AVAILABLE LIGHT. 1983. Fifty-five-minute work for eleven dancers (five women and six men) commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles: the third of Lucinda Childs’s large-scale productions. Music by John Adams, set by Frank Gehry, costumes by Ronaldus Shamask, lighting by Beverly Emmons.
BEAUTY. The visionary authority of Childs’s work resides, in part, in its lack of rhetoric. Her strict avoidance of cliché, and of anything that would make the work disjunctive, fragmented. The refusal of humor, self-mockery, flirtation with the audience, cult of personality. The distaste for the exhibitionistic: movement calling attention to itself, isolatable “effects.” Beauty as, first of all, an art of refusal.
CHOREOGRAPHY. Childs started by defining herself as a “modern” choreographer; therefore, alienated from “tradition.” (Two decades ago, it could still seem plausible to regard modern dance as the antithesis and subversion of classical dance.) When she did start choreographing dances, in 1968, it was with the predilection for keeping the movement vocabulary relatively simple, seeking complexity elsewhere—in the intricate design of spatial forms and of timing. But in the music-based works choreographed since 1979, which propose a much more complex movement vocabulary, Childs has broken radically
with the anti-ballet aesthetic of the other ex- or neo-Duchampian choreographers with whom she has been grouped. Of all the adepts of the rigorously modern among contemporary choreographers, she has the subtlest and most fastidious relation to classical dance. If her use of portions of the ballet idiom is less easily recognizable than Merce Cunningham’s and Twyla Tharp’s, it is because Childs does not feed balletic movements and positions into an eclectic mix but wholly transforms and reinterprets them. In this, as in other matters, she is adamantly anti-collage. Thus the choreography of Available Light was not conceived first and then illustrated by the music, the set, and the costumes but solicited, presupposed, and worked out in strict relation to these—to the two-level stage devised by Gehry, the multi-layered music of Adams, the three-color constructivist scheme (black, red, white) of Shamask’s costumes.
COMPLEXITY. Cunningham in 1952: “For me, it seems enough that dancing is a spiritual exercise in physical form, and that what is seen is what it is. And I do not believe it is possible to be ‘too simple.’” The delicate rhythms and intricate configurations and tempi of Cunningham’s work, the way attention is commanded through a simple, unadorned, unexplained, often decentered presence, offered a new standard of the complex.
CUNNINGHAM, MERCE. Childs, who studied with Cunningham between 1959 and 1963, assumes Cunningham’s notion that dance should not express something else (an emotion, a story, an interior landscape) but not Cunningham’s method, which is to make the elements of dance self-contained, autonomous, even aleatoric in their mix (and sometimes in their look). “I didn’t like it,” Cunningham once said, “that a movement meant something.” This liberating stance has been associated with a large element of parody in Cunningham’s idiom: post-Graham movements (the Cunningham curved back is an ironic comment on the Graham contraction) and laterally tilted ballet positions. Out of this eclectic aesthetic, much irony. (Cunningham’s choreography is an art of disjunction and therefore ultimately comic.) Childs by temperament unifies; her aesthetic refuses the eclectic, the disjunctive—it never
quotes. Though playfulness is one of her chief standards of grace, her work is virtually free of irony. Its tone is austere but never cool. Embracing the Cunningham position (the refusal of plot, of “meaning”), Childs has drawn other consequences from it; she has dropped the jokes, the kidding around, the wistful lyricism, and reached for the sublime.
Dance. 1979. The first of the large-scale productions, a hundred-minute work, for the company of nine. Music by Philip Glass, lighting by Beverly Emmons, and a film by Sol LeWitt of portions of three of the five sections (“Dance #I,” “Dance #3,” and “Dance #4”). Choreographers as different as Cunningham and Pina Bausch have made works with an accompanying, simultaneous image-record, displayed on a TV monitor placed on the stage; in contrast to this additive, fragmenting use, the projection of LeWitt’s film, on a transparent scrim at the front of the stage, is a true setting and literal transfiguration of the dance. The synchronized ongoing of film and dance creates a double space—flat (the scrim/screen) and three-dimensional (the stage)—and provides a double reality, both dance and its shadow (documentation, projection), both intimacy and distance. Recording the dancers from different angles, in long shot and in close-up, LeWitt’s film tracks the dancers, sometimes on the same level, sometimes from above—using split-screen and multiple images. Or it immobilizes them, in a freeze-frame (or series of still shots) which the live dancer passes through. Or it waits with the dancer, as in the beginning of “Dance #4,” Childs’s second solo, when Childs appears both in large mask-like close-up on the scrim and as a small immobile figure in white on the stage. The film is a friendly, intermittent ghost that makes the dancers, seen behind the scrim, seem disembodied, too: each seems the ghost of the other. The spectacle becomes authentically polyvalent, though the film is finally subordinate to the dance. “Dance #2,” Childs’s first solo, and the concluding “Dance #5” proceed without the film ghost.
