From the White Edge of Phrygia.

LUCINDA CHILDS DANCE COMPANY THEATRE DE LA VILLE, PARIS NOVEMBER 21-25, 1995 REVIEWED BY ROSLYN SULCAS

The geometries in Lucinda Childs's work look inevitable but are never predictable. In From the White Edge of Phrygia, a new work for twelve dancers presented in Paris as part of the Festival d'Automne, Childs creates yet another spatially ordered, choreographically minimal dance that nonetheless constantly surprises by its swift invention. The work opens with the stage bathed in red light as two dancers enter--like mirror images--from opposite diagonal corners. Crossing, then circling one another with big jumps, legs swinging to their sides, they plunge into penchee as a second couple enters, and then a third, creating a canonical effect as the variation is repeated. As the stage fills up further, Childs spins elaborate webs of dance from corner to center, giving unusual dynamic accents to the even-paced, smoothed-out texture of her choreography.

Suddenly Stephen Montague's sonorous amplified rhythms quiet, the stage empties, and a black voile curtain descends. Three dancers, eerily immobile, emerge slowly from trapdoors at the front of the stage, then walk through slits in the voile to join the others. Walking in punctuated stop-start rhythms, the colored tops of their black body tights gleaming in a darkened light, they could be marking the some trajectories that they flew across at the outset of the work--as if Childs had slowed the `film' and shown it frame by frame. Then the three dancers walk back to the trapdoors, sink down, and the voile curtain goes up, revealing--as if nothing had happened--the same red light and the dancers smoothly traversing the stage with low jumps and turns.

This darker side of Childs--apparent for a moment in From the White Edge--is perhaps what gives her affectless, propulsive dances their curious resonance. Even as the performers seem like joyous angels who have no other purpose than to dance with free, unbounded grace, their repetitive, ceaseless movement also seems like a warding off of dangers (like only stepping on the cracks of paving stones, or counting steps).

This element is even more explicit in the curious solo Commencement (to jagged music by Zygmun Krauze) that Childs first presented at the 1995 Cannes International Dance Festival. As she stands on the edge of a circle of light, her arms thrash stiffly; her body turns abruptly as she strides from side to side, seemingly haunted by an invisible presence or unshakable memories. The return to the calm certainties of Concerto (1993)--the dancers moving silently and triumphantly through space as if they were dancing a divinely logical mathematical equation--only adds to the dream/nightmare quality of the preceding solo, and to the sense that Childs's perfect lines and circles are an almost pagan preventive rite.

The recent Kengir, created for the Avignon Festival in August 1995, displays a sense of community through an uncharacteristic use of partnering and touch. But whereas most other Childs works gloriously transcend the sum of their parts, Kengir remains a set of well-performed components.