The Guardian, 28 September 2011, By Judith Mackrell

How Einstein helped dancer Lucinda Childs legend Lucinda Childs was going nowhere – until an avant-garde opera about a famous physicist shot her to success. As the work returns, Judith Mackrell tracks her down

‘It was a marathon’ … Lucinda Childs in New York. Photograph: Dan Callister for the Guardian, taken at the Mark Morris Dance Centre New York is in the grip of a heat wave but Lucinda Childs, sitting opposite me in her midtown office, is looking cool and alert. Now aged 71, Childs is no less elegant than she was as a young dancer. Anyone observing the poise of her head, the slender, disciplined lines of her body, would quickly understand why, 35 years ago, she was invited by director and composer to lead the cast of their pioneering minimalist opera, Einstein on the Beach.

This was an interval-free show that lasted five hours, with every gesture and word timed to an exact beat. Not a project for the woolly minded or faint-hearted. Polite and measured, Childs picks her words carefully, but even she will admit the work "was a marathon". The cast could only take the briefest of drink or toilet breaks, but the hardest task was learning to become oblivious to the audience, who were free to drift in and out. "At first," says Childs, "I used to feel very abandoned. You're very aware of shuffling and disturbances, discussions about whether it's time to go for a cigarette. But later, I liked letting the audience do as they wished."

When this extraordinary production, which has no discernible plot or characters, has its much-delayed UK premiere at the Barbican next spring, Childs won't be on stage. But she remains indelibly associated with it, not least because footage of her witty, exacting, luminous performance is enshrined in a documentary made about the work's 1984 revival. Wearing a simple white dress or the costume denoting Einstein (white shirt and red braces), Childs speaks her seemingly illogical, even hallucinatory lines with a calm authority, gesturing meticulously.

Her own , just as finely calibrated, also features in the opera's two pure dance interludes. Childs says she's delighted by the surge of public interest in such 1970s experimentalism: next month, there's also a revival of Childs's 1979 work Dance, headlining the Dance Umbrella festival in London. "It's amazing that audiences are looking back to those years, and seeing new things in them. I think there's an interest in the past that has a lot to do with YouTube. People are fascinated by what they can see of those early years."

In 1976, Einstein on the Beach changed everyone's perceptions of opera. Although inspired by the great physicist's life, the work didn't follow any biographical path. Audiences were left to make their own interpretations of why Einstein appeared as an ecstatic violinist and dancer, as the action moved between a train station and a space ship. The libretto was composed of chanting and sol-fa syllables, interspersed with stream-of-consciousness monologues; banalities were given the aura of sacred ritual.

In France, where Einstein premiered, only one critic failed to greet the work with praise, calling its repetitive structure and glacial pace the "perfect cure for insomniacs". In New York, some of the audience stormed out, but the rest gave it a standing ovation. By the time of its 1984 revival and 1992 world tour, the opera had become a legend. In Tokyo, Childs recalls, "You could hear a pin drop, no one moved for the whole show. In Melbourne, they just ate it up."

As for Einstein's creators, Childs says it "established all of us internationally". For her, it was a career- changing event. Childs was no stranger to radical experiments, having started out with Judson, the New York arts collective founded in 1962 and influenced by the then giants of the avant garde, , John Cage and . They performed in lofts, gyms, galleries and garages, in works that were more like installations than choreography. In one of Childs's early works, Carnation, she danced in hair-rollers with a colander on her head; in , she and a partner danced on the pavement while the audience sat in a loft, listening to a taped commentary about the architecture and the weather. But by the early 1970s Judson had disbanded, many of its members drifting off into hippyish improvisation. A beautiful dancer herself, Childs was more interested in revisiting pure movement, of working with a full-time company. But it was hard for a relatively unknown choreographer to strike out on her own. Until Einstein came along.

Wilson and Glass were high-profile, avant-garde collaborators. "They were the new constellation, the next generation after Merce, John and Bob." They were also taking experimental work out of the SoHo lofts and on to the big stage. For Childs, performing in a space as vast as the Met was fabulous but daunting. "I'd been accustomed to very small audiences sitting around me. It was a challenge to fill that stage. The movement, the projection, had to be so much bigger."