DIAGONAL. A signature element in Childs’s choreography: a principle of avidity, about space. Dancers often go into low plié arabesque, with the arm continuing the diagonal—the longest line that the body can
make. And they often move on the diagonal—the longest distance one can traverse on a stage without changing direction. Childs’s adventures with the diagonal have their apotheosis in Relative Calm, two of its four sections being choreographed entirely on the diagonal. In the first section, the whole company dances back and forth on parallel paths from upstage right to downstage left for twenty-three increasingly blissful minutes; in the third, solo section, Childs dances for seventeen minutes in phrases of different lengths, punctuated by turns, on the opposite diagonal … And moving to the diagonal often means an intensification, as in the finale of “Dance #1” of Dance, when suddenly four pairs of dancers dash again and again from upstage left to downstage right. Or in Available Light: Childs’s arrival upstage right and slow progress downstage left through a corridor formed by eight dancers, four on each side.
DOUBLING. A recurrent structure in Childs’s work: splitting the performer into two versions, the action into two levels, which proceed simultaneously. For example, in an early piece, Street Dance (1964), Childs’s voice, taped, was with the audience assembled in a sixth-floor loft, while she was down on the street, being seen performing the actions that she was heard describing. Doubling in the sense of several dancers performing the same movements on different paths became, starting with Untitled Trio (1968), the extended subject of the works she created for small ensembles in the 1970s. Transverse Exchanges and Radial Courses (both 1976) elaborate, delicately and strenuously, on the counterpoint of dancers who, using the same steps or families of movements, go in and out of sync with each other through changes of gait, direction, and relation to the floor. Having several people doing the same rhythmic thing—side by side, one in front of another, or one above the other—has always been part of choreographing ensembles, military, ceremonial, and balletic. Indeed, doubling is the most basic principle of artince—of form itself. Childs’s work concentrates on the implications of doubling as a formal principle and as the basis of choreographic syntax: the geometrical, or diagrammatic, idealization of movement. Her recent large works, created since 1979, allow for a
more complex orchestration of the theme of doubling. The adding of decor is never merely decorative but functions to create richer possibilities of doubling. Thus, the film that LeWitt made as the decor for Dance creates a perfectly synchronized double set of dancers. For example, the split screen allows the audience to see the dancers in the film, never less than life-size, on top; the live dancers (behind the scrim) on the bottom. What LeWitt supplied for Dance with a film, Frank Gehry supplies for Available Light with an architecture. In Available Light, the stage itself has become two-level, allowing other variations on the theme of doubling. Instead of traveling ghosts, there are live trackers: one to three dancers are upstairs echoing, playing off, providing counterpoint to what the dancers are unfolding below.
EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH. 1976. The “opera,” conceived and directed by Robert Wilson, with music by Philip Glass; Childs was a principal performer and collaborated on the text. The year she spent preparing and touring in Einstein on the Beach (Avignon, Venice, Belgrade, Brussels, Paris, Hamburg, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, New York) was a turning point. Her thirty-five-minute solo, constructed on three diagonals, that opens Act I, Scene I was a culmination of the second phase of her work and a bridge to the third. Her longest work so far (both as performer and as choreographer), it was the first time she choreographed to music—and the experience encouraged her to undertake the long work, for which Glass agreed to furnish the score, eventually called Dance.
