Moving Pictures: Lucinda Childs at the Joyce Theater, New York City

After avant-garde pioneer Merce Cunningham’s death this year, the question of how to preserve an artistic legacy is more immediate than ever for the dance community. The image presented by Lucinda Childs in “Dance,” revived in the Joyce Theater this fall, is a graceful and moving picture of how dance legacies will live on—not necessarily in the original form they were conceived—but nonetheless they live on, and on.

As Philip Glass’ exhilarating and intricate score starts up, Sol LeWitt’s film of the first production of this piece begins projecting on a transparent screen. Behind their projected counterparts, Childs’ dancers leap, glide, and spin across the stage, executing the same steps as in the original production. As they chase the ghostly shadows of their counterparts of 1979, what is produced is a doubled work that takes place in two different points in space and time—watching this unfold is thrilling, one feels clairvoyant and powerful.

The piece begins with pairs of dancers doing sequences of leaps and turns across the stage. Each pair is followed by another pair that does variations on the same phrases. Then the piece builds up in complexity; another pair comes in the opposite direction. They crisscross each other; their onscreen shadows follow likewise. The dancers begin to shift their fronts at a more erratic pace, so it almost seems that they are moving directionless even as their movements are completely directed. Suddenly one is aware of the sheer movement and the number of bodies that floods the stage. Yet like the patterns on a lace lattice, these sequences have been woven together another deliberately and artfully. They refuse to dissolve into chaos, but form an organized intricacy that is both mesmerizing as it is maddening. I almost want them to stop: these intersecting lines—on their own, so elementary, but when put together so overwhelming and dazzling—are too much to take in at once.

But “Dance” continues. It's as though Childs is trying to use our discomfort to drum in her point: the legacy of dance keeps going on. It continues to influence, inform and guide others into the future—just as Childs’ sequences keep repeating, recurring, evolving. One gets the sense that even as the pairs leap behind the wings, the dance doesn’t stop.

The differences we see between the dancers onscreen and the actual dancers on stage shouldn’t be seen as a sign of the legacy gone astray. Perhaps this should be an indication that dance techniques move with their times. At some moments the lines on stage seem too sleek, too controlled. There is something about the 1979 dancers captured on film that have a greater softness, fluidity, and unpredictability about them. They aren't in time, they're a little more raw about the edges, more willing to take risks in balance and timing—strangely, they emerge more lifelike than the actual dancers onstage. At one point, one notices gender subversions—the dancer shadowing the female dancer on stage is male—and we are reminded of the egalitarian nature of Childs’ dance that continues into today. There is something reassuring about the mixture of similarity and difference as our eyes move between the projected images to the actual images. Here is repetition with a difference--and the difference suggests that this legacy is an animated one, not the dead, mechanistic repetition of digital copies.

When youthful Childs emerges in “Dance II”, towering over her double, Caitlin Scranton, we are aware of the largeness of the Lucinda Childs legacy that Scranton is expected to fill in. Both of them spin—in collusion, but also in competition. Scranton spins with a certain frenetic hysteria, while her antagonist maintains her coolness. The onscreen Childs seems invincible, the “mixture of angel and alien” that Joan Acocella writes of—till she emerges in the flesh.

In “Largo,” the real Childs reappears again. At age 69, she no longer exudes the same electricity as the larger-than-life Childs. On a dim stage, she does freewheeling spins that are punctuated with awkward shakes on arms—here is the body that is organic, natural, fallible and mortal. Here is the body that asks her dancers to take on what she cannot keep doing, to make her art keep going on, and on, and on.

This was part of my final project on the history of dance criticism in the US.