Childs's next big venture was in theatre. She took a part in a two-act "play" by Wilson, called I Was Sitting on My Patio. She laughs, recalling the 1977 work. "It had a very bizarre text, which went along the lines of, 'Oh hello, I'm fine, how are you, goodbye.' I thought it was beautiful and hilarious, but it was challenging. Bob performed the text in the first act, then I repeated it in the second with different movements. And really, it was an unbelievable disaster. When we did it at the Royal Court, it attracted a lot of publicity because of Einstein. But the London critics were savage. They said we weren't actors and it wasn't writing."

Now Patio is also coming back to life. Childs laughs. "There's a lot of interest in it now. They're talking of reviving it with Ryan Gosling – and Annette Bening in my part." She crosses her fingers and looks starstruck. "Annette hasn't agreed yet, but I'm sort of hoping."

Patio may have been savaged, but Childs's career didn't suffer. Working with Glass on Einstein had proved inspiring. In the 1960s, choreography and music were thought of as separate entities: they might co-exist in the same performance, but the concept of tying dance steps to notes, phrases and melodies was seen as passe. Childs did not share this view. "The idea of exploring the pulse and timing of the dance along with the music was exciting to me, especially if that music was by Phil Glass."

In 1979, Glass collaborated on her hour-long opus, Dance. It was an ideal partnership. The shifting rhythms and cascading arpeggios of Glass's music were echoed in Childs's geometric configurations and minutely cadenced phrases. A trancelike meditation on space, pattern and time, it built to a kind of ecstatic abstract harmony, with the clinching visual element supplied by minimalist artist Sol LeWitt, a friend of Glass, who was intrigued by the possibilities of design in dance.

"Sol wasn't interested in making some kind of backdrop," says Childs. "We came up with the idea of having the dancers as the decor, using film of them that would synchronise with the performers on stage. That idea was pretty new. Sol filmed the movement in 35mm black and white, so it was very powerful. He edited the film so that it showed the dancers from different angles, sometimes looking from above, sometimes beneath, sometimes in close up. It was very complex."

The result was as seminal for the dance world as Einstein had been for musical theatre, taking postmodern choreography out of the fringe and on to the proscenium stage. Its success propelled Childs to the A-list, bringing commissions from Paris Opera, Lyon Opera , Rambert, Mikhail Baryshnikov and many others. A 2009 revival of Dance proved an odd experience, largely because of the differences between the new, young cast and the original dancers, preserved in LeWitt's accompanying film – including Childs herself, aged 39. "It was very strange at first. I found it hard to watch. The bodies and styles of dancers have changed so much in 30 years that it was almost distracting. Back then, there was a tremendous variety, more eccentricity of style. Dancers today are much more uniform." Still, Childs found it "seriously moving" to see how many dancers wanted to work on the revival, and odd that, after so many years of feeling she was inventing her career as she went along, she was now being venerated as the grande dame of a golden era.

Now, however, she is more interested in the future. Given that a full-time, fully paid-up company has been assembled to take Einstein and Dance around the world, Childs hopes she can make new choreography with these dancers, during gaps in the schedule. "I don't feel nostalgia," she says. "What interests me is creating new work, not just seeing the old work brought back to life."

DANCE REVIEW | 'LUCINDA CHILDS' By ROSLYN SULCAS The New York Times April 12, 2009

Distilling Four Decades of Dance Before Patrick Bensard’s 2006 documentary, “Lucinda Childs,” about the postmodern choreographer, had a Thursday screening at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Mr. Bensard, Ms. Childs and Mikhail Baryshnikov appeared. Ms. Childs was, characteristically, to the point. “Patrick Bensard attempted to put 40 years into 52 minutes, for which I am grateful,” she said.

Mr. Bensard, director of the Cinémathèque de la Danse in Paris, is one of Ms. Childs’s many admirers on the European dance scene, where she (like ) has enjoyed a level of financial support and a consistent admiration, almost veneration, quite different from her standing in the United States.

Here Ms. Childs is certainly regarded as an important figure, a founding member of the whose works went on to carve out a particular niche of elegantly minimal severity. In France she has been seen by a generation of influential taste makers as one of the indisputably major talents of .

