Choreographer Lucinda Childs’ Dance met with boos and walkouts when the Walker and Northrop copresented the piece in Minneapolis in 1981 for the New Dance USA Festival. It returns to the Walker 30 years later (April 7-9) as an acclaimed revival—a radical combining of choreography, music, and film that has over the decades attained a unique neoclassical grandeur. A landmark collaboration between Childs, composer Philip Glass (performing April 6 at the Dakota Jazz Club and Restaurant), and visual artist Sol LeWitt—who created a larger-than-life film version of the piece as its décor—Dance “brought together three individuals who since the ’60s have been working with similar modular structures in their separate disciplines,” wrote critic Ann-Sargent Wooster after its 1979 premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
In this wide-ranging interview, Childs talks about working with LeWitt (whose work is currently on view in the Friedman gallery exhibition Sol LeWitt: 2D+3D), the renewed acclaim for Dance, and her work in Europe over the past ten years.
Julie Caniglia
How did the collaboration with Sol LeWitt and Philip Glass for Dance come about?
Lucinda Childs
Working with Philip [Glass] on the opera Einstein on the Beach in 1976 was a big new experience for me. Up until that time I had been working just with dancers using kind of selective patterns that were musical in nature. But there was no musical accompaniment of any kind.
Philip suggested we do another piece together, and since Einstein was an incredibly ambitious project, with sets and lighting by Robert Wilson, I thought we must turn to a visual artist to complete this new project. I didn’t want to just take it into a bare theater, which in and of itself is sort of a statement. So Philip suggested we meet with Sol Lewitt; I didn’t know him.
Sol said ‘I’m not interested in making some kind of arbitrary drop for you to dance in front of.’ And I said ‘I’m not interested in that either, I agree completely, we should think of something that makes sense for why we would all work together.’ And finally we came up with the idea of the film of the dancers—the décor becomes the dancers. That solved our problem for how to get around the visual aspect of the piece being something arbitrary in form. And Sol did a fantastic job.
Caniglia
Had he worked as a filmmaker before?
Childs
No, but he’s always been very interested in photography. At Mass MoCA [where Sol LeWitt:A Wall Drawing Retrospective is on view through 2033], there’s a video where he’s talking about having photographed absolutely everything in his house, even his toothbrush. He had such an interesting way of approaching detail, there’s nothing he doesn’t notice, and he has a wonderful eye. I’m still finding things I hadn’t noticed before in his editing of the film. It’s just beautifully done.
Caniglia
How did the two of you collaborate to make the film?
Childs
I didn’t work on the editing at all. But I had a score worked out—kind of a storyboard, showing which dancer is doing what with whom, and where in the music and how in the space, and so on. He could follow that and we worked together on what to shoot. Sol wanted to sort of edit in his mind ahead of time which parts to shoot and how, because the piece consists of sometimes just film, sometimes just dancing, and then the combination of the dancers on film with the live dancers. And shooting in 35mm was and still is very expensive. You can’t just shoot endlessly and pick out what you like. So he worked almost all of that out before we actually went into the studio.
Caniglia
That sounds incredibly mind-boggling to figure out. But that kind of mathematical complexity is in keeping with what we see in his visual art, too.
Childs
Yeah, exactly. It was great because I could say ‘I know exactly where he wants me to start and stop’ and we’d move on to the next passage. Still, it was hard with a piece that’s almost an hour; for the dancers it’s almost 40 minutes of really rigorous material. [See the Visual Arts blog for an essay excerpt about LeWitt’s role in Dance, by Ann-Sargent Wooster.]
Caniglia
How have the audience’s reactions to this work changed since its 1979 premiere?
Childs
We had a lot of conflicted responses. I think people had never seen this sort of thing before, or heard this kind of music, which was kind of strange because Philip by then was quite well known, in my opinion. But in the dance world it’s a little different. In Minneapolis, at the Northrop Auditorium in 1980, a lot of people just walked out. So it’s amazing to come back with this piece 30 years later.
Caniglia
What do you think changed over those intervening years, in terms of audiences and what they expect from dance?
Childs
I think they respect what we went through. Now people are talking about it like it’s a classic. I wasn’t at all the recent performances in Philadelphia but the dancers told me there were standing ovations!
