This is the first monograph dedicated to Lucinda Childs, American choreographer who has promoted minimalism for the past 50 years with a rare elegance.
This book is the first monograph ever dedicated to a major artist of the 20th century. Lucinda Childs is internationally renowned and particularly acknowledged in France and Europe. Corinne Rondeau provides us with a sensitive, original interpretation of the work of Lucinda Childs while placing its emergence back into context and carrying out in-depth analysis of some of her compositions.
Supplemented by writings – some of which previously unpublished or translated into French for the first time – by the choreographer herself or her artistic collaborators (Sol LeWitt, Yvonne Rainer), the book also contains an illustrated section bringing together photographs of pieces or choreographic scores indisputably powerful in terms of graphics.
Lucinda Childs began her career in dance in the 1960s with Judson Dance Theater, an avant-garde group in New York City. There she worked alongside some of the big names of the experimental scene and took an interest in the artistic initiatives of Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Morris. In 1976, she took part in Robert Wilson’s revolutionary opera as a performer and choreographer: Einstein on the Beach. In 1979 she created Dance, a minimalist manifesto to which Philip Glass (music) and Sol LeWitt (stage design) contributed and which went down in dance history of dance.
Dancer, choreographer, actress, opera director – for 50 years Lucinda Childs kept on creating a choreographic work based on the aesthetics of repetition and strict musicality. Unfolding the art of lines and trajectories common to dancers and members of the audience, she turned dance into a unique experience of perception.
Corinne Rondeau is an art history and image specialist, a regular contributor to France Culture radio and Senior Lecturer in aestheticism and arts sciences in Nîmes university. Her book is the first comprehensive work on Lucinda Childs after Susan Sontag’s essay A Lexicon for Available Light (1983), in Temps forts (Christian Bourgois), 2005.