Lucinda Childs

LCLucinda Childs
TETheodore Elliman

Lucinda Childs is an American dancer and choreographer. As a young student at Sarah Lawrence College in 1959, she encountered Merce Cunningham, by chance, and began to train in his studio in New York City. There, she met another prodigious dancer of the postmodern movement, Yvonne Rainer, who invited her, in 1963, to join the Judson Dance Theater where Childs developed highly conceptual performance projects. Her first works of choreography, Pastime and Carnation, were experiments in the manipulation of materials and objects, presented in alternative spaces outside the theater, as solo pieces set in silence. In 1973, Childs founded her own company, Lucinda Childs Dance, which she continues to direct today.

Childs has worked across disciplines of performance, with remarkable command of the stage and a rare sensitivity for rhythm, pattern, and scale. In 1976, she created the durational opera, Einstein on the Beach, with composer Philip Glass and director Robert Wilson, who became regular collaborators throughout her career. Dance, from 1979, is a landmark of minimalism—choreographed using pedestrian steps that repeat in patterns along axes of geometry, with an accompanying film by Sol LeWitt. Childs makes dances that are at once straightforward and rapturous. She is precise, rigorous, and supremely elegant. This conversation took place in April 2025.

LCLucinda Childs
TETheodore Elliman

When and how did you start dancing?

I started very young with ballet, but not on an everyday basis, only once a week, on the weekends. I was in a school that was pretty demanding. My parents did not want me going to dance class during the week, but I was allowed to go to dance class on the weekends.

Before, I was a dance major at Sarah Lawrence College. I had many teacher—among them, Hanya Holm and Helen Tamiris. In 1959, Merce Cunningham was a guest teacher at the college. I didn't even really know who he was at that time. I was 19 years old and thought, “Wow, this is it. This is the place to be.” At the Cunningham studio, I met Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton and other members of the Judson group.

Were you aware at that point that modern dance was taking root in New York? Your teenage years would’ve been when Balanchine was creating New York City Ballet.

Oh, yes, absolutely. People were getting to see all kinds of wonderful dance early on—Jose Limon and Doris Humphrey. The 92nd Street Y was presenting Alvin Ailey. I also went to Martha Graham Performances also when I was younger, before college.

How did the transition happen from being a student to being a professional?

We found out that Merce’s studio was in New York and that he taught a six o’clock class after his company class. I would try to go in as much as possible from Sarah Lawrence to his studio for his class. And also in the summer. He taught at the Summer Dance Festival, which was then in New London. I went there two summers to study with Merce.

What was it like to be in the studio with him?

It was so special because he was such a towering figure. His combinations were so difficult and so long, and after learning on the right side, then you were supposed to do the whole thing on the left side. The company members could master this right away. But it was always a huge challenge. I loved it and I wanted to be part of it. It was amazing.

There were parallel activities happening in avant garde dance with Merce Cunningham and the Judson Dance Theater. Why did you end up at Judson rather than, for example, in the Cunningham company or another troupe?

Some of the most important people in Judson, like Steve Paxon, were also in Cunningham’s company as well. And Cunningham was not happy with it. It was hard for him because he needed Steve on tour, and there were conflicts. Merce personally said to me, “I prefer if you choose which way you want to go.” Yvonne [Rainer] had actually invited me to come to the Judson workshops when I met her at the Cunningham studio. She told me that I could bring in my own work. I was working on a solo, Pastime, and I performed it on one of the programs in 1963.

Looking back at archival footage and pictures from your first performance of Pastime (1963), I am struck by the costume choice. You are wearing a piece of cloth that envelops you and prohibits free movement. Why introduce this formal constraint?

You mean the tubular material. It is similar to something that Graham used in her famous solo, Lamentation (1930). I was not attempting to make any reference to that at all. It was the idea that movement is derived from manipulation of objects or materials. That was a basic John Cage idea—to step outside of the dance vocabulary to find other possibilities that include pedestrian movement, but also improvisational task-oriented kind of movement. I liked working with the possibility of manipulation of materials. Another solo, Carnation, is also very much about that, with commonplace objects, minute and large objects that allowed for a huge range of possibilities. I just felt that working with objects allowed me to explore movement in a new way.

How did the Judson Dance Theater work to facilitate this kind of exploration? I understand there were assignments and also classes.

It was almost entirely structured by Robert Dunn, who was a composer and pianist and collaborator with John Cage. He agreed to run our workshops and propose ideas for us to work on. But it was never really a class, it was always a discussion. It was an open discussion constantly because the workshops were open to anybody who wanted to come, as were the performances.

In one instance, he gave an assignment to the group to make a six minute dance. That’s when I made Street Dance (1964). I decided I would abandon the space for six minutes, vacate the space. It was site specific and became something of lasting interest.

