"Dance": a Lucinda Childs revival at The Joyce

Dance (1979) by Lucinda Childs,
presented in the second week of
Lucinda Childs Dance Company at The Joyce Theater
(photo: Sally Cohn)

I wonder if everyone feels that kick of anticipation whenever, after much agitation, the stage hangs empty in Lucinda Childs's Dance, the 1979 masterpiece now revived at The Joyce Theater. It's like being suspended high above the ground before your ride descends...or your parachute, hopefully, opens.

In Dance, the dozen skimming, twirling live dancers--and their looming predecessors in the Sol LeWitt film--create a hallucination so intense, do audacious that it wears down any rational desire for it to end. Gridded surfaces for dancing float, tilt at crazy angles, appear and disappear--as ghostly as the live and filmed dancers themselves in Philip Glass's whirlpool of music. And, later, the goddess herself--her image pure, as stately as an ancient temple--stands in floor-length raiment, arms flat against her thighs, staring out into the audience and freezing her votaries in place. We must give her her due. Brava to this dangerous woman!

Lucinda Childs Dance Company 's Program B--Dance--continues at The Joyce through December 11.  For schedule details and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (corner of 19th Street), Manhattan
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Looking at Lucinda, then and now

Scenes from Dance (2009) by Lucinda Childs
(photos: Sally Cohn)

I regret missing Barnard College Dance Department's recent evening with Lucinda Childs and French filmmaker Patrick Bensard, director of the 2005 documentary, Lucinda Childs. Just short of an hour, the film traces notable influences and milestones in the dance artist's career--her exposure to the aesthetics of Cunningham and Cage, explorations with her fellow Judson iconoclasts such as Yvonne Rainer, magisterial flights through the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson universe.

It is Wilson, interviewed by Bensard, who best sums up the multitude within Childs, the mixed feelings she and her elegant, minimalist aesthetic can stir in a viewer. He describes a being at once soft and severe, hot and cold, and he appears to love her every polarized contradiction. The film includes wonderful excerpts of Childs, Mikhail Baryshnikov and other dancers performing her choreography--skimming the floor and slicing through air like figure skaters, earth and its gravity mere playthings to these mercurial figures.

Worth any price of admission are the brief glimpses of her solo Carnation, made in 1964 when I was 12 and a decade away from starting to write about dance. Maybe only a woman as frosty-looking as Childs could be this wickedly clever, surreal and funny in her ritualistic precision, crowning herself with a flexible strainer basket, carefully stuffing kitchen sponges into her mouth and fanning the stack open like a duck's bill.  How I wish I could see it performed live now.

* * *

See the fall season of The Lucinda Childs Dance Company at The Joyce Theater, November 29-December 11. The first week's program includes the New York premiere of a Joyce commission, The Sun Roars Into View (2016), and the second week features Childs's signature work, Dance (1979) with a commissioned score by Philip Glass and the original film decor by Sol LeWitt.

For information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (corner of 19th Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Get your free email subscription

to InfiniteBody.

Click here!

Jookin' Lil Buck to jam with Yo-Yo Ma at (le) poisson rouge

Memphis jookin' star Lil Buck

jams with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and other musical guests

(le) poisson rouge

Tuesday, April 2 (10pm)

Lil Buck, dance
Yo-Yo Ma, cello
Marcus Printup, trumpet
Cristina Pato, Galician bagpipe
John Hadfield, percussion
Brooklyn Rider

featuring a world premiere for solo cello by Philip Glass, composed for Yo-Yo Ma and Lil Buck, especially for this engagement


Director’s Statement:

“It is an honor to present Lil Buck in his first New York one-man show — an exclusive chance to see the virtuoso jookin’ sensation up close at (Le) Poisson Rouge, where he is joined by a stellar musical cast including Yo-Yo Ma, who first performed with the dancer in the original “Swan” video that went viral online. The one-hour jam session will feature that “Swan” duet come to life onstage, and a world premiere composed by Philip Glass for Ma and Lil Buck, in addition to new music from Brooklyn Rider, and appearances by Galician bagpiper Cristina Pato, jazz trumpeter Marcus Printup, and percussionist John Hadfield.” – Damian Woetzel, Director and Producer

 For complete information and ticketing, click here.

 As one commenter wrote: "the hood meets ballet and owns it."

(But if they ever want to come back, they've gotta get a permit....)

Sarah Michelson's "Devotion"

In the right (or the wrong) hands, The Kitchen's black box theater can be a pressure cooker. I don't know whether Sarah Michelson's hands are right or wrong. I think, whenever I see her work, I'm never completely clear about that--and maybe she isn't, either--and, on some level, that's okay. But there were moments last night when I felt like bolting from my seat.

What is devotion (and Devotion)? In Michelson's hands, it is certainly a state of intensity, located just past the intersection of Philip Glass and Lucinda Childs, on the edge of danger. In the bodies of her dancers--best exemplified here by valiant Rebecca Warner--and performers from Richard Maxwell's New York City Players, it is an obsessive, mangled (and mangling) formalism that drives, strains and splays movement beyond the point where it is accceptable (and potentially beautiful) to our eyes, just as the volume and repetition of the work's accompanying music is often pushed past the point where we can absorb it without our scalps throbbing and crawling. Recently, when songwriter Gerry Rafferty died, I thought of Michelson and her similar appropriation of his melancholy hit "Baker Street"--in an endlessly looping cover version--for her piece, Daylight. 

Her theater feels at once severe and manic, a space where performers push and push and push themselves like Olympic athletes in the cold blast of eccentrically-placed light, where a gargantuan cluster of lights swings with potential lethality over their heads, where we sit, trapped in our winter clothes and too-close seats, feeling whipped up--and whipped to the bone--by the sonic, visual and kinetic energy in the room for an uninterrupted 100 minutes.

Her dancers bear--and, I mean, bear--these roles: Spirit of Religion (Nicole Mannarino), Mary (Non Griffiths), Jesus (James Tyson), Adam (Jim Fletcher), Eve (Eleanor Hullihan) and a quartet of Prophets (Neal Medlyn, Alice Downing, Liz Jenetopulos and Nancy Kim). TM Davy's icon-like portraits of Michelson and a young musician, with their black backgrounds, hang high above the black space; the evening concludes with these painted figures' luminosity being the last thing we see before we're released into the night--a kind of benediction.

With text by Richard Maxwell, original music by Pete Drungle, lighting by Michelson and Zack Tinkelman, and costumes by James Kidd, Shaina Mote and Michelson.

Devotion runs now through Saturday, January 22 at 8pm. No late seating. Schedule and tickets

The Kitchen

512 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan

(directions)

What time is it?

The Rubin Museum of Art presents a conversation, about time, between screenwriter/director Charlie Kaufman (Synecdoche, New York and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and Brian Greene (physicist and foremost proponent of string theory).

Greene is currently working on a cantata with Philip Glass and David Henry Hwang based on his children's book Icarus at the Edge of Time. The cantata will premiere at New York's World Science Festival 2010.

What time is it? is part of the museum's wide-ranging and provocative Brainwave series. Get full schedule and ticketing details here.


What time is it?
Saturday, March 6, 3:30pm
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th Street (at 7th Avenue)
212-620-5000