LUCINDA CHILDS
EARLY WORKS, 80'
Lucinda Childs Dance Company
Performers: Lucinda Childs, Katie Dorn, Kyle Gerry, Robert Mark Burke, Sharon Milanese, Lonnie Poupard, Matt Pardo, Caitlin Scranton
Production manager: Tricia Toliver
Company manager: Ammara Shafqat
Production: The Blanket
Bilhete: 12 euros
Desconto de 50% para Amigos de Serralves, jovens até aos 18 anos, estudantes e maiores de 65 anos.
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Lucinda Childs is a major name in American postmodern dance and a preeminent figure in the history of contemporary performing arts. Her important choreographic body of work is distinguished by the uniqueness of the language, recognizable in the complex andabstract structure of her pieces and in the vocabulary employed, of restricted movement.
The Early Works, presented in two galleries of the Serralves Museum, are a collection of pieces by Lucinda Childs that cover the period of creative evolution of this seminal choreographer and dancer, spanning from 1963 to 1979, and integrate the axial and original ideas of her artistic work.
The trajectory of this program spans from the solo Pastime, exemplary of prop-based investigations made during her time with the Judson Dance Theater, presented at Judson Memorial Church, to the “Silent Works” (pieces danced in silence). Particular Reel, Calico Mingling, Reclining Rondo, Radial Courses and Katema are the earliest works she made for her Company, which she founded in 1973, and which distinguish Childs for their formal and conceptual specificities.
In these works, rhythm and geometry are highlighted, with a focus on the body moving through space. Through the pure movement vocabulary of walking, running, turning, skipping, and leaping, Childs explore rapid changes of direction and the effects of minimal shifts in movement patterns, displacements that are difficult to execute due to their physical and mental complexity.
These geometric and mathematical dances were the precursor to DANCE, her first work choregraphed to music. This iconic collaboration with Philip Glass and Sol Lewitt was created in 1979. The excerpt of “Dance 2”, a solo she created for herself (and performed through the 1990s) shows the ways in which her signature minimalist phrases, accumulating slight variations on theme, both echo and oppose a musical score.
Sharing the progression of these pieces will be a unique opportunity for the audience to experience the origin and journey of Childs work and its evolution to include decisive collaborations with visual artists and composers such as Philip Glass, Frank Gehry, Robert Wilson, Sol LeWitt and John Adams.
The pieces will be performed by members of the Lucinda Childs Dance Company, including Childs herself.
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LUCINDA CHILDS (choreography, dance), born in 1940, began her career at the Judson Dance Theater In New York in 1963. Since forming her dance company ten years later, she has created over fifty works, both solo and ensemble and received numerous awards including the Dance Magazine Award, The Golden Lion award from the Venice Biennale and the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival award for lifetime achievement. In 1976 she was featured in the landmark avant-garde opera EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, for which she won an Obie Award. In 1979 Childs choreographed one of her most enduring works, DANCE, with music by Philip Glass and film décor by Sol LeWitt, which toured internationally and has been added to the repertory of the Lyon Opera Ballet. Since 1981, Childs has choreographed over thirty works for major ballet companies and directed and choreographed a number of contemporary and eighteenth-century operas for the Los Angeles Opera, for La Monnaie, in Brussels, and for the Opera du Rhin, among others. Most recently, Childs directed and choreographed Philip’ Glass AHKNATEN for Nice Opera Cote D’Azur which premiered in November 2021.