Carnation, 1964, Lucinda Childs. Premiere April 24th 1964 - Institute of Contemporary Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Duration: 20min approx. Choreography and originally performed by Lucinda Childs. Reprised by Ruth Childs in 2015. Light Design by Eric Wurtz.
Más distinguidas, 1997, La Ribot (2nd series of Distinguished Pieces). Premiere at Desviaciones, Madrid, November 21st - 23rd 1997. Duration: 50min. Written and directed by La Ribot. Originally performed by La Ribot. Original Light Design by Daniel Demont. Reprised by Ruth Childs in 2015. Light Design by Eric Wurtz. Divana costume, 19 esquilibrios y un largo costume & Angelita wings by Pepe Rubio. Music from Erik Satie, Javier López de Guereña, Rubén Gonzalez and Carles Santos. Originally produced by La Ribot, Supported by INAEM, Ministry of Culture of Spain and the collaboration of ICA, Live Arts, London, Danças Na Cidade, Lisbon, and the distinguished proprietors. An Artsadmin associated project. This transmission projet is produced by La Ribot- Genève. La Ribot is supported by Ville de Genève, République et canton de Genève and Pro Helvetia - Swiss Arts Council. The transmission to Ruth Childs was done by Lucinda Childs in Summer 2014 and by La Ribot in Septembre 2014.
Show/ Dance/ Theater
In summer 2014 the dancer Ruth Childs, Lucinda’s niece, “inherited” Pastime, Carnation and Museum Piece, and began working under her aunt’s guidance to present the solos to a new generation of viewers. At the same time, La Ribot was considering a similar experiment with her Más distinguidas series of 1997, and proposed that the new interpretations might form a double bill.
“Conceptual” and “minimal” are the labels most often applied to the work of celebrated American choreographer-dancer Lucinda Childs: see for instance her contribution to Philip Glass’s four-act opera Einstein on the Beach (1976) or her much-performed Rambert Company commission Four Elements (1990). However, there exist early works, developed at the Judson Dance Theatre, New York, that have a very different feel. Pastime (1963), Carnation (1964) and Museum Piece (1965), for example, are rich with Dadaist humour and Duchampian influences; they involve a playful, inventive manipulation of everyday objects and a studiedly deadpan delivery. In pieces such as these, Childs (like Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer) helped to move dance away from the confines of the theatre and into the “expanded field” of contemporary art.
In both bodies of work, the performing artist’s activities give rise to a “concrete” score of found sounds: running water, a ticking clock and a vacuum clearer, for instance. Both performances involve an assortment of everyday, mass-produced (and sometimes rather comical) items, such as a wire colander (Childs) or a rubber chicken (La Ribot). Both comment on the formal geometries of choreography and critique the idea of virtuoso performance: they require expert balance, precise positioning and a dextrous manipulation of objects, but in the service of attitudes and movements far from dance’s usual conventions. In both, the performer is clothed in an odd kind of glamour. However their major divergence concerns the status of the performing body.
In Childs’s pieces the body is treated in a strongly formal fashion; body and objects seem interchangeable. In La Ribot’s pieces, the body remains, paradoxically, both object (a choreographic instrument) and subject: vulnerable and alive, it forms the polar opposite to Más distinguidas’s cast of inanimate items.