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By Ann Moradian
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Published on May 6, 2025
Lucinda Child's "Distant Figure." Photo © Fabian Schellhorn
Choreographer: Lucinda Childs
Performers: Robert Mark Burke, Katie Dorn, Kyle Gerry, Sharon Milanese, Matt Pardo, Lonnie Poupard, Jr., Caitlin Scranton and Lucinda Childs
Musicians: Johann Sebastian Bach, Dominik Hildebrand, Marques Lopes, Hildur GuınadÛttir, Philip Glass
Set Designer: Anri Sala
Costume Designer: Nile Baker
Lighting Designer: Sergio Pessanha
March 19 - 22, 2025
Théâtre National de Chaillot
Lucinda Childs' new solo, Geranium'64, is a slow-motion exploration of a high-speed moment. Obscure black and white images of a football match waft like distant memories over a projection of a corroding wall. In the foreground, Childs performs an impossibly slow run, missed catch and fall with spectacular control, fluidity and grace. Walking in slow motion, which takes up the first half of the dance, did not capture my attention, but I was fascinated as she began to lean, swerve, careen, topple and roll. Accompanied by a radio broadcast of the 1964 NFL championship football game and connected to a long, taught chord, Childs replicates the dynamics of effort, momentum and opposition impeccably. At 84-years old, Lucinda Childs suspends time.
Ordinary gestures and pedestrian movement, like running or falling, were core elements in the postmodern dance vocabulary developed in the early 1960s by Childs and other members of the Judson Dance Theatre in New York. Geranium '64 is a recreation of a solo Childs originally performed in 1965. The striking simplicity of this dance focuses our attention on the dynamic musculature of life as it not only moves us but torques us into peculiar asymmetric instants as we encounter the world around us.
The other three pieces on the program look nothing like this. The dancers are mostly upright and vertical, creating clean geometric lines and patterns through space. The first piece, Actus, is a duet built on theme and subtly shifting variations. Pristine, with little contrast in texture or dynamics and no emotional content, the dancers inhabit the same space, but they do not look at one another, touch or interact. Caitlin Scranton is long-limbed and elegant. Sharon Milanese brings the music of Bach's Actus Tragicus alive. It is as if she is painting the sound through space with her body.
Timeline, a septet, is faster. And they jump. Arms jut out and pull back in a variety of unexpected angles, like that candy that pops in your mouth. One luscious spiral whirls to the floor faster than you can blink. Bodies seem to hang suspended in air as they bound, pivot, patter and spin. All these dances look a lot like ballet, with sautÈ basques, arabesques, pirouettes and chainÈ turns. In Timeline, the momentum is constantly re-directed or aborted - often too quickly for the dancers to keep up. Their feet scramble as their arms rest contained at their sides, unaffected.
The performers concentration is formidable, and their drive is palpable. At the same time, they seem to have no will of their own, as if everything is directed, monitored and controlled by a relentless algorithm that ignores the real and present feedback from their bodies and the world around them. In today's context, it all seems disturbingly robotic. The disconnection from emotion, lack of connection to one another, and the dampening of will underlie some of our most challenging societal dysfunctions today. In the 1960s they served as a counterbalance to the passionately expressive work of Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham, or the glamourized exoticism of the Denis-Shawn company. But today, we have followed these tendencies too far.
It is unfortunate that Distant Figure, a septet created to Philip Glass's stunningly beautiful passacaglia, came last. By the end of the evening these dances lost their distinctions for me and became one big blur.
At the Q&A after the performance, it became apparent that the audience here in Paris appreciated the undeniable precision, rigor, simplicity and discipline of Lucinda Child's work. Childs was awarded the rank of Commander in France's Order of Arts and Letters in 2004, and she continues to be held in high esteem here.