Caniglia
In reviewing this revival, some critics have noted interesting stylistic differences between the performers seen on the film from 1979 and the contemporary dancers onstage. What have you noticed in that regard?
Childs
In the film we didn’t really isolate too much, there was a lot of freedom in the interpretation. Now there’s a little more, I would say, ‘uniformity’ among the dancers, and they need that , they need to know okay, now where are my arms supposed to be? Whereas in the old days a lot of things were let free, because I don’t like to make too many positions sort of forcing the dancers into a certain presence or a certain style. I want them to use their arms in an organic way because there’s all these changes of directions, quick turns and half-turns, very very fast work . I find that in the film there’s a lot of diversity and of course therefore the dancers look different—but people understand that and it adds a dimension.
Caniglia
Was this stylistic aspect related to what you were saying earlier about being your own little group?
Childs
We were our own little group, but we were all from different places. Now in New York everybody’s in ballet class, absolutely everybody. In those days that was not the case. People were doing tai chi, all kinds of things, gymnastics. It was a freer world, with contact improvisation and all that—it was a freer world in terms of the downtown scene anyway. Although my work is very very demanding, and I had to find people who could deal with it and do it.
Caniglia
Dance has been called “a seminal collaboration emerging out of one of the most vibrant and prolific periods in New York’s art world.” What made the art world at that time so vibrant, and how is it different from today?
Childs
Well, we just … we made that piece happen, a lot was through the generosity of the artists involved. I by some miracle got a Guggenheim Fellowship that year, which enabled me to devote my time to the work and that was so great. But everything else about the work, there was no production budget … it happened, and we wanted to do it, and as Philip said, we found a way.
Caniglia
Was there something about New York at that time that made it easier to work in that way?
Childs
There was a lot of interaction with the visual arts community and musical people. Einstein brought together so many different people, singers, dancers. Now I don’t feel very connected to the visual arts community except for the people I knew then. Also, what’s changed is the technology in theater—you tend to want to work with someone who’s inside that world, who knows about what can be done.
Caniglia
So a Sol LeWitt today couldn’t pick up a film camera and shoot like he did in 1979?
Childs
I’m not really saying that, it’s more that the technology of the theater has changed radically. With Sol, we brought in a wonderful lighting designer, Beverly Emmons, to translate his ideas. That can still be done. But now there are theater artists who want to work specifically for choreographers or for opera.
Caniglia
It’s about the evolution of theatrical professions, then.
Childs
Exactly. The whole visual aspect of contemporary opera and contemporary dance, especially in Europe, has been a phenomenal development in the last 25 years. And I would say a very small percentage of that work in Europe comes here.
Caniglia
You’ve been working mostly in Europe for the past 10 years, right?
Childs
Since my 25th anniversary season at BAM in 2000. I don’t regret at all those 25 years, it was wonderful to have my company, but I was at a point in my career and my life where I wanted to open up to all these freelance opportunities in opera, and to continue working with Robert Wilson and Philip Glass, and doing solo work.
Caniglia
Is that a dream now, to bring more of the work you made in Europe to the U.S.?
Childs
Or make new work for this new group [formed for the revival of DANCE], that would be wonderful. We may have a chance because there’s another revival we might be doing in connection with Einstein, from that same period, Available Light, a collaboration with John Adams and Frank Gehry. Because I’m still working — I’ve loved doing this revival, but I like to have the chance to make new pieces. Or, as you say, bring pieces made in Europe here at some point.
Caniglia
How would you describe the work you’re making today, how has it evolved?
Childs
It’s the same process; it’s always the same because the music is always different. I study the music, improvise, then I find, little by little, how to bring the improvisation into a structure that fits the music, then that material gets set on the dancers and then I set the piece. It’s quite a long process, but I love working this way. I choose music that sort of takes me different places—mostly in the postmodern genre, but also because of opera I’ve been exposed and had more opportunities to work with more classical forms. I’ve moved out into another realm, it doesn’t always have to be Philip Glass, John Adams, Steve Reich, or composers like them. These explorations in other genres have been satisfying … I think 20 years ago it would have been terrifying to me, but now that kind of challenge is very interesting.
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