In Street Dance, you make a few radical decisions. The street was the stage. The audience was in an apartment. Much of the drama could not be seen directly, but is narrated indirectly. You extended the range of perception and activated senses that we typically don’t associate with dance. Can you describe the ideas you were interested in pursuing?

I liked the idea of leaving the space and leaving a prerecorded tape that tells the audience what to do, where to look. I left instructions for the audience to look out the window to see what I was doing on the street. It tells them that I'm pointing to details that they couldn’t possibly see like a drop of paint on a sign. I thought it had a humor to it also—with his distance that was fabricated between myself and the audience.

In 1976, a couple years later we got Einstein on the Beach, which was a collaboration between yourself, Philip Glass and Robert Wilson. How did you meet Philip and Robert to begin this process?

A lot of people knew Wilson’s work, but for some reason I didn’t. In 1974, Wilson was on Broadway with A Letter to Queen Victoria, which is one of his works that was produced in Europe, but actually performed here, in the U.S. I got the chance to go see it. I happened to meet up with him later on, after the performance, because I was with a friend who knew him personally. He started talking to me about Einstein on the Beach and invited me to be a part of it right then and there. Later, he came by to talk about it and show me what it was and to introduce me to Philip.

What were the rehearsals like?

Every day was completely different. Some days, Bob had specific ideas he wanted us to work on, to develop the ideas together. Other days, he would let us improvise. For example, he said to me, “There are three diagonals in the opening scene of Dance I. You can use them.” And then in another scene, he said he needed a text because there hadn’t been mention of the beach in the opera, which is part of the title that is a reference to Neville Shute’s On the Beach. So I created a text.

Were you always as comfortable speaking on stage as you were dancing?

I had acting experience from early on because I was going to summer school before Sarah Lawrence, where I studied with a director from Pasadena Playhouse. He was very important to me. He let me into his advanced class. I was only 16 and very serious about acting at that time.

Einstein on the Beach is a long opera of some 5 hours, and dance is a practice that can only be sustained for a certain period of time. Were you interested in understanding the physical limits of the body, in pushing towards extremes of exertion?

For the dance sequence in the first act, I knew how long it was going to be because the music existed. So I knew the duration of it and I knew it was broken into three sections. I had to develop a kind of a strategy to deal with the stamina involved for that half hour. That’s what we worked on with Bob in the studio, and Philip would often come and play the musical sections that we were working on himself, on a Yamaha. It was the first time I was working with a composer. Philip Glass was my first composer. All through the period before that, we didn’t use music. I made works in silence.

What is your understanding of the relationship between dance and music?

That you could illustrate it or you could ignore it, or create a dialogue with it. I like to be very precise. I liked to work within Philip’s structure and play against it—not exactly illustrate it, but be aware of it. We don’t just illustrate all the downbeats. We play off of not doing that. In the next piece I made, Dance, with him, the dancers always know where they are, but they’re not always exactly on the same count as Philip.

Einstein on the Beach was one of many operas for which you’ve choreographed. In opera, movement may be seen as secondary to voice and drama. How do you negotiate this hierarchy between genres and do you feel that the dance has to be in the service of the story?

The first opera that I became involved in was Salome directed by Luc Bondy (1992). There was a lot of discussion about the character of Salome. Who is she? Working with the singer, Catherine Malifitano, there was a lot of back and forth. Physical discussion and psychological discussion. I really enjoyed it very much because it took me into the world of narrative, but I could also use my own ideas. For the seven veils, we did something I think quite unusual. One of the veils almost covered the entire part of the stage. We really had the chance to play around, but it was in collaboration with the singer and Luc Bondy and with the narrative of Salome by Oscar Wilde.

You and Robert Wilson have worked on numerous collaborations. I’m thinking of Video 50 and La Maladie de La Mort by Marguerite Duras. After Einstein on the Beach, was there an understanding that this was a very generative partnership?

In the early part of my career—the first 20 years—I was focused exclusively on my company and my work. As years developed, working more and more in theater and opera has been interesting. It was a very interesting challenge to tour for many years with Michel Piccoli for La Maladie de La Mort by Marguerite Duras.

I was anxious to perform in La Maladie de La Mort because I had to perfrom play in French. I had been in France for so long and I met Marguerite. She had originally wanted the French actress, Delphine Seyrig, for the part. In any case, when I met with Marguerite and she said, “I remember your performance of Dance at The Theatre des Champs d'Elysée when half the audience was shouting and the other half were saying, be quiet.” She said she loved this atmosphere of those for and those against what was happening. For many people, it was the first time they heard Philip Glass music and the first time they saw dancers moving in this kind of way. We spoke for a while and she eventually said, “Well, your French is not really that bad.” I was thrilled to be accepted. She was never able to see the performance because by the time it came to Paris, she had passed away.

