would be associated more and more often with the work of the Company. From the re-editions of “Untitled Trio” to “Calico Mingling” (’73), from “Congeries on Edges for 20 Obliques” (’75) to “Redial Courses” (’76) from “Plaza” to “Interior Drama” (’77) Childs experiments with this line, perfectly brought to completion in ’79 with the creation of “Dance”, music by Philip Glass, film by Sol Lewitt. In her previous works Childs did not use any musical accompaniment, however the dance followed constructive procedures similar to the structural processes of the musical minimalism of artists such as Glass and Reich, defining itself through infinite minimal variations of starting choreographic numbers. Since the end of the ’70s, Childs, in line with a multidisciplinary idea of creation, has collaborated more and more often with artists of different backgrounds, signing complex large-scale productions. Fundamental in those years was her meeting with Bob Wilson, with whom she collaborated in 1976 for “Einstein on the Beach”, participating as a choreographer and performer in the creation. Philip Glass signed the music. Through Wilson, Childs returned to the theatrical stage space and experimented with a particular choreographic temporality and spatiality, in which movement expanded to its extreme possibilities. Since its foundation, the Lucinda Childs Dance Company, which has more than twenty-five repertoire works to its credit, has been hosted by the major European and American Festivals. Among the most recent works: “Relative Calm” (’81), “Portraits in Reflection” (’86), “Calyx” (’87), “Mayday” (’89). In 1990, “Dance” was restaged for the IV International Dance Biennial in Lyon. Childs performed four pieces in Rovereto: “Relative Calm”, “Field Dance II”, “Rhythm Plus” on the 14th; “Available Light”, “Dance I” and again “Rhythm Plus” on the 15th.
In “Relative Calm” the pure abstraction of the artist’s dance is sublimated in a dilated and hypnotic temporality that harks back to the aesthetics of Bob Wilson, here the author of the sets and lights. “Available Light” is one of the choreographer’s great productions. Staged in 1983 on commission from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, “Available Light” was born in collaboration with John Adams, composer of the San Francisco Symphony, with the fashion designer Ronaldus Shamask for the costumes, with Beverly Emmons for the lights and with the architect Frank Gehry. It was the latter who created the original scenographic layout playing on the relationship between an elevated platform and the space below. “Dance I” re-proposes a section of Childs’s famous minimalist masterpiece created in 1979. “Field Dance II”, in its national premiere in Rovereto, is a choreography recreated in 1984 by Childs on the occasion of the restaging of “Einstein on the Beach” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “Rhythm Plus” is a world premiere creation, set to music by György Lieti and Luc Ferrari.