This tone is very evident in “Lucinda Childs,” which opens with a lingering shot of Ms. Childs in profile. As the director Robert Wilson later points out in the film, the camera loves Ms. Childs, whose extraordinary classical beauty (she looks like Catherine Deneuve crossed with Katharine Hepburn) is no less striking now, at the age of 68, than it is in the plentiful footage of her younger days.

Mr. Bensard and his camera can’t resist it. There are many misty vistas of her walking along the beach on Martha’s Vineyard, where she lives, and frequent lengthy close-ups as she speaks about her career or rehearses dancers. (There is amusing footage of her working with Mr. Baryshnikov, who offers lots of opinions about phrasing. “O.K.,” she says equably.) The sense that Mr. Bensard is intrigued by the personage of Ms. Childs rather than by her choreography subtly infuses the film, although he does a good job of cramming in the outlines of her career. Her training at Sarah Lawrence College, the impact of Merce Cunningham, the early Judson years, her first work with Mr. Wilson (“Einstein on the Beach” in 1976) and her early pieces for her own dancers are all covered. There is the requisite archival footage and the pertinent commentary from colleagues (, Mr. Wilson, Philip Glass) and critical thinkers (Anna Kisselgoff, Annette Michelson, ).

Mr. Bensard is necessarily selective (we hear nothing about the formation or dissolution of Ms. Childs’s company and little about her later career), and the narrative voice-over is sometimes overly general. (Ms. Childs’s 1978 solo “Katema,” we are told, was “a turning point in the history of contemporary dance.”). But if Mr. Bensard’s reverential approach can feel a little cloying at times, Ms. Childs is never that. Restrained and thoughtful, shy yet uninhibited, she remains essentially enigmatic despite offering her thoughts and memories with apparent frankness. After the screening Mr. Bensard said he hoped to make a sequel. It’s easy to see why.

The New Yorker, September 24, 2012, by Andrew Boynton

Lucinda Childs in Command On a recent evening at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, in the East Village, a fortunate hundred or so people attended “An Evening with Lucinda Childs: Films, Performance, and Discussion,” a tribute to Childs, a member of the Judson Dance Theatre and a seminal figure in . The members of the Judson group started presenting works in July of 1962, at the , on Washington Square, and, even though the group lasted for only a few years, its influence has reverberated in the decades since. This year marks Judson’s fiftieth anniversary, and celebrations have abounded.

The atmosphere at St. Mark’s was reverential but celebratory. Many of Childs’s current and former dancers had come, and excited greetings bubbled up everywhere. A viewing screen stood about twelve feet in front of the first row of the audience, and the austere St. Mark’s space loomed behind it. The lights went out, and scenes from Patrick Bensard’s documentary “Lucinda” (2006) introduced the uninitiated to the Judson Dance Theatre and its aesthetic—the use of chance, à la John Cage; the incorporation of everyday movement and objects; and a “rejection of beauty,” in Susan Sontag’s words—and led into a clip of Childs in a reconstruction of her 1964 solo “Carnation.”

In that dance, Childs—sitting before a table, in a red leotard top and faded jeans, her long right leg stretched out beside her, creating a forty-five-degree angle between her torso and the floor— manipulates everyday objects in unexpected, comic ways, maintaining dignity throughout. She starts by carefully placing a collapsible colander upside down on her head, folding the two wire handles down, one at the back of her head and one in front of her face: a veiled hat. Then she takes pink foam hair curlers and inserts them into wire triangles descending from the rim of the colander, one by one, then solemnly lifts the handles, bringing the ring of rollers up to form a crown. Finally, she stacks colored sponges on the table, squashes the pile, picks it up, opens her mouth wide, and places it in her mouth and clamps down. Then she releases the ends of the sponges, which splay out, making a duck mouth of sorts. Childs was twenty-four when she made “Carnation,” and no one else was doing anything like it.

