DANCE

Lucinda Childs: Dance

THURSDAY – SATURDAY, OCTOBER 19 – 21, 2023
7:30 PM THURSDAY & FRIDAY
3:00 PM SATURDAY

Lyon Opera Ballet
Dance Reflections
New York City Center
131 West 55th Street, Midtown, Manhattan

$45-$145
TICKETS + INFORMATION

Lucinda Childs’s 1979 piece Dance (to music by Philip Glass) changed the course of Downtown dance history. Starting in the early ‘60s, the Post-Modern Judson School had emphasized the modest and the quotidian, the unenfranchised bohemian. Dance was the first of the Big Post-Modern Dance Productions, the kind of thing that filled the stage at BAM throughout the ‘80s. Up until this stunner, nobody thought Post-Modern dance could be this Big. Visual design was important to these productions, and there was always a Major Visual Artist involved: here, the dance is in counterpoint to projections designed by Sol LeWitt. The projections were filmed at rehearsals of the piece; so the dancers seem to be dancing with themselves. This presents an interesting question for revivals: do you use LeWitt’s original footage from 1979, or do you recreate the projections with the current dancers. (The last revival of this piece I saw used the original footage — and it was hard not to focus on how much sleeker, and more expensively shod, the current dancers are than their comparatively dumpy 1970s NYC counterparts.) Eventually, the Big Post-Modern Dance Production genre suffered the same fate as Marvel Movies: audiences stopped being thrilled with all the Bigness but became fatigued by it. And of course, if you’re me, you can’t help but tie the turn by formerly counter-cultural Downtown figures to these slick expensive productions, which required corporate sponsorship (this show is part of a series sponsored by Van Cleef & Arpels), to the concurrent ascendance of Neo-Liberalism. And get real pissed off.

MAKE A NIGHT OF IT: You gotta say two things about Quality Bistro: it’ll still be open after the show, and it’s right across the street.