EMOTION. The leading notion of the great modern dance pioneers, from Duncan to Graham and Horton, was to return dance to ritual. Though dance-as-ritual looked more abstract than ballet, actually such dances were heavy with descriptive intentions based, above all, on ideas about the primitive, the authentic, both in movement and in feeling. Thus, Mary Wigman created her “absolute” dances, performed in silence and with a minimum of theatrical support, the better to render extremely emotional “inner states.” Childs’s turn (in 1968) to dance without props or music or words was an absolute conception of dance,
for it did not claim to express anything interior. For Childs, as for Cunningham, all notions of dance as ritual are alien; she was drawn to using game-like forms of ensemble movement, in which the idea of inwardness is irrelevant. The view that dance should not express emotion does not, of course, mean to be against emotion. Valéry defined the poem as a machine made of words whose function is to create a distinctively poetic feeling: it does not “express” emotion, it is a method of creating it.
FORMATIONS. Childs tends to organize choreographic patterns symmetrically, movement contrapuntally. The dancers move in formations—in twos, and their multiples, more than in trios and quintets. Though Childs most often deploys dancers in pairs, this is the smallest formation and has nothing to do with partnering in the traditional sense: neither dancer is the consort of the other, one does not assist or accompany or accommodate another. They are duplicates, and therefore equal. The two dancers are doing the same movements: the existence of a pair doubles the movement image. There are “delicate invasions” (Childs’s phrase) of one group by another, each keeping its group contour, as in the traveling diamond formations of the fourth section of Relative Calm. Men and women perform the same movements (thus shaving off the gender-specific extremes of movement vocabulary, such as very high jumps), wear the same or virtually identical costumes. All plugged into the same sound, the dancers move on paths, inexorably, to a steady underlying pulse. They rarely take up perilous off-balance positions, such as Cunningham favors. (He also favors asymmetrical formations.) The rule that each element in a Cunningham dance has its own autonomy and can be apprehended in isolation from the other elements of the spectacle also applies to the dancers. In Cunningham’s company every dancer is, can be, a star. In Childs’s work, as each element of the spectacle is strictly coordinated with every other, so is each dancer: she choreographs for the glorified corps de ballet—they become the star. Childs’s dances are not exercises in polyattentiveness; more generally, they are not examples of art conceived as a tool for perception. Her choreography demands a concentrated
all-over attention; it is cumulative; it aims at transporting, not educating the audience.
GEOMETRICAL. Available Light is the second act of Giselle as revised and corrected by Mondrian.
HEAD. The positioning of the dancer’s head in ballet always implies a look—to a partner, or a central (noble) figure, or to the audience. In Childs’s choreography, the head is not posed in this sense; there is no such looking elsewhere. One of the basic conventions of Cunningham’s technique is a simple, unmannered use of the head and detached, cool expression. Even while taking part in cooperative tasks—a lift, a pull, a support—his dancers usually seem unaware of each other. (Much humor is milked from this incongruity.) In Childs’s choreography dancers never engage in cooperative tasks, indeed never touch each other. Hence, their intensely blank performance masks signify another, non-atomized detachment. The effect is never incongruous, or comic; rather, it underscores the feeling of purity, the striving for an elevated state of things that is the register of her work.
IDEAL. Where are these dancers dancing? Not in the vernacular space, here and now, of Duchampian performance pieces; nor in the anti-dramatic, democratized space of Cunningham’s dances—dance as pure, noncumulative activity with detachable parts and movable borders. (Hence one of Cunningham’s characteristic notions: dance as a sequence of open-ended “events.”) Instead, Childs’s choreography suggests some ideal space, where ideal transactions and transformations take place. (In this, she is close to the ethos of traditional ballet.) Dance as the art of ideal precision; ideal spatial relationships; ideal, undiluted intensity.
ILLUSTRATING. A procedure typical of Childs’s early (conceptual or didactic) work, in which she sometimes used words in the form of instructions or descriptions—as in Street Dance. This linguistic decor could be live monologues or words on tape that were illustrated by her
movements. Some of the early pieces treat movement in the manner of the Surrealist objet trouvé: citing already existing positions, “found” through words. In Model (1964), Childs gives a mock lecture on modern dance and illustrates a few awkward positions. In Geranium (1965), she provides a taped sportscast: as the announcer describes a football player falling, tumbling, Childs illustrates the actions in slow motion. Museum Piece (1965) has nineteen dots in three colors cut out of heavy paper, each about ten inches in diameter, which are an enlargement of a tiny portion of Seurat’s Le Cirque. While delivering a mock lecture on pointillism, Childs sets out the dots like plates in a complex pattern on the floor. Then, gazing into a hand mirror, she walks backward, making a slow, circuitous journey through the dots, without stepping on them, speaking of why she wants “to enter this body of material.”
