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 current, born and developed in New York between the 1960s and 1970s, known as 'post-modern dance'. She took classes with 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 1960s, whose experimental venue, frequented by painters, musicians, writers and various artists, was the Judson Dance Theatre. Childs joined it in '63. In that sphere, dance was investigated according to new points of view: having extrapolated the subject and content of stage action, 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 no longer considered such 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 representations, according to a 'democratic' attitude of art in line with the politics of those years.
Childs' first solo creations followed the Judson Dance Theatre's aesthetics: suffice it to mention the pieces 'Pastime' ('63), 'Carnation' ('64) 'Geranium' ('65) 'Museum Piece' ('65) or the extraordinary 'Street Dance', created for a composition class by Dunn in '64. The relationship with Judson ended in '66 with 'Nine Evenings: Theatre and Engineering', an event attended by many Judson artists and some engineers from the 'Bell Telephone Laboratories'.
Already in '68 Childs had begun to speak of "minimalism", a meaning that would be increasingly applied to the Company's work. 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 experimented with this line, which was perfectly brought to completion in '79 with the creation of "Dance", music by Philip Glass, film by Sol Lewitt. In earlier works Childs did not use any musical accompaniment, yet the dance followed constructive processes similar to the structural processes of the musical minimalism of artists such as Glass and Reich, defining itself by endless minimal variations of choreographic starting numbers. Since the end of the 1970s, Childs, in line with a multidisciplinary idea of creation, has increasingly collaborated with artists from different backgrounds, creating complex productions on a large scale.
Crucial in those years was her meeting with Bob Wilson, with whom she collaborated in '76 for 'Einstein on the Beach', participating as choreographer and performer in the creation. Philip Glass signed the music. Through Wilson, Childs returns to the theatrical stage space and experiments with a particular choreographic temporality and spatiality, in which movement expands to its extreme possibilities.
From its foundation to the present day, the Lucinda Childs Dance Company, which has more than twenty-five repertory works to its credit, has been hosted by major European and American festivals.
Among the most recent works: 'Relative Calm' ('81), 'Portraits in Reflection' ('86), 'Calyx' ('87), 'Mayday' ('89). In '90, 'Dance' was remounted for the 4th International Dance Biennial in Lyon.
Childs presented 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 into a dilated and hypnotic temporality that harks back to the aesthetics of Bob Wilson, here the creator of scenery and lighting. '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 created in collaboration with John Adams, composer of the San Francisco Symphony, with fashion designer Ronaldus Shamask for the costumes, with Beverly Emmons for the lighting and with architect Frank Gehry. It was the latter who created the original set design based on the relationship between a raised platform and the space below. "Dance I" reproposes a section of Childs' famous minimalist masterpiece created in '79. "Field Dance II", in Rovereto in prim
