Lucinda Childs, Vehicle

« Vehicle » est une performance musicale et chorégraphique mettant en scène trois danseurs et un dispositif qui repose sur la création du son par le mouvement.

Presented on October 16th and 23rd 1966, Vehicle is a musical and choreographic performance by Lucinda Childs staging three dancers, a system of mobiles and projectors, an ultrasonic transmitter, and a cabin on an air cushion. A reminiscence of the Bauhaus luminous machines, this device relies on the creation of sound by movement.

A disciple of Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage, Lucinda Childs participated in the Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s. In 1976, she was the choreographer and interpreter of Einstein on the Beach by Bob Wilson and Philip Glass. Fascinated by the interaction between the body and objects and by how dancers can produce their own music through their movements, the artist saw in Vehicle an unprecedented opportunity to work with large-scale technological resources. With the engineers from the Bell laboratories, she designed a work with geometric shapes around the transmission of audible and light signals. In this work, the performers act more like operators than real dancers. Isolated in a plexiglas cabin, Alex Hay hands three illuminated buckets to William Davis who suspends them from a frame. Lucinda Childs propels and controls their swaying, which causes the frequencies of an ultrasonic beam to vary, as well as the shadows that they cast. 

Source : Sylvain Maestraggi

We owe 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, a series of performances presented in the large building of the Arsenal of the 69th Regiment of New York, in October 1966, to the complicity between the visual artist Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver, an engineer with the telephone company Bell. The concept was simple: allow a dozen artists to achieve the performance of their dreams thanks to the technology of the Bell laboratories.

Born from the experimentations of the members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the Judson Dance Theatre, the 9 Evenings mark a decisive step in the changing relationship between art and technology. Evening after evening, projectors, video cameras, transistors, amplifiers, electrodes and oscilloscopes entered the stage at the service of ambitious, futuristic, iconoclastic or poetic visions – all filmed in black and white and in colour. When these films were rediscovered in 1995, Billy Klüver decided, in partnership with Julie Martin and the director Barbro Schultz Lundestam, to produce a series of documentaries reconstructing what had taken place on the stage and during the preparation of the performances. The original material was thus completed by interviews with the protagonists of each performance (artists and engineers) and a few famous guests. The 9 Evenings would thereby be restored to their place in the history of art. 

Source : Sylvain Maestreggi