Cho­reo­graph­er Ruth Childs is work­ing on her first group piece, a tra­gi­com­ic dance in which move­ments, tra­ject­or­ies, sounds and voices are treated play­fully and musically.

After recre­at­ing the early works of her aunt Lucinda Childs (four were presen­ted at the ccn de Caen in the spring of 2023) and two soli, Ruth Childs is work­ing on her first group piece for five per­formers, includ­ing her­self. Fun Times stages dif­fer­ent vari­ations on the Eng­lish notion of fun: the naive act of hav­ing fun or being fun togeth­er, the less con­ven­tion­al act of mock­ing. The cho­reo­graph­er explores how these shared exper­i­ences can be trans­lated, both cho­reo­graph­ic­ally and vocally. Move­ments and tra­ject­or­ies move away from the geo­met­ric rig­or of her pre­vi­ous pieces to work on dances that explode in a play­ful rela­tion­ship with space. As for the voices, they are used for their son­ic and music­al qual­it­ies: no words, but an express­ive­ness linked to laughter, cry­ing and ono­ma­to­poeia, which guides the cho­reo­grapher­’s writ­ing. Inspired by the work of Amer­ic­an com­poser Meredith Monk, and assisted by sound design­er Stéphane Vec­chione, she explores the ways in which the voice can become one with the cho­reo­graphy or be dis­so­ci­ated from it, unfold­ing in indi­vidu­al or shared scores. In this way, Ruth Childs explores the music­al­ity of laughter and tears, their tone and rhythm, in a tra­gi­com­ic vein befit­ting our times, when we no longer know wheth­er to laugh or cry. It’s a ten­sion remin­is­cent of Mod­ern Times, where Chap­lin was able to sim­ul­tan­eously cap­ture the ser­i­ous­ness and the ridicu­lous­ness of mod­ern life.