THE HANGOVER REPORT – Lucida Childs’ hypnotic AVAILABLE LIGHT celebrates bodies in motion, devoid of human volatility

Lucinda Childs Dance Company dances "Available Light" at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, courtesy of the Mostly Mozart Festival.

Lucinda Childs Dance Company dances “Available Light” at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, courtesy of the Mostly Mozart Festival.

Lucinda Childs is one of the pioneers of American modern dance. Her ascent to prominence largely mirrors the rise of the minimalist movement in classical music. Indeed, it’s hard to think of her choreographic contributions without the accompaniment of works by now-mainstream composers such as John Adams, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich. Their scores find drama and tension in the larger architecture of and glacial musical progression within their relentless repetitions.

Ms. Childs operates under the same philosophy and aesthetic. Her dances, notably her collaborations with Mr. Glass, indicates an artist more interested in the drama of bodies in motion rather than “theater” per se. She treats her dancers like atomic particles, moving through time and space with the limited but indisputably powerful vocabulary of physics itself. The cumulative impact of Ms. Childs’ pieces, as exemplified by her seminal Dance and the choreographic passages in the groundbreaking opera Einstein on the Beach (both legendary collaborations with Mr. Glass, both of which I was lucky enough to experience in person), are akin to watching evolution itself in action. Rigorous and scientific, yes, but in its own way deeply spiritual.

Last night, I was finally able to catch one of Ms. Childs’ breakthrough pieces, Available Light, which was created in 1983 and set to music by John Adams (a piece entitled “Light Over Water”). The dance – which just concluded an all-too-brief two-performance run in New York at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, the first entry in this summer’s Mostly Mozart Festival – follows in the same mold as the majority of her body of work. It’s hypnotic, if somewhat impersonal and distancing. But what Ms. Childs presents to us is another kind of beauty. There’s a formality and stateliness (the two-tiered set is by a then less known Frank Gehry) that’s devoid of human volatility, as if in a universe before and after us.

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AVAILABLE LIGHT
Dance
Lucinda Childs Dance Company
Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center
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Categories: Dance

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