Ever since Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s opera “Einstein on the Beach,” which was first performed in 1976 (and is being revived at BAM this month), Childs has been a sensation. She had a leading role in “Einstein” (one of the other stars of that production, Sheryl Sutton, was in the audience at St. Mark’s), and created some of the for it, which contain the repetitions and simplicity that have become hallmarks of her choreography. But she also showed herself to be a skilled actress who could deliver a line of text disarmingly, with a withering straightforwardness. In an interview in the film, she explains that her “taste for the weird” led her to Wilson; that fruitful association was exemplified not only by “Einstein” but by works like “Video 50” (1978) and “La Maladie de la Mort” (1997), which show off Childs’s acting ability. (In the former, she’s heavily made up, smoking, a bizarre hairdresser; in the latter, she’s an elegant woman lounging on a platform as she delivers a monologue to Michel Piccoli, in French.) Wilson, in an interview in “Lucinda,” says that Childs was “so many opposites … soft but hard, natural but unnatural.”

Her taste for the unusual was evident in “Pastime,” the first piece that Childs showed at the Judson Church, in 1963, and which she performed a section of at St. Mark’s. The lights came up on Childs, who is now seventy-two, reclining in a vessel of stretchy blue-gray fabric, her torso and her legs and feet providing the vessel’s limits. (In the discussion at the end of the evening, a woman told Childs, almost apologetically, that she couldn’t help seeing the fabric as a boat, and asked Childs how she saw it. Childs said, plainly, “It’s a boat.”) As “Pastime” began, the boat faced offstage, but Childs maneuvered it around to face us, though it was not clear how. A few times, she withdrew a leg from inside the boat and dangled it over the edge, testing the unseen water (the music, by Philip Corner, contained some liquid sounds), and at one point she straightened her body along the floor, flattening the boat.

Later in the evening, Childs performed another Judson work, “Screen,” from 1965. Childs is a striking woman, tall and slender, erect, with a kind of classical beauty that has not faded. Wearing a gray T- shirt and tight-fitting gray jeans, she was barefoot, her shoulders slightly slumped. One by one, she cast a dozen or so large colored disks onto the floor, in a loose grid, her manner absorbed and distracted at the same time. (In the discussion, she said that in creating “Screen” she had been thinking about Seurat’s dots, and wanted to zero in on them.) Then she took out a small, round pocket mirror and began speaking to us about what she was doing, and why. Using the mirror to guide herself among the disks, she took tiny shuffling steps, and explained, “I want to find a new angle on the material. I want to get past the retina of the spectator to the brain.” Then she sprawled on a short stool, belly down, and repeated the action on different parts of the stage, inviting us to examine it anew. It was enigmatic, funny, absurd.

At one point in “Screen,” Childs says, “There is nothing personal going on here.” But the personal took over when, after only a few years with the Judson group, she began to want to leave the gimmickry of props behind, and to get back to pure movement. (The Judson Dance Theatre petered out in 1966.) She wanted to be “just myself, moving, focussing on change of direction,” and she developed a style that looks nothing like the works she made as part of the Judson group. (“Ballet,” Childs said, when someone asked what the best training ritual is. “Even when people at Judson were carrying around mattresses onstage, they still went to ballet class.”) Thus, a rejection of the rejection of beauty.

The second of Bensard’s films about Childs, “Post Scriptum” (2010), is largely about her company’s rehearsals in 2009 for a revival of her 1979 work “Dance,” a classic. The extensive footage shows how precise, rigorous, and, in its way, simple her work is. The movements are clear and balletic, but the changes in facing, the turning, and the pace are dizzying. We see dancers counting out Philip Glass’s insistent rhythms, trying to keep track of how many beats are in a phrase, what their entrance cues are, how many times they’ve repeated a sequence. When Childs says, “There is no place in ‘Dance’ that is improvised,” you might think that the work has an airless, suffocating quality, but seeing it proves just the opposite. There is great freedom in having such a tight structure. Or, as Childs says, “In our repetition, we cannot be lost. But we can open up to the repetition.” Throughout the film, she is patient and encouraging with her dancers, and shows great tenderness toward them; she understands that what she’s asking them to do is difficult, but she knows, and they know, that it will be worth it. The dancers, in interviews, speak with devotion.

