Lucinda Childs is beaming. Light gray down jacket, anthracite blouse, its slim and dynamic silhouette flows and snaps. Since October 31, the 83-year-old American choreographer, a figure of the post-modern dance, regular collaborator of Bob Wilson, works hard with the one hundred and fifteen dancing students, classical and contemporary, aged 14 to 22, from the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris (CNSMDP) solo concerto solo concerto.
With her assistant, Ty Boomershine, who reassembled many of her works and was a performer in her company, she developed the show Lucinda Childs × 100. An anthology of pieces chosen from a repertoire spanning over forty years of creation, on display at La Villette on December 1st and 2nd. ” I am very happy, she exclaims. I made a little table with all the students’ names, so I can call them by their first name when we talk together, it’s much more pleasant. »
Question “small painting”, Lucinda Childs, who “loves organization”, drew dozens of them to design this incredible retrospective but brutally lively operation that is Lucinda Childs × 100. The choreographer takes her computer out of her backpack. She lists the six pieces from which she has extracted the different sequences revisited and taught to the dancers. “It had to be feasible in a short time and the whole troupe, from the youngest to the oldest, had to be involved,she specifies. In small groups or together. »
” My solo concerto will be performed by all one hundred and fifteen students at the same time”, she slips in greedily. These fireworks conclude an evening accompanied by twenty-two young musicians from the conservatory, a harpsichordist and the conductor Marc Coppey, installed on a huge stage specially designed in the Grande Halle de La Villette.
Scholarly gestural stories
Lucinda Childs × 100 follows Merce Cunningham × 100, which celebrated, in 2019, the centenary of the choreographer’s birth, and of Trisha Brown × 100, in 2021. This third part (the first in which the guest choreographer is still alive) composes a sort of American trilogy with three major personalities, who are also very close to each other.
Lucinda Childs was 19 when she took lessons from Merce Cunningham in New York. She met Trisha Brown in the early 1960s at the Judson Memorial Church, an avant-garde arts center in Greenwich Village, where these two adventurers imagined experimental performances. “It was an extraordinary time,” she remembers with a smile. And an incredible springboard. Dance, Lucinda Childs’ best-selling play created in 1979, to music by Philip Glass, continues to tour the world.
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