1962, New York: a group of avant-garde artists cre­ated the Jud­son Dance Thea­ter, which was to revo­lu­tion­ize the found­a­tions of mod­ern dance. Lucin­da Childs cre­ated her first solo, Car­na­tion, in 1964, a post­mod­ern mani­festo. Archives, images, con­ver­sa­tions and excerpts from shows will be com­bined to draw the por­trait of an icon­ic cho­reo­graph­er of con­tem­por­ary Amer­ic­an dance whose cre­ativ­ity nev­er ceases to sur­prise us. Between 1962 and 1966, the Jud­son Dance Thea­ter was a place where cho­reo­graph­ers, visu­al artists and musi­cians could cre­ate in a spir­it of total free­dom. Inspired by Merce Cun­nin­gham, Lucin­da Childs cre­ated her own cho­reo­graph­ic vocab­u­lary – a pen­du­lar motion of the arms, a pros­ody of steps, changes in dir­ec­tion along the axes of a com­plex geo­met­ric­al struc­ture. She stood out in the Par­is Fes­ti­val d’Au­tomne in 1976 in the opera by Bob Wil­son and Phi­lip Glass, Ein­stein on the Beach. But she won the audience’s hearts in 1979, still dur­ing the Fes­ti­val d’Automne, with Dance, a hyp­not­ic piece com­bin­ing min­im­al­ist­ic dance, monu­ment­al videos by Sol LeWitt and music by Phi­lip Glass. Lucin­da Childs was imme­di­ately hailed by crit­ics as a major artist. Her pieces have entered the rep­er­tory of sev­er­al major European bal­let com­pan­ies in these past few years; in her NYC work­shop and in her insu­lar home facing Bos­ton, she revis­its her career in the documentary.
(Mario Fanfani)