JUDSON DANCE THEATRE. Co-founded in 1962 by Yvonne Rainer (then, like Childs, a student of Cunningham’s) and Steve Paxton; disbanded in 1966. Childs was invited to join in 1963, and did a ten-minute piece called Pastime—her first work presented publicly—at the Judson Memorial Church, where she went on to present most of the work she did in the next three years, as well as to perform in pieces by Rainer, Paxton, James Waring, and Robert Morris.
KLEIST’S ESSAY ON THE PUPPET THEATRE. Its subject is an ideal state of the spirit; written in 1810, it is also the first great essay on the dance. Kleist exalts as the summit of grace and profundity in art a way of being without inwardness or psychology. Writing when the characteristic modern oppositions of the heart versus the head, the organic versus the mechanical, were invented, Kleist ignores the obloquy already attached to the metaphor of the mechanical, and identifies the mechanical movements of puppets with the sublimity of the impersonal. The Romantic ideal of the absence of affectation is equated not with the free expression of personality but with its transcendence. These Romantic oppositions (and evaluations) continued to dominate sensibility for another century, mutating into what we know as modernism, into “romantic” modernism, which was challenged by “neo-classical” modernism—various ideals of the impersonal as different as
those of Duchamp and of Balanchine (who thought ballet should be unconcerned with inner experience). The ideals of the personally expressive and the impersonal or impassive constitute a central contrast in the evolution of contemporary dance. Cunningham is the most important champion of the anti-expressive and anti-subjective, and most of the choreographers who studied with him have extended his emphasis on objectivity and impersonality. Yvonne Rainer’s work in the period of the Judson Dance Theatre aimed at “submerging the personality” in impersonal, task-like movements: “So, ideally, one is not even oneself, one is a neutral doer.” In Childs’s choreography, one is not a neutral but a transpersonal doer. Her emphasis on impersonality is closer to the virtues extolled by Balanchine than by Rainer, for she assumes that dancing is a noble art. The dancers move on paths, imperturbable—their comings and goings seem implacable. Their impassivity is not detachment, the cool ironic tone of Cunningham dancers. It is a positive impassivity that recalls the argument made by Kleist—as if grace and inwardness were opposed.
LIGHTNESS, ART OF. Childs’s conception of dance is Apollonian: dance should be lively, playful, joyous. Beauty equals power, delicacy, decorum, unaffected intensity. What is ugly is timidity, anxiety, demagoguery, heaviness. (Other exemplars of the Apollonian style: Seurat, Mallarmé, Morandi, Ozu, Wallace Stevens.)
MEASURABLE. Seurat calculated exactly the place and the disposition of some forty tiny figures in Le Cirque—cited by Childs in her early Museum Piece. Childs prepares placing of dancers and timing in the same spirit. Seurat believed that the beautiful had an objective, measurable basis; Childs needs to specify the structure of her work in numbers. The early pieces were timed to the second, but not counted. The method of working out choreography by counts started in 1968, with Untitled Trio, when Childs began choreographing in the normative sense: to choreograph means to give movement a rhythmic, countable time structure. It is through counting that space is connected with time, whether or not time is further articulated by music. All the “silent” works of the 1970s are precisely counted. (An example: a
dance from 1976, Transverse Exchanges, has 1,449 counts.) In works created since 1979, counts are coordinated to—supplied by—music. For instance, in Relative Calm, Childs requested a specific pattern, and numerical phrase base, from the composer Jon Gibson—that the first section be constructed out of fifteen-count phrases and have eleven subsections; that the second section be composed of seventeen-count phrases and have nine subsections, each two to two and a half minutes long; et cetera. The intricate patterning (designed to activate the whole stage space) and subtle variations in timing may seem simple to dance audiences habituated to recognizing only the complexities apparent in movement itself.
