At 85, Lucinda Childs is still trotting the globe. After coming through the Berliner Festspiele to premiere ‘Four New Works’ in December, the pioneering American minimalist returns for her second collaboration with the Dance On Ensemble to premiere Stein, a meditation on global ecology inspired by Gertrude Stein, at Radialsystem, along with reviving three pieces from her ‘Works in Silence’ series from the 1970s.
Featuring Childs’ own 22-minute reading from Stein’s play Photograph. A Play in Five Acts, the new piece, performed by Childs and the dancer Miki Orihara, offers an experience of multimedia dance theatre from one of its greatest living practitioners. Childs spoke with The Berliner about her process of creation, her reading of Stein and the pulse of her work a half-century after its premiere.
Where did you begin with Stein?
I began working with [artist and composer] Hans Peter Kuhn, who’s based in Berlin, many years ago. We did a project together with a text by Susan Sontag, for which he also made a whole score of me recording her text. And this is similar. In this case, we chose a text by Gertrude Stein. It’s an excerpt from A Play in Five Acts, a beautiful, very short text that we’re using for a 22-minute piece. And he’s also done a soundscape and a videoscape, for which he’s travelled around the world and filmed different oceans. We’ve been using this as part of our production, which is not really a political statement, but it’s drawing attention to this incredible planet and its possible future, which could be shorter than anyone thinks.
How do you think about the relationship between the movement of dancers and the moving images on stage?
I would never start without the music and without the video scenography, without knowing exactly what’s happening when the ocean is in motion or when the ocean is still. There are all kinds of very subtle elements that you see throughout the piece. And I do as much preparation as I can visually, notes and paper, and then go into the studio. That’s where things happen, where I think, ‘Oh, this is going to work or this is not going to work.’ You come out with a lot of surprises, because once you’re in the space with the dancer and with the material, things happen and it takes you to a place you didn’t expect.
Often, one thinks of Gertrude Stein as a writer whose work calls attention to the materiality of language – much as your work has called attention to the physicality of the dancer’s body. Do you see a similarity between her work and yours?
You could do this text in multiple ways, which is exactly what I do. I do it in a perfectly straightforward way, and then I do it in a way that the sarcasm comes through, and then there’s a way that’s questioning what’s happening. I have recorded the text for Hans Peter and it’s also integrated into the sound. So, Stein can be interpreted in many different ways, I think. And it doesn’t have to be consistent. In this particular case, it’s not going to be consistent. And sometimes my voice is asking a question and my voice is answering the question at the same time, or contradicting it.
What does it mean to see your ‘Works in Silence’ pieces from 50 years ago at this moment in time?
I said to Ty [Boomershine, artistic director of Dance On Ensemble], ‘When I do a programme, sometimes I do one of the 60s and one of the 70s,’ and he said, ‘Why don’t you do all of the 70s?’ I said, ‘Oh, no, that would be so demanding for an audience to watch.’ And yet when we were in Barcelona, his company was doing this and it was amazing. First of all, the company is amazing, but they performed all of the ‘Works in Silence’ – a whole programme, not just Radial Courses and Interior Drama, but including Untitled Trio. And it was really amazing. He convinced me this is interesting for people to see, and people don’t feel necessarily that it’s dated – and that’s a nice feeling. People get into it and see the rigor and the shared pulse of the dancers. You know, if someone’s off, everybody’s off.
- Stein, July 24-27, Radialsystem, English