You’ve lived, worked, and performed in Europe. What’s that like as an artist?

Dance feels privileged and important there in comparison to what we have here, especially in New York. Here, it’s really uphill and it’s a struggle. It was a huge transition for me in 1976 to be able to be introduced to the whole world of European performance culture with the opening of Einstein on the Beach in Avignon. We kept coming back. And that’s been true for all these years.

Let’s talk about Dance (1979) which is not narrative, but abstract. The movements are simple and repeated. Were you seeking to pair dance down its most essential elements?

Philip and I decided to work together again after Einstein on the Beach. We thought: if we’re going to be in a theater, if we’re going to be in a traditional space, we need to work with a visual artist. We turned to Sol LeWitt, who didn’t think it was interesting to make some kind of structure that we dance in front of. That didn’t make sense to him. We finally decided that the decor should be the dancers and that it should be a film.

At that time, I was working in a very abstract way with the dancers. Sol LeWitt had been an important influence—the whole minimalist concept for that natter. I wanted to connect Dance to that with movement. One dance only takes place on a horizontal path; another is just a circular path; another diagonal, etc.

Were those paths something that LeWitt determined or that you choreographed?

I would determine them and I also wrote physical scores, which are overhead maps of the dancer’s movement in space, to illustrate which dancer is with which dancer and where they are in the music. Sol was able to use my score in making his storyboard for his film.

Can you tell me about the scoring system that you developed? Given that dance is an ephemeral art that is hard to capture and transmit. I’m interested in how it can be notated.

The scores are specific to every dance. All the scores are different depending on the kind of movement. It’s actually not the movement that the scores describe, but the spatial pattern, the timing of what’s happening. The actual movement can be stored on a video, but the scores just helped me to know how I’m dealing with all the different options available, what we’ve done, what we haven’t done. They’ve been very useful also in the reconstructing work.

Do you prepare them prior to arriving in the studio for rehearsal?

No, I prepare them at the end of rehearsal. I might have ideas prior, but what I keep is a map of what happens at the end of rehearsal.

The use of Sol Lewitt’s video creates this amazing doubling effect and monumentality. It also mixes media between video and dance on stage. What were you hoping to achieve?

I didn’t really know what would happen. This was in Sol’s domain. It was shot on 35 millimeter black and white film. What’s amazing to me—still amazing to me, because we continue to perform the work–is the detail of his editing. It’s amazing. It’s so complex, but you don’t feel that when you see it. There are 35 different shots in the first section, maybe even more. There are so many different intercuts, but it’s just beautifully designed. It took a great artist, I think, to make this film.

Was Dance performed by your own company at that point?

Yes. It’s always been my own company. Of course, the dancers are mostly changed now, including myself, so when the work is performed these days, you see dancers from the late seventies who have completely different dance backgrounds. This is a dimension that was never intended.

Sol passed away in 2009, and I’ve been in contact with his family about redoing the piece, which is only performed with my company. The dancers from 1979 are replaced with dancers from my recent company. But for another company to perform Dance, in order to be true to the idea of Sol LeWitt, and to have this synchronization between the dancers in the film and the dancers on stage—the film has to be redone. But other companies can follow the storyboard of Sol LeWitt exactly, which makes it possible.

Another piece I have been curious about is Available Light, which is a collaboration between yourself, John Adams, and Frank Gehry. I’m especially interested in the double stage. What kinds of creative freedoms did that choice enable?

I proposed the split level as an idea for Frank Gehry. He liked the idea and designed the set for us. There’s a limitation to how many people can be on the upper level, with the maximum being three dancers. I wanted 8 dancers on the stage in total, so I had to enlarge the company to eleven dancers to make it possible. Working with a larger group was interesting, challenging.

Susan Sontag wrote an essay about Available Light (1983) called “A Lexicon of Available Light.” What is the relationship between works and dance for you, especially as we have evoked your facility with the spoken word on stage. Is reading or writing part of your process?

I love to read. Writing, I feel, has been important—not so much that I end up with a product, but that I go through the process of thinking about how to describe the work and how to put this into words. Artforum wanted a piece from me about my work. It was published in 1973, I think. I really struggled with it because I wanted it to be as good as it could possibly be and clear. To put the thoughts down was a challenge that I felt was worth the trouble because it took a lot of work.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on different projects, which has been the story all along. I was in Europe for two months, performing with my company and working with a company in Holland. I’ll be working on a Philip Glass opera, Satyagraha, in Nice (1980). I’ll be in Lyon giving one of my works called Concerto to that company. I’m also creating a new piece for a Martha Graham soloist. And on and on. These projects seem to be just coming up and I have to try to keep up. I can’t complain.