Yesterday Orange Mountain Music released a DVD entitled simply Dance. This was the title of an imaginative collaborative effort that brought together choreographer Lucinda Childs, composer Philip Glass, and artist Sol LeWitt, who contributed a film. This one-hour composition was given its first performance in 1979. By way of context, both Childs and the Philip Glass Ensemble had previously partnered with Robert Wilson to create Einstein on the Beach, which was first performed in Avignon in July of 1976. My own first contact with Childs did not take place until the early Eighties, when the Next Wave festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) presented a performance of her “Available Light,” which used an all-electronic score by John Adams.
That performance was one of my first “dates” with the woman that would later become my wife. After about half an hour, she began to grow impatient with the choreography; and we ended up leaving early. It was only after we attended the first revival performance of Einstein, again at BAM, that I began to adjust to Childs’ sense of time and how that sense meshed with what Glass had come to call “repetitive structures.” In the making of Dance, Childs, Glass, and LeWitt each contributed a unique perspective on such repetitive structures.
Indeed, repetition is a key property of the interaction between Childs and LeWitt. As Teresa Guerreiro wrote in the jacket notes for the Dance album:
LeWitt shot a film of the dance, and then cut, layered and floated it onto a scrim over the live performance. The dancers in Sol LeWitt’s film, featuring Lucinda Childs herself, appear to flit through the live dancers.
As a result, the viewer is confronted first with the repeated movements of the choreography, after which LeWitt’s film adds a new “semantic layer” to those repeated movements. Taken in its entirety, Dance is structured in three sequential parts. The first and last of these parts involve the full ensemble of dancers, while the second part involves a single dancer, partnered only by LeWitt’s images.
The DVD itself presents a performance that was filmed in Paris in 2014. The filming was directed by Marie-Hélène Rebois. The performance seems to have taken place before an audience, and Rebois provides a convincing account of what one would have seen had one been in that audience. Nevertheless, it did not take long for my memories of “Available Light” to enter consciousness. Engaging as those repetitive structures were, the sense of overall duration was strained in a way that did not surface during the “mind-sized chunks” of the individual acts and “Knee Play” interludes in Einstein.
While I continue to be interested in Childs’ achievements, I also continue to worry that, more often than not, she delivers too much of a good thing.
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