Lucinda Childs and Parcours.

Celebrating a quarter century of the route less taken

Lucinda Childs has chosen the title Parcours for her company's show October 11, 13-15 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival. Parcours is a French word meaning the route, the trip or the journey. And it's intensely reflective of the fact that despite a packed career in the borderless worlds of dance, opera and theater, and despite her stature as one of the most admired avant-garde performer-choreographers of the postmodern generation, Childs is better known in Europe than in her native land.

It's a not-unfamiliar state of affairs for modern dancers in the United States, harkening back a century to artists such as Loie Fuller and Isadora Duncan.

The Lucinda Childs Dance Company last appeared in New York at the Joyce Theater in 1994. "The company still was touring, but it was very difficult to keep it together because there was no funding for general expenses. I disbanded the company in 1995. We had only enough money to keep the office going," Childs said a few months ago in Paris.

Although she started her company in 1973, making 1998 the official year for its silver anniversary, her upcoming New York performances were planned as the culmination of a six-month twenty-fifth anniversary celebration that began last spring in Europe.

Childs has spent the last five years abroad, choreographing, teaching and performing. But she did make a significant foray back to the United States for a commission premiered by the Martha Graham Company in February 1999. Histoire, a duet for Terese Capucilli and Peter Roel set to music by Krzysztof Knittel, was described as "very fine" by New York Times reviewer Anna Kisselgoff.

By last year, Childs had raised enough money to fund her own twenty-fifth anniversary celebration. Two hundred dancers showed up for her auditions in New York. She picked nine of them to join company veterans Garry Reigenborn and Maria de Lourdes Davila plus former Mark Morris dancer Keith Sabado. The current troupe numbers twelve plus Childs--who, at 60, is still a central presence on stage.

The program she brings to BAM includes the same works she presented in Europe: From the White Edge of Phrygia (1995), music by Stephen Montague; Commencement (1995), music by Zygmunt Krauze; Concerto (1993), music by Henryk Gorecki, and Variete de Variete (2000), plus two additional works. Radial Courses (1976) is performed by a quartet of men to no score other than the sounds of their feet, and Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector, choreographed for her students at the Conservatoire National de Paris in 1998 and revised for her company this year, is set to music by Terry Riley. The works will be presented without an intermission, one piece flowing into another like the passage of time.

The Childs troupe opened its twenty-fifth anniversary tour at the Theatre de la Ville in Pads. She and her dancers mesmerized the audience that packed the 2,000-seat auditorium with its raked seats tumbling down to the edge of the stage.

Childs appeared twice during the evening--first in a four-minute solo, Commencement, moving erect along a diagonal line, a path she has blazed on stage in the past. She was dressed by Ronaldus Shamask and Suzanne Gallo in an up-to-the-minute black, one piece pants costume that suggested a billowing skirt, topped by a flowing scarf. The outfit emphasized the fashion-model look that she has never shed. In a recurrent gesture, one arm reached up with a flourish to allow a quick turn of her body around itself.

Her second appearance came during the finale, the world premiere of Variete de Variete, with music by Mauricio Kagel. Childs danced among the members of her company in footwork that looked as if it had been inspired by a music-hall variety show. Like the other six women, Childs, in her short gray jumper and black blouse designed by Gabriel Berry, looked like a Parisian child on her way to school.

At the end of the concert, the audience jumped to its feet, clapping, cheering, stamping. The fans' age range suggested an audience for a rock band rather than for a choreographer who started her professional life in the downtown lofts and church halls of New York.

Later, on its spring and early-summer tour of France, the company attracted the same kind of audiences. "When we performed at the new, modern theater in Valenciennes, the audiences were very young," Childs said. "The sponsors were happy. They were worried, not sure that dance would attract audiences, and it did. It was reassuring and nice that the houses were full. It gave you the feeling that it could happen again someday. We won't say when," Childs said cautiously.

