DANCE

REVIEW by Celia Ipiotis

Merging video and dance is always a delicate proposition yet, Lucinda Childs and artist Sol LeWitt found harmony in their collaboration, Dance. 

Set to a score by the mesmerizing minimalist composer, Phillip Glass, Dance was born in 1979. Immediately hailed a landmark avant garde creation, Dance os now part of the post modern dance pantheon.

Mapped out on a grid, Childs’ choreography follows geometric patterns and proportions. Constantly in motion, dancers sustain an aerobic pace over a progressive sequence of steps that build into crystalline, complexities of rhythmic precision and passionate variance.

Hops, skips, perky low to the ground leaps are punctuated by stops, backward runs and arms opening out to the sside and back down to the thighs.The sheer tenacity of the patterns forge a passionate refrain that spits out a soloist

Noëllie Conjeaud (originally Lucinda Childs) who like the Goddess Athena, commands the stage in stillness until she spits out laser clear, wide lateral leaps that dissolve into  spitfire turns, corkscrewed into the ground. 

The sheer simplicity of the choreography evolves gradually with each sequence, in the same way Glass’s music progresses chromatically, and LeWitt’s designs spread across the background exponentially.

Layered over the live dancers, the black and white film made in 2016 (recreated according to the original by Marie Helene Rebois) means a number of the Lyon Opera Ballets dancers are no longer represented live. That does not diminish from the contrapuntal punctuation of projected images to live dancers in white.

Originally performed in 1979 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Dance retains its propulsive impact as performed by the excellent Lyon Ballet dancers.

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Celia Ipiotis

*Photos by Julieta Cervantes