national premiere
choreography:
Lucinda Childs
music: Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinskij
a collaboration between Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and Fabbrica Europa
The Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, in collaboration with Fabbrica Europa for the first time, presents the national premiere of Daphnis et Chloé, and Symphony of Psalms, Lucinda Childs's new creation for MaggioDanza. The dancers perform within an imposing set composed of numerous rotating structures and spirals that fill the height of the Leopolda. A glass screen, a sort of forth wall, filters the gaze of the spectator.
"Lucinda Childs's work results from an exceptionally coherent sensibility and possesses an extraordinary unity. It is visually authoritative work - an authority that lies, in part, in an absence of rhetoric. It develops from a rigorous rejection of dance clichés and of anything making for disjointed or fragmentary work. She refuses irony, flirtation with her public and the personality cult. Without a trace of, movements call attention to themselves and to their isolated effects. The beauty of her work is, above all, an art of rejection. In her first phase from 1963 to 1966, her work consisted of only 13 pieces, mostly solos. This was dance of non-movement, using objects and in some cases witty monologues that gave these pieces a Dadaist nonchalance, even though they were rigorously structured and solemnly executed. Improvisation was not used as a technique, nothing happened by chance - and yet the work always required a deftness (acrobatic for some performances) and a precise synchronisation. Untitled Trio (1968) consisted of ten minutes repeated three times, each for three dancers, without props, words or music. This piece marked a alteration in her dramatic tone and techniques. 'Found movement' and an ironic verbosity, inherited from the aesthetic of Duchamp, brought about a change. A change so radical that it could obscure the essentially exploratory nature of the first and second phases of Childs's work and the implicit unity of her formal concepts.
In her second phase of exploration between 1973 and 1978, she created sixteen pieces made up of solos and works for small ensembles. These works, all lasting between ten and thirteen minutes, explored relationships in space, similar to games. They were complex and impeccably rigorous, though using phrases of movement created from such simple actions as walking, jumping, running or turning. Six of these silent performances were the programme for her first appearance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1977, a space that went on to be the location for her US premieres for many years. Her third phase began in 1979 and cannot be defined by exploration: it consisted of long pieces, with greater dimensions and a greater formal ambition. She added music, scenery and costume to a dance vocabulary that was designed to bring her, on her own terms, back within the parameters of the dance world. In the pieces with a broad scope created from 1979 onwards - when Childs abandoned dance concerts for full dance productions - the addition of scenery was never solely decorative. Rather, it was always in harmony with a selected theme. The choice of decor functioned to enrich and add potential to the dance. The work of Childs is concerned with the love of dance. Much contemporary dance demonstrates a disdain for dance. In contrast, for Childs, dance is the art of euphoria. Her work starts with the idea that dance is above all a noble art."
Susan Sontag
Lucinda Childs began her career as a choreographer and performer in 1963, as an original member of the Judson Dance Theater in New York. After forming her own dance company in 1973, she collaborated with Robert Wilson and Philip Glass on Einstein on the Beach, participating as leading performer and choreographer. She also took part in its revivals in 1984, and 1992. In 1977 she performed opposite Wilson in his two-act play I Was Sitting On My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating, and in Wilson's 1987 production of Heiner Muller's Quartett. In 1996-97, she appeared in Wilson's production of La Maladie de la Mort by Marguerite Duras.
Since 1979 she has been collaborating with composers and designers including John Adams and Frank Gehry. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979 for Dance, with music by Philip Glass and scenography by Sol LeWitt. Since 1981 she has been receiving commissions from major ballet companies including the Paris Opéra Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Berlin Opera Ballet, Lyon Opéra Ballet and the Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo. She choreographed Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe for the Geneva Opera Ballet. In 1992 she also began to work on operatic productions, such as Luc Bondy's production of Richard Strauss's Salome for the Salzburg Festival (shown also at the Maggio Fiorentino) and Verdi's Macbeth for Scottish Opera. In 1995 she collaborated with Peter Stein on the De Nederlandse Opera production of Moïse und Aaron, and directed her first opera, Mozart's Zaïde, for La Monnaie in Brussels. She then choreographed The Chairman Dances for the Ballets de Monte-Carlo (2000) and Lohengrin, directed by Kent Nagano, for Los Angeles Opera (2001). She directed Orfeo e Euridice for Scottish Opera and the Los Angeles Opera (2002) and created Largo (2001) and Opus one with music by A. Berg (2003) for Baryshnikov. In 2004 she choreographed The Miraculous Mandarin for the Ballett der Deutschen Oper am Rhein and Parsifal at the Grand Théâtre de Genève. In 2005 she created The Firebird for MaggioDanza. In 2004 she was awarded the rank of Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government.
