Lucinda Childs: Dance

Lucinda Childs: Dance brings 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 #1; 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 was remounted in July 2009 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.

The exhibition is organized by Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator.