by Leigh Witchel
Watching “Available Light” felt like seeing a monument to a dance as much as a dance itself. It was big, it was impressive and it stuck with you, but it loomed more like an edifice than a dance.
In 1983, The Temporary Contemporary museum in Los Angeles hooked Lucinda Childs up with minimalist composer John Adams and architect Frank Gehry to create an hour-long dance in a vacant warehouse. Holding the stage for 55 minutes, the piece marked the collaboration of three mid-career artists who would go on to be even better known.
Individually, each produced quintessential Minimalist work, taken together it’s a strong collaboration, but one that said what it had to say, and then kept on going.
Frank Gehry’s set was dull gray metal and chain-link fencing, and two-level – providing an elevated platform for dancing as well as a ground floor. Adams’ score, “Light over Brass” had a similar driving melody to his other work of the time – repetitive, but not pared back to the extreme. Kasia Walicka Maimone dressed the cast simply: dividing them into three squadrons by simple red, black or white leotards with a rough matching sash.
The dancers were revealed with a striking (and by now cliché) image: standing in aisles of fencing like gray silhouettes. They walked slowly in lines forward toward us, and a few went up the platform. To an ostinato phrase on the synthesizer, the dancers repeated phrases of choreography.
Childs varied the composition not with vocabulary, but by who was dancing and what spatial pattern that formed. After the opening section the lights dimmed and one woman slowly crossed as if in a daze, then another. The dancers went from standing sentinel as if they were chess pieces to long, fluid chains of movement. “Available Light” was first remounted in 2015; by now the dancers have those phrases down cold and connect them with liquid clarity. They ought to: they did them over and over and it was all they did.
Childs’ vocabulary was simple and academic, but clean. Her restricted palette was about as close as you can get to ballet without actually being ballet. The steps and positions, soutenu, attitude, renversé, as well as the placement and language are from ballet class, but the arms are clipped and flattened. In some ways it was a cognate to Gehry’s architecture, a utilitarian style of dance relating to the classical form, but with the beams and girders exposed.
Like Adams, Childs’ language wasn’t bare-bones. Phrases featured a tilting rock from side to side, a galloping chassé with the dancers turning round themselves in stag-like leaps or a fouetté flipping sides as neatly as a flapjack. It was Minimalism plus: phrases that were long, complex and interesting enough to be repeated. Both Childs and Adams find something juicy in repetition.
Since the dance steps aren’t providing any build or division, it was up to the designers. To demarcate a section, the lights went red and one woman left the upper platform. Some dancers left, others continues, and a few ascended the platform to dance there. The work closed as it began, with the cast walking to the back to reform much as they entered as the music thinned.
It’s a shame Childs’ work hasn’t been performed much by U.S. ballet companies; it could be more congenial to a ballet company’s training than a crossover artist of the same time – Laura Dean. Yet as impressive a collaboration as “Available Light” was, it’s also a testament to why Minimalism became passé. The score was as visceral and danceable as disco, but the 55 minutes held exposition, repetition, and no development. Like the construction of a monument, you didn’t need to see the entire process to understand the final result.
Copyright © 2018 by Leigh Witchel
“Available Light” – Lucinda Childs Dance Company
Mostly Mozart Festival
Rose Theater, New York, NY
July 13, 2018
Cover: Lucinda Childs Dance Company in “Available Light.” Photo © Richard Termine.
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