Reconstructed and performed by Ruth Childs & Dancers

sobota, 24. 11. 2018 // Saturday, 24th November 2018

7 pm, Ljubljana Puppet Theatre, Stage Under The Stars

Calico Mingling (1973), dance quartet,

Katema (1978), dance solo,

Reclining Rondo (1975), dance trio,

Particular Reel (1973), dance solo

 

Vstopnice/Tickets: 7 EUR (Predprodaja/Pre-sales), 9 EUR (Regular)

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Poseben kolut (Particular Reel) in/and Katema

Izvedba/Dance: Ruth Childs

Asistenca/Assistant: Ty Boomershine

Oblikovanje svetlobe/Lighting Design: Joana Oliveira

Režija/Directed by: Nidea Henriques

Kostumografija/Costumes: Severine Besson

 

Bombažev preplet (Calico Mingling) in/and Rondo vznak (Reclining Rondo)

Izvedba/Dance: Ruth Childs, Anne Delahaye, Anja Schmidt, Pauline Wassermann

Asistent/Assistant: Ty Boomershine

Oblikovanje svetlobe/Lighting Design: Joana Oliveira

Režija/Directed by: Nidea Henriques

Kostumografija/Costumes: Severine Besson

 

Produkcija/Production: SCARLETT’S

Izvršni producent in promocija/Executive Producer and Promotion: Tutu Production

Koproducenta/Co-producers: Festival La Bâtie, Ženeva/Geneva; Arsenic – Center sodobnih scenskih umetnosti/Centre for Contemporary Performing Arts, Lozana/Lausanne

Podpora za produkcijo/Production Support: mesto Ženeva/City of Geneva, Pro Helvetia, Švicarski sklad za izvajalce/Swiss Foundation for Performers, Sponzorski sklad/Foundation SIG (Services Industriels de Genève), Sklad Nestlé za umetnost/Foundation Nestlé for Art, Sklad Stanleyja Thomasa Johnsona/ Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation, Sklad Ernsta Göhnerja/ Ernst Göhner Foundation

Podpora za gostovanja/Touring Support: Pro Helvetia, Kanton Ženeva/Canton Geneva, Corodis, Loterija francoske Švice/French Swiss Lottery, Migros

After a five-year break, during which she tried to focus on the study of dance and modern history of art, the 33-year-old dancer and choreographer Lucinda Childs returned to the American dance stages in 1973, this time with purified minimalist choreographies such as Calico Mingling, Reclining Rondo and Checkered Drift. These works differed from her choreographic experiments that, as a newly merging graduate of dance composition from the Sarah Lawrence College, she presented within the frame of the dance evenings organised by the Judson Dance Theatre collective between 1962 and 1964 and after that on various stages and urban locations in New York. These new choreographies emanated choreographic maturity, which included the knowledge, processes and bodily materiality of her dance experiments from the 1960s.

 

Soon after her return the choreographer started planning the opera Einstein on the Beach together with the composer Philip Glass and director Robert Wilson, in which she played one of the central roles. In September 1976, soon after its opening night in Avignon, she performed it at the BITEF festival in Belgrade. In this monumental work of American theatre modernism, the second and third acts include two thirty-minute abstract minimalist choreographies (Field I, II), in which dance takes over the lead role. Three years later, in New York, she and Philip Glass created the choreography which is today believed to be her central work: Dance (1979). Sol LeWitt, the American minimalist artist, whom she and Glass invited to come up with the visual appearance for the choreography, cut up Dance (1979) into a series of film perspectives that were – projected onto a transparent canvass – wholly synchronised with the choreography danced live on stage.

 

Einstein on the Beach and Dance turned Lucinda Childs into an international contemporary dance star and gave her ample opportunities to work in USA as well as in Europe. In 1983, after seeing the premiere of the choreography Available Light Susan Sontag wrote her famous essay Lexicon for Available Light, in which she, with an encyclopaedic approach, analyses the work of Lucinda Childs and tries to place it within the frame of the history of dance. Even though Lucinda Childs is, three decades after her breakthrough, engaged primarily as a choreographer and opera director in Europe (predominantly in France and Switzerland), her work has been presented in the territories of former Yugoslavia only twice since the aforementioned performance at BITEF: in July 2007 the Ljubljana Festival presented her choreography for Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird performed by the Goldoni Theatre from Florence, and in 2010 the City of Women in Ljubljana presented the performance of the German choreographer Nicole Beutler 2: Dialogues with Lucinda (2010), in which the precise reconstructions of the Radial Courses (1976) and Interior Drama (1977) are mildly theatricised with speech, costume and music elements.

 

Her Early Works will be presented in the Balkans and within the states of former Yugoslavia for the first time and this will take place at the same time as the Museum of Modern Art in New York presents them within the frame of the retrospective exhibition of the Judson Dance Theatre entitled The Work is Never done, which was opened in September.

 

During the first evening we will show the works that Lucinda Childs created between 1973 and 1978. These are marked by the choreographic tendency for their relatively simple movements to be woven into complex repetitive and variable structures. They are constructed with strict spatial orders, which the viewers can read from the ground plans and which always present an essential element of the choreographer’s choreo-notational idiolects. The dance performance for four dancers entitled Calico Mingling (1973) is based exclusively on walking. It starts from a straight line and, following a series of six-step paths that the four dancers take in various configurations (individually or synchronised), it returns to its starting point. Reclining Rondo (1975) is a dance for three dancers, which is constructed in a slow tempo and incorporates floor dance elements, with the twist that the majority of the dance elements are performed in reverse. Katema (1978) is a dynamic dance solo, composed on a single spatial line. Particular Reel (1973) is constructed from twenty-one parallel paths that the dancer creates with a series of various rotations.