Guest performance
13.9.2022, Kino Šiška
Choreography: Lucinda Childs
Staging: Ty Boomershine
Alternate cast: Ty Boomershine, Anna Herrmann, Emma Lewis, Gesine Moog, Omagbitse Omagbemi, Lia Witjes-Poole, Alba Barral Fernandez, Javier Arozena
Costume design: Alexandra Sebbag
Lighting design: Martin Beeretz
Tour lighting design: Vito Walter
Sound: Mattef Kuhlmey
Tour coordination: Simone Graf / Hélène Philippot
Distribution: Danila-Freitag Agency for the Performing Arts
Production: Dance On / DIEHL+RITTER
Co-production: STUK – House for Dance, Image and Sound / Münchner Kammerspiele
With the support of: Doppelpass Fund of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation), Ministry of Public Administration
Presented within DANCE ON PASS ON DREAM ON with EU support
Organization in Ljubljana: Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia and Kino Šiška (CoFestival)
In 2018, CoFestival hosted the choreographer’s niece Ruth Childs, who, together with her ensemble, presented some of Lucinda Childs’s earliest works under the collective title Early Works of Lucinda Childs. This time, a series of works created by the choreographer in the 1970s was presented by the Dance On Ensemble, staged by Ty Boomershine—former assistant to Lucinda Childs, dancer, and artistic director of Dance On. The evening bore the title Works in Silence and included, for the first time in Slovenia, Untitled Trio I (1968, 1973), Congeries on Edges for Twenty Obliques (1975), Untitled Trio II (1973), and Radial Courses (1976). The solo Katema (1978) was shown again after 2018, this time in a different interpretation.
Review: https://odrisca.si/2022/09/16/harmonija-molcecih/
Dance On Ensemble was founded in 2015 as a project of the Berlin-based non-profit organization Diehl+Ritter. Its creation was motivated by the recognition that Western dance systems tend to exclude dancers on the basis of age, and that youth is treated as an exclusive and overvalued criterion. The ensemble—composed of prominent figures from contemporary dance and ballet, along with personal decisions that it is still too early for dance retirement—has expanded over the years. Its repertoire reveals a desire not only to engage with canonized works of contemporary dance, but also to pursue bold experimental approaches to dance and choreography.
As a result, the constellation of choreographic and artistic names featured in the Dance On Ensemble’s repertoire over seven years is strikingly diverse: Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, Lucinda Childs, William Forsythe, Deborah Hay, Ivana Müller, Jan Martens, Rabih Mroué, Mathilde Monnier, Tim Etchells, Ivo Dimchev, among others. Artistic director Ty Boomershine—also known as a former dancer in Lucinda Childs’s company, where he worked for years as her assistant—curates the ensemble’s repertoire as a carefully selected collection of works that have shaped the history of American and European contemporary dance, ensuring freshness and unusual challenges while also inviting today’s creators to collaborate.
In this way, Dance On Ensemble provides contemporary dance with an expanded public lifespan, a characteristic shared with other projects by Diehl+Ritter, including the European project DANCE ON PASS ON DREAM ON. Dance On Ensemble first appeared in Slovenia at CoFestival 2018 with the duet Elephant (2018), created by the renowned Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué. In May 2023, the ensemble returned to Slovenia to perform at Cankarjev dom with Jan Martens’s choreography any attempt will end in crushed bodies and shattered bones.
Lucinda Childs (born 1940) belongs to the generation of choreographers who brought American contemporary dance of the twentieth century to its peak. With a strong background in the neo-avant-garde dance experiments of the 1960s—developed within the emblematic Judson Dance Theater—and with knowledge that could scarcely have been more effectively acquired anywhere else than in New York in the mid-twentieth century, Lucinda Childs developed, during the 1970s, a series of choreographic compositions that remain strikingly effective, fresh, and continually surprising today due to their concision, abstraction, and complexity. They give no indication of being fifty years old.
Built solely from the most fundamental materials of dance—the movement of human bodies—and extremely restrained in their use of other spectacular elements, these works feel as fresh today as they did in the 1970s.
Among American postmodern choreographers, Lucinda Childs was the first to successfully transition from experimental spaces to large theatrical stages soon after the late 1960s, and eventually to break through in Europe, where she has created the majority of her work over recent decades. Yet it was precisely in the 1970s that she distilled, through her kinetic language, a crystallization of dance time—an abstraction of dance art. Her works, with their modernist kinetic architecture, contain a substantial measure of baroque compositional mathematics: an abstraction of the dancing body. Perhaps this is why audiences around the world never tire of Lucinda Childs’s choreographic works.
“My career began in the 1960s with the Judson Dance Theater, founded by two of my contemporaries, Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton. This group sought to expand the vocabulary of dance beyond what one usually imagines as a dance vocabulary—in other words, we aimed to incorporate movements from everyday life into dance. The choreographies I created at that time were—at least as I would describe them—completely conceptual. They were conceived, for example, around spoken text; movements approached and moved away from the context of speech, and I also used objects.
Today, I no longer use either text or objects in my work. I would say I have made a huge turn, in the sense that things in my work have become much simpler. Nevertheless, the movement we see in my current works originates from that early period. We see walking, we see very simple movement. Dance technique is certainly still involved, as I am a professionally trained dancer in modern dance techniques, but in my current works I seek to exclude any development of content [story].
I am interested in extremely simple movement materials and in ways of organizing them so that the viewer can perceive them from a different perspective at any given moment. It is a question of how to prevent the viewer from seeing anything in only one single way. A dance phrase changes very gradually. There are no strong contrasts in movement, but rather barely perceptible ones. Thus, these choreographic works remain within a very limited content framework, yet allow us to experience a multitude of transformations—in terms of the use of time and space.
I think the beginnings of this artistic movement date back to the early twentieth century, when avant-garde art arrived in New York. The dance movement I refer to began in the 1960s. Today, I no longer consider my work avant-garde; I am simply one choreographer among many. It is no longer important to me that people see me as an artist who departs from tradition. I simply make dances, and no artistic label particularly attracts me. I would like people to understand them as dances, because that is exactly what they are. They are not intended to be didactic, nor do they aim to depart from any academic tradition known to us today. To be honest, they even seem a little classical to me [a shy smile].”