Lucinda Childs Brings Light to Lincoln Center

July 19, 2018

This past Friday, I had the pleasure of seeing Available Light, the epic evening-length work that is a collaboration among Lucinda Childs (choreography), John Adams (music), and Frank Gehry (stage design). It was programmed for two shows (alas, only two!) as a part of Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, and performed at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

The work was originally commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1983 as a site-specific work in a structure associated with the museum but not the museum itself, which was under construction at the time. In a pre-show talk between Ms. Childs and former Director of Programming at The Joyce Theater, Martin Wechsler, Ms. Childs explained that Julie Lazar, the founding curator of the museum, proposed the idea of a collaborative, cross-disciplinary project to Ms. Childs. Ms. Childs herself had the idea to work with Mr. Adams and Mr. Gehry, artists who happened to be on Ms. Lazar’s list of prospective collaborators. Ms. Childs remembered that while neither was particularly well-known on the East Coast, both were known in “certain circles,” and known to her.

The three created and presented the work in a large space in LA that Ms. Childs recalled had been a warehouse for repairing police cars. The large skylights lining the edge of the roof account for the title of the piece.

Mr. Wechsler asked compelling questions, including one about the relationship between the dancers on the top stage and those on the bottom. He wondered whether the audience should read that the two sets of dancers were aware of their relationship to one another. Ms. Childs deflected the question. Sitting with ramrod posture and dressed, elegantly, in white pants and crisp white top with an accenting patterned scarf, Ms. Childs answered Mr. Wechsler deliberately, and warmed over the course of the interview, obviously enjoying the opportunity to recall the genesis of the piece. Available Light is as formal as Ms. Childs was in this pre-show conversation.

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Available Light is a true epic, and I feel lucky to have seen the work live. As my friend and dance colleague mentioned post-show, “I think [Ms. Childs] is the most brilliant person in the world,” which may be a hyperbolic statement, but only just.

My mother (who was my date) and I agreed that the mystery and surprise elements of the piece were among its most compelling characteristics. As is typical and distinctive of Ms. Childs’s choreography, the 11 dancers (four dressed in black, another four in red, and a shifting three in white) repeat a number of phrases in seemingly never-ending variations–in different directions, on different levels (the set features a two-level stage of Mr. Gehry’s design), in different groups, slower, faster, with changing lighting. My mother remarked that as soon as she thought she had noticed the pattern (“Oh, it’s the red-clad dancers together! Oh, it’s men dancing together! Oh, it’s the short women dancing together!”), it had transformed again. There is both an excitement and genius to the ever-evolving nature of the repeated phrases. It is both hypnotizing and stimulating to watch. The steps are duplicated again and again, but the space is reshaped and reused and expanded, as the sequencing of these steps continuously shifts. As with the shuffling of a deck of cards, one never knows what Ms. Childs will come up with next.

Ms. Childs is undoubtedly a master of theme and variations, but beyond this element, which creates the intriguing mystery and surprise of Available Light, the aspect of the work that most captivates me is the simultaneous synchronicity and diversity of the dancers. The group of dancers performing this piece, most of whom have been working with Ms. Childs for at least ten years, is a heterogeneous collection. They vary greatly in height and physique, but are still able to move as seamlessly and flawlessly as a corps de ballet, if not more so. Unlike in a ballet, this corps is the main action; they aren’t flanking or supporting the principal dancers downstage.

While the dancers never touch one another, as is typical in Ms. Childs’s work, they certainly have relationships with one another–in fact, they have multiple and complex relationships with one another, which are explored through the choreography. The dancers must be thinking constantly about their spacing in relation to those around them: am I in line with the person next to me, with the person diagonal from me, with the person behind me? Am I evenly spaced from the others to create a beautiful pattern in that space, and am I dancing in perfect unison with those whose steps I share in this moment? The intense focus that is required of the dancers to remain in the correct place in space, while doing the correct steps at the correct second, is truly remarkable. The musical score often does not lend itself to counts or cues, so the feat is all the more exceptional.

Yet another relationship that Ms. Childs explores with bodies in space is that between the dancers on the upper stage and those on the lower. The piece begins with dancers in white dancing above. They are almost spectral, like angels or ghosts, mirroring the steps of those below, without glancing down to ensure that they are in time. As the piece progresses, other dancers ascend and descend the staircases to dance on the upper level. They are isolated above, sometimes easier to view than the dancers below, but there does not seem to be a power dynamic between those who occupy the high stage and the low stage. Rather, the higher stage is another way for the dancers to use and take up the vast expanse of the stage. It is visually arresting.

The world that Ms. Childs and her collaborators create onstage is almost like a utopia; at least, it’s an idealist’s version: a group of diverse people united in a common endeavor to craft something beautiful that is larger than, and beautiful because of, each of its distinct parts. The dance is a celebration of this vision too. The piece concludes with a triumphant, bright unison phrase. As is typical of Ms. Childs’s vocabulary, the port de bras and lower body movements are expansive, despite their containment. The second position of the arms in Ms. Childs’s choreography is less rounded than in the traditional ballet vocabulary; the dancers’ arms reach further outward almost to their full wing span, creating close to a 90 degree angle with their torsos. In their grand jetés, the dancers skim the floor, jumping outward; their legs are somewhat lower than in a ballet grand jeté, but the jumps seem to reach further forward. Through these outward gestures and movements, the dancers take up space in an exhilarating way, made even more exhilarating in the finale by the whole group’s perfect synchronicity: all of these bodies moving through and taking up space in the same expansive shapes! There was even a moment in this concluding section in which I caught one of the dancers smiling. Though the dancers throughout appear to have no emotion expressed on their faces, the exaltation of the ending was infectious, even for those participating in the movement, who had certainly danced the same steps countless times before. I left the theater with a feeling of warmth, and positivity for the future–something that seems harder and harder to access in our current climate.

If this piece is revived elsewhere at any other time, I urge you to see it. As Mr. Wechsler remarked at the conclusion of the pre-show chat, Ms. Childs “brings beauty into this world,” and we could use more of that.

Other than the chance to see the piece performed live again, my only other wish is to see it recorded two-dimensionally on paper, or to watch it from above, to see the way in which Ms. Childs creates patterns from that vantage point as well. Although there is no mathematical sequence or algorithm for the way that Ms. Childs creates the work–Mr. Wechsler asked her outright about this–there is something completely rational and orderly about it. In addition to beauty, Ms. Childs gives us, in Available Light, respite from the chaos that we often experience in our daily lives.