Lucinda Childs
10 May - 08 Nov 2009
Installation view of Lucinda Childs: Dance (May 10 – October 11, 2009) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. (L-R) Dance, 1979: performed by Ballet du Rhin at Theatre de La Ville, Paris, 2001; Nathaniel Tileston Dance #4, 1979: collection of Lucinda Childs; Sol Lewitt Dance #4, 1979: collection of Lucinda Childs; Nathaniel Tileston Dance #3, 1979: collection of Lucinda Childs; Sol Lewitt Dance #3, 1979: collection of Lucinda Childs. Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins
LUCINDA CHILDS
"Dance"
May 10–November 8, 2009
Within the collection galleries this summer is Lucinda Childs: Dance, bringing together for the first time material that choreographer Lucinda Childs, composer Philip Glass, and artist Sol LeWitt generated for Dance, commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1979. Glass’s musical score formed the framework for Childs’s choreography, to which LeWitt responded by creating a 35mm black-and-white film of the dancers performing passages selected from each of three dances. The materials on display include drawings by Childs; three large storyboard diagrams by LeWitt related to the making of the film for Dance; the original score by Glass for ‘Dance # I’; black and white photographs from the first performance of Dance in 1979 by Nathaniel Tileston; and a video of a performance of Dance in Paris in 1991. Seen together, the material reveals the working process behind a unique performative collaboration by three key figures.
Though rarely performed, Dance has been remounted by the Richard B. Fisher Center at Bard College with a complete restoration of Sol LeWitt’s work on film, which comprises the work’s decor and with which the dancers seamlessly interact. Dance will tour with a new company of eleven dancers under Childs’s direction.
"Dance"
May 10–November 8, 2009
Within the collection galleries this summer is Lucinda Childs: Dance, bringing together for the first time material that choreographer Lucinda Childs, composer Philip Glass, and artist Sol LeWitt generated for Dance, commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1979. Glass’s musical score formed the framework for Childs’s choreography, to which LeWitt responded by creating a 35mm black-and-white film of the dancers performing passages selected from each of three dances. The materials on display include drawings by Childs; three large storyboard diagrams by LeWitt related to the making of the film for Dance; the original score by Glass for ‘Dance # I’; black and white photographs from the first performance of Dance in 1979 by Nathaniel Tileston; and a video of a performance of Dance in Paris in 1991. Seen together, the material reveals the working process behind a unique performative collaboration by three key figures.
Though rarely performed, Dance has been remounted by the Richard B. Fisher Center at Bard College with a complete restoration of Sol LeWitt’s work on film, which comprises the work’s decor and with which the dancers seamlessly interact. Dance will tour with a new company of eleven dancers under Childs’s direction.