In the last two decades we have witnessed numerous re-stagings, reconstructions or historical stage studies of repertoire from different phases of contemporary dance. Some of these were placed by the artists themselves, others by those who were in one way or another addressed by these works. Returns to artistic oeuvres have been more or less resounding during this period, but one of the most successful is certainly the choreographic works of the American choreographer Lucinda Childs. In recent decades, they have attracted the interest of generations of artists who may not even have been born at the time of their creation. Because audiences in different parts of the world can never get enough of them, and because they are always a challenge for dancers, the works of Lucinda Childs keep returning to the world stages and are born anew.
19.30 – lecture (free entrance)
Rok Vevar: Introduction to the principle of the work of Lucinda Childs
20.30 – show (tickets 7/9 eur)
DANCE ON ENSEMBLE: Works in Silence
Choreography: Lucinda Childs
Staging: Ty Boomershine
Alternating Cast: Ty Boomershine, Anna Herrmann, Emma Lewis, Gesine Moog, Omagbitse Omagbemi, Lia Witjes-Poole, Alba Barral Fernandez, Javier Arozena
Costumes: Alexandra Sebbag
Lighting: Martin Beeretz
Lighting on tour: Vito Walter
Sound: Mattef Kuhlmey
Touring: Simone Graf/Hélène Philippot
Distributing producers: Danila-Freitag Agency for the Performing Arts
Production: Dance On/DIEHL+RITTER Co-production: STUK. House for Dance, Image and Sound/Münchner Kammerspiele
Funded by: Doppelpass Fund of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (Doppelpass Fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation) and Ministry of Public Administration of the Republic of Slovenia
The performance is organized within the project: DANCE ON PASS ON DREAM ON project, Co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union
Organization in Ljubljana: Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia and Kino Šiška (CoFestival)
In 2018, CoFestival hosted her niece Ruth Childs, who presented some of the choreographer’s earliest works under the collective title Early Works of Lucinda Childs. This time, Dance On Ensemble presents a series of works created by the choreographer in the 1970s, choreographed by her former assistant, dancer and artistic director of Dance On Ensemble Ty Boomershine. The evening is entitled Works in Silence, and among the classic works of American postmodern dance we will see Untitled Trio I (1968, 1973), Congeries on Edges for 20 Obliques (1975), Untitled Trio II (1973) and Radial Courses (1976) for the first time. We will see the solo Katema (1978) again after 2018, this time in a different rendition.
About the Dance On Ensemble:
Dance On Ensemble was founded in 2015 as a project of the Berlin-based non-profit organisation Diehl+Ritter, and its creation is linked to the observation that cultural dance systems in the West exclude dancers on the basis of age, and that youth is an exclusive and overrated criterion in these systems. Its cast, made up of some of the biggest names in contemporary dance and ballet and a series of personal decisions that it was a bit early to retire from dance, has been expanding over the years, and the repertoire shows that the dancers are keen to take bold experimental approaches to dance and choreography alongside the canonised works of the contemporary dance repertoire. This makes the mix of choreographic and artistic names that have appeared in Dance On Ensemble’s repertoire over the past seven years unique and very diverse: Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, Lucinda Childs, William Forsythe, Deborah Hay, Ivana Müller, Jan Martens, Rabih Mroué, Mathilde Monnier, Tim Etchells, Ivo Dimchev and others. Artistic director of the ensemble, Ty Boomershine, best known as a former dancer with Lucinda Childs, where he also worked for years as the choreographer’s assistant, curates the repertoire with a delightful selection of works that have broken with the history of American and European contemporary dance, providing freshness and unusual challenges, and invites artists who are doing it today to collaborate with the ensemble. In this way, it provides the contemporary dance present with its extended public time, which is also characteristic of other Diehl+Ritter projects, including the European project DANCE ON PASS ON DREAM ON. Dance On Ensemble made its debut in Slovenia at CoFestival 2018 with the duet Elephant (2018), created with the dancers by the well-known Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué, and in May 2023 it will be presented at Cankarjev dom with a choreography by Jan Martens entitled Any Attempt Will End in Crushed Bodies and Shattered Bones.
A few words about Lucinda Childs:
Lucinda Childs (1940) is one of a generation of choreographers who brought twentieth-century American contemporary dance to its peak. With a strong background in the neo-avant-garde dance experiment of the 1960s, which she co-created as part of the emblematic Judson Dance Theater collective, and with skills that could not have been acquired and developed more effectively anywhere else in the mid-twentieth century than in New York, Lucinda Childs developed in the 1970s a series of choreographic compositions that, because of their reach, abstraction and complexity, are still effective, fresh and surprising today. There is nothing in them to suggest that they are 50 years old. Because they are composed of nothing but the most basic of dance materials, the locomotion of human bodies, and because they are extremely selective in their use of other spectacular elements, they are as fresh today as they were in the 1970s.
Among American postmodern choreographers, Lucinda Childs was the first to make the transition from experimental spaces to the big stage shortly after the end of the 1960s, and finally to Europe, where she has made the bulk of her work in recent decades. But it was in the 1970s that the choreographer, with her kinetic language, created the distillate of the dance time, an abstract of dance art, because her works, with their modernist kinetic architecture, contain a vast amount of baroque compositional mathematics: they’re an abstract of the body of dance art. Perhaps this is why dance audiences around the world never tire of her choreographic works.
LUCINDA CHILDS – INTERVIEW WITH ERICK FRANCK (1978)
»My career began in the 60s with the group called Judson Dance Theater which was formed by Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton, two of my contemporaries. The main purpose of JDT was to expand the vocabulary of dance beyond what you would traditionally consider vocabulary in the sense of traditional dance. In other words, to include movements of everyday life. And the dances that I made at that time were – what I would call – totally conceptual, totally based on an idea of a spoken text of some kind. The movements that you saw would drift in and out of the context of what you were hearing. I used objects at that time and also a text. At this point in my work, I don’t use anything like that anymore. I use no object at all and no text. And there’s a rather enormous shift in that is much simpler now. However, the movements that you see in the dance derive from that early period. You see walking, you see very simple movements and there’s certainly technique still involved. I’m professionally trained dancer in modern dance. But the emphasis in my work now is really to de-emphasize building up [of/a] content. It’s really to take very very simple material and to re-arrange it in such a way that you constantly presented with material from a different point of view. The idea being that you essentially dislodge the audience from perceiving anything from any one way. And one phrase and another shift very gradually, so that you don’t have very strong contrasts in movement but very slight ones. As a result, the experience of the dance is really to stay in a very restricted framework of content but experience the multitude of shifts in terms of the use of time and space.
I think the beginning of this whole movement really stems from the early 20th century because the avant-garde came to New York in the early 20th century and the movement in dance began in the 60s. And now we’re in period when we’re really no longer dealing … I don’t consider myself properly as a part of avant-garde. I really consider myself a choreographer among many others. I don’t at this point care whether or not people perceive me as having departed from tradition. I simply make dances now and I don’t particularly feel strongly attracted to any particular label to describe them. I prefer that people just look at them as dances because that’s what they are. They are not intended for didactic or academic departure from any tradition that we know right now. In fact, I find them a little bit classical …«
