Disrupting the Grid Lucinda Childs’S Scores for Silent Dances
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Disrupting the Grid Lucinda Childs’s Scores for Silent Dances Lauren DiGiulio etween 1973 and 1978, the choreographer Lucinda Childs created sixteen silent dances that were composed according to strict choreographic rules. BUsing a discrete group of pared-down movements, Childs built up her dances in a highly ordered structure. She employed complex counting rhythms and repeated movements to form a series of patterns that modulated on the dance floor in relation to a grid form. Although the grid is not physically marked on the floor during the performance, it is visible in the dances’ scores, which are written directly on grid paper. The dances are a combination of solo and group works for her eponymous company, which at that time consisted of five dancers, including herself. They each last between ten and thirteen minutes. Throughout these works, the dancers repeatedly break the structure of the choreographic pat- terning by moving idiosyncratically in accordance with the distinctness of their individual bodies. The compositions of the dances themselves also regularly deviate from the set of choreographic rules that otherwise govern their structure. At the level of both performance and composition, dancers and choreographer break the dances’ strict delineation of movement, and “re-pattern” themselves in juxtaposition to the grid, using the moving body as a means of disrupting formal patterns. Childs’s interest in concrete movement can be formally linked to developments in minimalism that emerged in the 1960s, in concert with conceptual art practices that turned toward language as a medium in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Her practice was influenced by her early involvement in the Judson Dance Theater, where she collaborated with choreographers Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown, among others. Judson Dance Theater connected her directly to artists working in minimal and conceptual forms such as Robert Morris and Robert Rauschenberg. In her performances throughout the 1960s at Judson Church, she worked with props and objects, and sometimes used speech. Her turn in the early 1970s to © 2020 Lauren DiGiulio PAJ 125 (2020), pp. 21–33. 21 https://doi.org/10.1162/pajj_a_00517 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_a_00517 by guest on 23 September 2021 work performed in silence, focusing strictly on movement, signaled her interest in the way that patterns could be established and broken by the moving body. This period of choreographic production is uniquely positioned in Childs’s long career. It is inaugurated by her return to choreography after her early, experi- mental work with the Judson group in the mid-1960s, and it ends with her turn to larger, proscenium-based productions at the end of the 1970s. Beginning in 1979 with the premiere of Dance, a landmark work created in collaboration with musician Philip Glass and visual artist Sol LeWitt, Childs began to work pri- marily in theatres, creating dances for the structure of the proscenium’s frame.1 The period between 1973 and 1978 is characterized by Childs’s exploration of formal structure and the development of a movement vocabulary that provides the foundation for her thematic approach throughout her subsequent career. Childs inaugurated her new formal vocabulary with a concert at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Friday, December 7, 1973. The concert consisted of four dances. Untitled Trio, composed of three ten-minute segments for three dancers each, had been revised from an earlier 1968 showing. The three other dances—Particular Reel, Checkered Drift, and Calico Mingling—were completely new. In the second section of Untitled Trio, she employs four basic steps: a steady walk, a prone position lying on the floor, a rotating lunge that lands with a pounding step, and a jump. These movements are assembled as the dancers trace a diagonal line across the dance space. In a thoughtful review of the evening published in Artforum, Noel Carroll observed that, “it is the linear pattern of the dance, rather than the correspondences of phrasing, that conditions attention. It becomes quite clear that the basic movements of the dance are being employed to literally measure the linear trajectory of the dance.”2 It is the overall effect of the dancers moving together—he establishment of a pattern and the consistent shifts in that pattern—that are of concern to Childs. For Carroll, Childs’s dances are made of lines. These lines are made up of dis- crete units of movement, and their accumulation in space forms a pattern. But what is a pattern, exactly? Writing in the pages of Artforum in 1975, Amy Goldin describes pattern as not merely the repetition of a motif, but the spacing between units of composition: “The crucial determinant of pattern is the constancy of the interval between motifs, a fact easily demonstrated by anyone with access to a typewriter. If you preserve the spacing between sequences of letters it doesn’t matter what letters or marks you use, a pattern will appear.”3 Childs uses spacing throughout these dances to create composition. Individual movements are strung together to render phrase sequences, and the lines of the phrasing modulate as the dance unfolds in time. The units of movement that make 22 PAJ 125 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_a_00517 by guest on 23 September 2021 up the phrasing are discernible because they remain discrete. There is physical space between the dancers’ steps, and that space is marked in time by a puls- ing, silent rhythm that the moving dancers share as they temporally execute the steps together. Similarly, each phrase is separated by a short interval. Although the dancers each execute different units of movement in a given phrase, their movements are measured at the same pace. The duration of each gesture is the same, and each step occupies a similar amount of space. The end of a phrase is often marked by a dancer’s turn in space. If a dancer is not moving on the next phrase, she stops after she turns toward the opposite direction. Her pause is always accompanied by a collective pause, as the performers seem to take a shared breath before beginning the next round. These intervals in space and time create pattern at the level of the individual dancer’s performance. The accumula- tion of multiple bodies in space, each making a separate choreographic pattern, further amplifies the pattern’s function within the dance. Spatial arrangement and temporal rhythm combine to create structured patterns at every level of the choreography.4 The creation of dance scores figures prominently in Childs’s choreographic process, and the scores serve as important archival objects through which to read and restage these dances. A written score that traces the dancers’ patterns along the floor accompanies each of her silent works. Each dancer’s trajectory is rendered in a different colored marker, and the lines are drawn between fixed points on grid paper. Each dance Childs created during this period was surrounded by a constellation of visual and textual objects. A score, drawn out on grid paper that marks the dancers’ pathways from above, assigns to each dancer a color, and each phrase is drawn out separately, sometimes with counts notated below. This “master score” is sometimes supplemented by index cards marked with individual parts for the dancers to carry with them. Most of the time, the dancers drew their own notes directly onto these, and also created their own notes on separate loose-leaf or white computer paper.5 Additionally, Childs often drew the dances’ spatial patterns as they mapped onto each other simultaneously, creating geometric visual effects. These works serve no clear purpose for archival or reconstructive situations, but rather exist on their own terms as visual works in themselves.6 One of these dances, Melody Excerpt, employs a particularly complex program of spatial and counting patterns. It is worth looking closely at this dance because the complete score is intact, and there is a substantial volume of drawings and notation material on the dance.7 Melody Excerpt premiered in the Lepercq Space at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November 1977, along with Interior Drama and Plaza. Its spatial and counting patterns are particularly complex. I first encountered the score during my visit to Lucinda Childs’s archive at the Centre DiGIULIO / Disrupting the Grid 23 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_a_00517 by guest on 23 September 2021 National de la Danse of France in March 2017. Housed in a large Brutalist build- ing designed in 1972 by Jacques Kalisz in Pantin, a suburb of Paris, the archive viewing room adjoins the library on the center’s ground floor, overlooking the Canal de l’Ourcq. Although the setting felt unfamiliar, the material in my hands was worn from years of careful handling. Melody Excerpt’s score is held in a black plastic three-ring binder in which 158 pages of grid paper are presented in lami- nated plastic sleeves. The first three pages give an overview of the entire dance. Here, each phrase pattern is shown in miniature, and the phrases are arranged in a grid pattern. In seeing these phrases brought together, one can easily map the visual trajectory of the dance at a glance. The whole is thus compressed into a single, introductory expression, rather like a literary preamble, prologue, or index. Following this overview, each phrase of the dance is written on a single page. The pages each contain twenty marked points, color-coded in blue, red, yellow, brown, and green that represent the possible positions of the dancers—where they can begin or end a phrase.