Born in 1940, Childs grew up on New York City's Upper East Side. She began her own parcours in her teens, studying with Hanya Holm, Helen Tamiris and Mia Slavenska before entering Sarah Lawrence College as a dance major. There, she trained under Bessie Schonberg as well as Merce Cunningham. A year after graduating from Sarah Lawrence, she joined the Judson Dance Theatre in Greenwich Village, creating her first solo pieces in 1963 as an original member of the troupe, also performing in works by Robert Morris, Steve Paxton and Yvonne Rainer. Childs's Judson days ended in 1966 when she moved to the upper West Side of New York, making a new circle of friends that included visual artists Larry Poons, Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella and Barnett Newman.

By 1973, when she founded her company, her work was grounded in a presentational mode that depended on the stage environment of lighting and decors as well as the movement phrases. Childs's pristine form of choreography became directed toward collaborations deep within the community of artists that had so keenly influenced her.

Her early association with the director Robert Wilson instantly placed her in the international avant-garde. Wilson cast her in his landmark staging of the opera Einstein On The Beach in 1976. It was revived at BAM in 1984 (and again in 1992) with Childs recreating her role and staging Field Dances, choreographed for the original Einstein by Andrew de Groat.

In 1974, Childs bought the studio loft at 541 Broadway, where she continues to live and rehearse when she's in New York. The building is also home to Trisha Brown, Douglas Dunn, David Gordon and Valda Setterfield. Within a decade, these relatively unknown downtown dancemakers became the leaders of the postmodern generation. And within those few years, Childs had created the great works that made her reputation, Dance (1979), Relative Calm (1981) and Available Light (1983). She enlisted help from some of the most important composers and artists of the time: composers Philip Glass and John Adams, painter Sol LeWitt, architect Frank Gehry and lighting director Beverly Emmons, among many others.

Childs's choreography was described as minimalist because of the limited vocabulary of steps, but it was anything but spare. In their imaginative positioning, inversions, repeats and phrasing that progressed in detailed increments, the dances took on a glistening fascination, allowing audiences to focus on the majesty of movement within a context of space, light and music. For each of the dances, Childs drew scores that stand on their own as works of art: intricate lines, arrows and circles spread out in delicate script on large sheets of graph paper.

From the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties, Childs kept the company going but also took on a number of outside projects, setting works on companies in the United States and in Europe, Finding work on her own was never a problem--at least in Europe, where she has been much in demand by avant-garde directors. She choreographed the "Dance of the Seven Veils" for Luc Bondy's production of the opera Salome, which premiered in Salzburg in 1992, and worked with Peter Stein on De Nederlander Opera's production of Schoenberg's opera Moses und Aron in 1995. That same year, Childs directed her first opera, Mozart's Zaide, for La Monnaie Opera House in Brussels, Belgium. She spent 1996 and 1997 as an actress, touring in Wilson's stage production of Marguerite Duras's La Maladie de la Mort opposite French actor Michel Piccoli. In 1998, she created an "American evening" with students of the Conservatoire National de Paris at the Cite de la Musique, a new concert hall. The French government honored Childs in 1996 with an appointment to the rank of Officier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Childs's recent works have evolved into something different from the severe, geometric patterns of the past. Variete de Variete is more decorated, filled with allusions to recognizable dance forms--a tango, an apache dance--with even the hint of a specific milieu. "I wanted to make something different for a new company, not like the pieces they were learning. I like music that pushes me in different directions," she said. She has given up plotting out the dances on paper. Instead, "I count out the musical score. It's very tricky."

Childs returns to Europe after the BAM performances to complete a new work (music by John Adams) for Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, to be premiered in December, and another for Bayerisches Staatsballett, Munich. These will be her second pieces for the respective companies. She is pleased about a commission from Mikhail Baryshnikov that will bring her back home: a solo and a new company work for the White Oak Project. "I'll be glad to be back in the United States, working with American dancers," Childs said. "We worked very hard to find enough touring and support for a full six-month contract for the dancers in my company, through the end of the BAM performances. It's difficult when you look at what's happening, the Graham company closing, the fact that the only way Merce can survive is with bookings.

"There should be other support," she added. "I don't want to spend my life as a fund-raiser. But I can't imagine giving up the United States and staying in Europe full-time."

Iris Fanger is a Dance Magazine contributing editor.