MINIMALIST. Unlike some other dumb labels that emerged in visual arts marketing campaigns (Pop Art, Op Art) in the last two decades, this piece of linguistic chewing gum, first applied to some painters and sculptors (Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Carl Andre), has spread to architects, choreographers, composers, even to couturiers—imposing, as such label-mongering invariably does, a specious unity among widely different artists. Muybridge, Mondrian, Stein, and Ozu had the good fortune to pursue careers as virtuosi of obsessive repetition and strong patterning without incurring this label. Inevitably succeeded by POST-MINIMALIST.
MOVEMENTS. Childs’s movement ideal: clear, clean, deliberate, intense. And directional. The dancers are moving or are absolutely still. When moving, they move continuously, with relatively muted accents and a softer dynamic than in classical choreography, recalling Rainer’s prescriptive idea of dance as “movement series”—with “no pauses between phrases and no observable accent … the limbs are never in a fixed, still relationship … creating the impression that the body is constantly engaged in transitions.” Childs has brought the aesthetic of the Judson performers, designed (in Rainer’s words) to impart to dance a “factual quality,” a deliberately matter-of-fact, more “banal quality of physical being in performance,” into confrontation with the high energies and lyrical solemnity of the classical dance ideal. Many of the movements that she recasts are ballet movements. In ballet, positions are reached, then held, allowed to shine. In Childs’s choreography, the
classical positions (arabesque, attitude, tendu plié) are taken, cleanly, but only for a split second. Childs doesn’t use in-place movements (like penché, passé développé, grands battements) that exhibit positions, that display technique. Reacting against the modern-dance ideal, exemplified by Graham, of dance as a succession of climaxes, Cunningham and, in more radical form, the Judson choreographers proposed a style of movement that has no climaxes, in which nothing is dramatically framed. From that aesthetic Childs has retained the prohibition against devising positions that can be framed; but the taboo on climactic passages is weakening. Available Light has several clearly identifiable climaxes. It also has a looser weave—perhaps because, unlike Dance and Relative Calm, the work is not divided into separate sections. Adams’s score is a departure from the music Childs has previously used. Instead of the sharp boundaries of earlier scores, it evolves with soft-edge transitions; it has a more obvious emotional texture and consists, most starkly in the last fifteen minutes, of a succession of climaxes.
NEO-CLASSICAL. It is the hallmark of a neo-classical style, whether in dance or in architecture, to be accused of being merely mathematical. If mathematical means quantifiably precise, insistently formal, majestic, stripped down—as in some Platonic or Palladian kingdom of forms—there is truth in the accusation.
OPENINGS. In Dance: an empty stage, and the propulsive joyousness of the music … and then the dancers springing in pairs from the wings, spinning, prancing, skimming across the stage. In Relative Calm: the drone … and the dancers already in place, sitting (in diagonal formation) on their carpets of light. In Available Light: the blast of sound that fades into a drone-like hum … and the dancers coming on slowly to take their positions.
ORDER. Beauty is identified with order, liveliness, serenity, inevitability.
POLITENESS. The classical tradition of dance is related to courtesy. Ballet gestures are based on a system of deference, of hierarchy, and
descend from the gestures of real courts. Childs’s dancers comport themselves as members of an imaginary, cosmic court, behaving with egalitarian courtesy. There are no angry or erotic emotions. The dancers are grave, imperturbable. They always leave each other enough space.
POST-MODERN. The aging of modernism was remarked by astute observers when modernism was still in its prime. “The word ‘modern’ has changed meaning,” Cocteau observed in 1932, already situating himself safely beyond the modern (everyone’s favorite vantage point) and predicting that “the modern age will be a period between 1912 and 1930.” One of modernism’s perennial ventures, its demise, has recently been celebrated with the most successful of new labels—the word “post-modern,” first applied to architects, now as well to visual artists and to choreographers after Cunningham. Frequently a synonym for eclectic. But sometimes conflated with MINIMALIST.
