Dancer-choreographer Lucinda Childs was internationally acclaimed for the premiere ofEinstein on the Beach at the Festival d'Avignon in 1976, as was composer Philip Glass.

At the time, both were confined to New York's underground experimental scene. His solo, " Danse en diagonale "in the first act of the opera, which will be indelibly remembered as a manifesto for the minimalist dance she had just invented.

In perfect symbiosis with the composer's music and Bob Wilson's staging, this dance claims to "explore, to attempt all the possible variations offered by a simple choreographic phrase" until the possibilities are exhausted. Endlessly pacing the stage in an unflappable diagonal back-and-forth movement, the dancer's extraordinary stamina enables her to modify her small gestures down to the minutest detail: movement of the hands, arms, neck, head, eyes... The eye always has something to notice, to detect, to observe in this infinity of options, this gestural ostinato of perpetual difference. This track will remain the choreographer's credo for all future shows.

lucinda childs

Lucinda Childs studied with Bessie Schönberg and Merce Cunningham. The latter immersed her early on in the multidisciplinary world of the New York School, where she came into contact with composer John Cage and visual artists Jasper Jones, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Morris. In the sixties, she took part in the adventure of Post-modern Dance within the Judson Dance Theater, alongside Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown, dancing on the roofs of buildings, in the street or in churches. She herself puts on highly experimental shows, deliberately turned towards the avant-garde and happening, marked by the stamp of John Cage. Everything is called into question: the separations between dancers, choreographer and audience; classical gestures in favor of trivial everyday gestures; the relationship to narrative or even sentimental expression.

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After the initial success ofEinstein on the Beach, Lucinda Childs, who also wrote one of the libretto texts, followed Andy de Groat to choreograph all subsequent productions: 1984, 1992, 2012 and 2014. She continued her in-depth work on minimalism, achieving further success in 1979 with Dance, set to music by Philip Glass and projections by Sol LeWitt, an absolute benchmark that has been repeated many times since. 

Lucinda Childs and Philip Glass have a long history of collaboration: in November 2020, she staged and choreographed Akhnaten at the Opéra de Nice, the composer's third opera-portrait (1984), under the baton of Léo Warynski, directing the artists by videoconference from New York, in the midst of a health crisis. The show, saved in extremis by an online broadcast in the midst of confinement, will be programmed again for the 2021-2022 season.

Guillaume Kosmicki