When Childs took questions from the audience, she was indulgent, good-humored, though at times she seemed tired. When she realized that she didn’t have to sit up straight in order to speak into the microphone, and could detach it from its stand and sit back, she did so theatrically, gratefully. People asked about how she got involved with Judson (she met Yvonne Rainer at Merce Cunningham’s studio); whether there was, considering Judson’s acceptance of everyday objects, any overlap with Pop art, and with Andy Warhol’s Factory (yes; Warhol asked Childs to come to his studio so that he could film her shoulder, which he did, at length); how “Carnation” came about (she wanted to investigate “what to do with commonplace objects that don’t belong together”); how it felt to perform “Pastime” again (“I was interested in getting back inside it fifty years later”).

Childs is a formidable woman; we had just seen her perform two solos that she made when she was in her early twenties, and her command of the stage through uncluttered, succinct movements is undiminished. Her hair, once dark and pulled tightly back, into a bun, is now short, airier, and gray- white-blond. As she answered questions, wittily, thoughtfully, her expressions changed— concentrating, puzzled, playful—and the wheels were always turning. “Making decisions is the essence of what you’re doing as an artist,” Childs said. These days, she relishes the opportunity to revisit works that she hasn’t encountered in a while: “I’m enjoying the freedom to move about in the material.” It’s a freedom she’s earned.

Le Figaro, 12 avril 2010, par François Delétraz

Lucinda Childs entre modernité et envoutement Parmi les grands noms de la danse du XXe siècle, les Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham ou Maurice Béjart, Lucinda Childs occupe une place à part. Une place obtenue de haute lutte, sa danse n'ayant pas fait beaucoup d'adeptes à ses débuts. Il faut dire que la grande dame avait choisi des chemins de traverse et que, comme tout ce qui est unique, elle dérangeait. L'inlassable marcheuse de Einstein on the Beach de Bob Wilson savait que sa vie serait une course d'endurance.

Elle a donc eu raison de persévérer : ses sont parmi les plus beaux et les plus enivrants que la danse nous donne à contempler. Dance, que reprend le Ballet du Rhin sous l'œil intraitable de cette chorégraphe aujourd'hui âgée de 70 ans, est un bel exemple de perfection. Créé en 79 à la Brooklyn Academy of Music, il est ici repris avec virtuosité par la troupe alsacienne, qui l'a inscrit à son répertoire l'année dernière. Comme toujours, Lucinda Childs, qui n'a rien d'une conteuse, ne se préoccupe pas de raconter une histoire. Le mot même la hérisse. Elle bâtit des atmosphères, des ambiances dans lesquelles il faut se laisser aller, sans a priori, en oubliant la notion du temps. Philip Glass, le compositeur, l'avait convaincue en son temps que danse et musique n'étaient pas antinomiques. Lucinda, en effet, en doutait. Il eut raison d'insister : musique et danse répétitives forment ici un duo ensorcelant, sorte de transposition dans la société occidentale de ces rituels d'envoûtement que l'on rencontre plus volontiers en Afrique. Voilà un ballet que même des néophytes peuvent apprécier. Il n'est besoin d'aucune référence pour laisser cette danse pénétrer son inconscient et y faire des merveilles.

En seconde partie, l'infatigable Lucinda crée une nouvelle pièce, Songs from Before. Là non plus, pas d'histoire, mais, comme elle le dit, « des fragments d'émotions ». Tous les allergiques à la danse contemporaine devraient se donner rendez-vous au Théâtre de la Ville (si cela n'avait pas été complet) pour y voir Dance de Lucinda Childs. C'est l'exemple même du ballet parfait, intelligent, accessible à tous, même à ceux qui n'ont jamais vu de danse contemporaine, et où l'on peut passer un très bon moment. Il suffit pour cela de s'asseoir dans son fauteuil, de laisser ses a priori et son Blackberry au vestiaire et de donner du temps au temps. Sur une musique répétitive de Philip Glass que l'on pourrait croire immuable mais qui évolue imperceptiblement, les danseurs vont et viennent telles des images fugaces qui pourtant imprègnent les esprits (Photo JL Tanghe).

Liens supplémentaires http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/oct/18/step-guide-dance-lucinda-childs http://www.paris-art.com/spectacle-danse-contemporaine/songs-from-before-puis- dance/childs-lucinda/6976.html