PRESENCE/ABSENCE. Dance, most present, incarnate of arts, is used by Childs in the service of an aesthetic of absence. This principle was first acknowledged in a Dadaist way, in the notion of the blank, the gap—as in the unpainted painting that is conjured up by discussing its absence, or the drawing that is illustrated by its erasure. Thus, the third section of Geranium, a monologue in which Childs announces: “This is supposed to be the third section, but there really is no third section, so it might be best to refer to the third section as a gap”—and goes on to discuss ideas for the third section, one of which is a glass enclosure that would contain a performer. (It was constructed, and could skim about the stage, in the last piece of Childs’s first period, Vehicle—presented in 1966 in the series “Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering”: the dancer is inside a mobile Plexiglas box.) Many of the early solos are exercises in absence. Street Dance begins with Childs disappearing into the elevator after pushing the button of the tape recorder. (She reappears below on the street.) In Carnation (1964), Childs does a vanishing act under a white sheet. In her very first piece, Pastime, Childs assumes various poses inside a stretchable blue jersey bag. What starts as a Dadaist performance is eventually raised to a positive principle: a mysticism
of space. The dancers are disembodied, dematerialized. The Duchampian whimsicality of non- or anti-appearance is replaced by the Mallarméan idea of beauty as a tribute to the ineffable, to absence.
QUARTETS. Favorite formation in Childs’s choreography, the first multiple of two. Among the short works choreographed for four dancers are Calico Mingling (1973), for four women, and Radial Courses, for two women and two men. In Relative Calm, the second section is for a quartet formation restocked several times from among eight dancers. Its sequel is the fourth section, which consists of two quartets, one of women and one of men.
RELATIVE CALM. 1981. The second of Childs’s evening-length productions. Music by Jon Gibson, decor and lighting by Robert Wilson. Ninety-five minutes, a prologue and four sections, for nine dancers. Though not so labeled, the sections make up one of the traditional four-part sequences, The Times of Day. This is the Symbolic-Romantic version of the subject—Runge rather than Hogarth. Prologue: a star backdrop and the moon swinging pendulum-like in front of the dancers sitting in diagonal formation in carpets of light. The first section, “Rise,” is early dawn—the dancers are in identical white jumpsuits; at the end, the stage brightens and the stars blanch out. “Race” is day; the dancers are in beige; it contains an homage to the quotidian, in the form of some inane sentences projected on the cyclorama and the brief appearance of a live dog. “Reach,” the solo, is twilight—the stars start to come out—and both stage and cyclorama are cut diagonally, with half of the stage and half of the cyclorama in shadow, and Childs, in black, dancing in a diagonal wedge of light. “Return,” with the dancers in royal blue, is starry, electric night. The conceit of the times of day evolved in conversations between Childs and Wilson; Childs invented the titles of the four sections, whose function was both to convey and to obscure a little the literalness of the scenic underpinning supplied by Wilson’s set and lighting.
REPETITION. Childs’s early notion of repetition, in the sprightly “silent” dances of the 1970s: dancers using the same steps or families
of movements, going in and out of sync with each other. The notion becomes more complex in Childs’s solo in Einstein on the Beach: repetition as an accumulation of effects, as layering. (Versus the repetition-as-reinterpretation of Patio.) Strictly speaking, there is of course no repetition in Childs’s work, but rather a certain strict use of thematic materials, which are first stated and then gradually modified at a different rate of change (more evenly, not expressionistically) than audiences are accustomed to. In contrast to Wilson’s Judson-derived dynamics of slow movement, thin difference, low-contrast change, Childs’s work since the late 1970s has a greater density of movement, fast rhythms and few tableaux. (Whereas Wilson’s work tends naturally to take long forms, Childs’s work is only gradually assuming them.) Though usually presented as cool choice, repetition always suggests perfectionist zeal. Rainer in 1966 defended repetition because it makes movement appear “more objectlike”—more matter-of-fact, neutral, unemphatic. But repetition is also a method for inducing bliss. Repetition is a technique that seems to suggest simplicity, that in principle enhances legibility or intelligibility. (Rainer: “literally making the material easier to see.”) A way of ordering material associated with the idea of the minimal, it could more accurately be called the modern maximalism: repetition as exhaustive patterning; the exhausting of possibilities. Far from making material neutral, repetition has a vertiginous effect, as in much of Childs’s recent work—duplications, mirrorings, that are the kinetic equivalent of the static mise-en-abîme. See DOUBLING.
