This content contains scenes that may shock an uninformed audience.
Do you still want to watch it?
Lucinda Childs
1962, New York: A group of avant-garde artists creates the Judson Dance Theater, which will revolutionize the foundations of modern dance. Lucinda Childs creates “Carnation” there in 1964, her first solo, a postmodernist manifesto.
Lucinda Childs
1962, New York: A group of avant-garde artists creates the Judson Dance Theater, which will revolutionize the foundations of modern dance. Lucinda Childs creates “Carnation” there in 1964, a postmodernist manifesto. Archival images, interviews, and performance excerpts paint the portrait of a choreographer emblematic of American contemporary dance, whose creativity, always at work, continues to surprise us.
Between 1962 and 1966, the Judson Dance Theater was a place where choreographers, visual artists, and musicians could flourish in a spirit of total freedom. Under the influence of Merce Cunningham, Lucinda Childs developed her choreographic vocabulary: pendulum movement of the arms, scansion of steps, changes of direction on the axes of a complex geometric structure.
She is noticed in Paris at the 1976 Festival d’Automne, in the epic opera Einstein on the Beach by Bob Wilson and Philip Glass. But it is in 1979, again at the Festival d’Automne, that the captivated audience discovers Dance, a hypnotic spectacle combining minimalist dance, monumental videos by Sol LeWitt, and music by Philip Glass. Lucinda Childs was immediately recognized by critics as a major artist.
In recent years, her choreographies have entered the repertoire of several European opera ballets. In her New York workshop or her island home near Boston, she retraces her journey.
(Mario Fanfani)
Duration of the documentary: 52′