ROMANTIC. The “classical” tradition in dance is Romantic, so a neo-classical idiom in dance will inevitably be, in a restrained key, neo-Romantic. (But even this restraint is appropriate. Romantic art is, above all, self-conscious and critical.) The play of ghost, shadow, doppelgänger in Dance. The Pythagorean beauty of Relative Calm, with its allegorical underpinning: the Times of Day. (The contact with Wilson’s allegorizing sensibility and its innate affinities with a certain German Romanticism helped Childs move away from a dead-end puritanism in her own sensibility.) There are Romantic echoes in all the
work since 1979. In Dance, having two solo sections, one in black (“Dance #2”) and one in white (“Dance #4”), like Swan Lake’s Odile/Odette. In Available Light, the arrival of Childs in the corridor, like the Queen of the Wilis in Giselle. When Available Light was first presented—in July 1983, at the Châteauvallon Dance Festival in an open-air version, with no set and with the dancers in the company’s allpurpose touring costumes, the white jumpsuits of the first section of Relative Calm—one saw the choreography in its naked state: without white tutus but very much a ballet blanc.
SOLOS. Childs choreographs for herself differently than she does for the rest of the company. As a soloist she gives herself a wider range of dynamic changes, more evolution in the material (rather than in space). There are two lengthy solos in Dance, one in Relative Calm. In Available Light, which is not divided into separate sections, Childs functions more as a member of the ensemble, less as a soloist. Still, she is separate—in white, when most of the dancers are in red or black. Although she has no solo section as such where she appears alone onstage, she is the only dancer who comes and goes. The rest of the company remains onstage for the entire fifty-five minutes (except for one brief pause when the music downshifts and all ten go off, then return). From her early solos, with their theme of the absent or disappearing performer, to her privileged comings and goings in Available Light, Childs’s solo presence—grave, hieratic, not wholly expressive—invokes both presence and absence.
SPACE. Dancers are travelers, “space eaters” (Childs’s words), using up a given space in a patterned, comprehensive way. (An early didactic solo, Particular Reel, 1973, in which Childs covers the stage in ten rows from right to left and then in ten rows from left to right, ending at the point where she started, is a model demonstration of the project of using up space.) The more space the better. Dancers are pulled along a line; and their relations are conceived as parallel or perpendicular. Dancers are always, indefatigably, going somewhere. In a state of non-imploring urgency, they never stop; though they may go into
movement-absence, they do so in order to repopulate the space. When dancers “drop out,” others come in.
TITLES. After the capers of the mid-1960s, titles have been sober: usually two words, adjective and noun; often a structure or pattern word with a movement word, as in Checkered Drift, Calico Mingling, Reclining Rondo, Transverse Exchanges, Radial Courses. A favorite title form is a contradiction, an oxymoron—one that, in recent works, suggests the paradoxes of self-control: Relative Calm, Formal Abandon. Or a stylish appreciation of the possible: Available Light.
UNAVAILABLE. Dance is about the absent or unavailable object of desire.
VOLITION. The more formal dance is shown to be, the weaker the possible attributions of volition. Dancers in formations—all this mirroring, duplicating, and inverting of movement removes the impression of subjectivity. So does the neutral performance mask—the fact that the dancers don’t look at each other, or at the audience. (The effect is comparable to the anti-acting style favored by Bresson.) Dancers stop because they are being rearranged or repatterned, not because of any emotion or volition. To substitute rules or patterns—Kleist imagined them as mechanisms—for subjectivity in demeanor and movement is the prerequisite of grace. But the dancers are anything but automata.
WORLD. Dance, since the Romantics, has been about a phantom world. Childs’s counts, like the tiny dots of color in the paintings of Seurat, are the building blocks of an art of phantom presences. Things which both are and are not: the moment of plenitude is an evocation of absence; pleasure—as in La Grande Jatte—is shown as rigidity, restraint.
YEARNING. The body in diagonal is a pose of outreach, hailing; of longing—for space itself. However large, the stage is never large enough. Childs’s choreography projects onto the finite stage an infinitely large space or territory. Her love of space produces movements
and structures—among them, the modalities of repetition—that seem choreographic equivalents of Zeno’s arguments (called paradoxes) on the subject of motion, according to which, since any line is infinitely divisible, and will be made up of an infinite number of units, each of which has some magnitude, every finite line or space is in fact infinitely great; and, despite appearances, no moving object ever traverses any distance at all.
ZENO’S TERRITORY. Childs’s early, provisional title for the work now known as Available Light.
[1983]