Lucinda Childs Dance Company. - Joyce Theater, New York, New York - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, May, 1994 by Nancy Dalva

The best dances of Lucinda Childs's New York season were the earliest on the program, Dance #1 (dating from 1979 and still exhilarating after all these years), and one of her two most recent, Concerto (1993).

In between these bookends, if you will, of minimalism - the first the blazing cold primer for an entire movement enterprise, and the last an implosion of the form (minimalism without the center holding) that, ironically, reaffirms its potency and potential - Childs waffled. Lured, perhaps, by the dubious but very real demands of the marketplace (only last March a critic for the Daily News noted that "minimalism is passe"), she has ventured onto peculiar turf during her company's twentieth-anniversary season.

How else account for Rhythm Plus (1991), a modestly quirky pseudo-ballet, and Impromptu (1993), which featured mirrored balls spinning at different speeds, filling the stage with dizzying blips of light? Both were chicly costumed, the former by Christophe de Menil in a glamorous glossy Degas-cum-evening gown mode, the latter by Ronaldus Shamask, whose dramatically crisp neo-Grecian tricks look dated. (His costumes for the 1983 Available Light, now presented in a lusterless reduced version, feature peek-a-boo trousers that split up the rear - revealing, thank heaven, chaste underpants.)

It did not help that all of the scores for the new works featured (according to the program, "the greatest living contemporary") harpsichordist Elizabeth Chojnacka, who in the recordings used for these dances drives the instrument not as a classical vehicle, but as an engine of confusion. While Henryk Gorecki's ferocious Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings was inseparable from Childs's Concerto, the rest of her choices made one yearn for Handel on the one hand, and Philip Glass on the other. For Glass, Childs is the ideal choreographer, a divine match, as in Dance #1.

Childs herself remains timeless, centered, as ever the unravished bride of quietness. Is that patrician hauteur, or unbearable shyness? It doesn't much matter. Hers is a bred-in-the-bone racehorse beauty, and it is, as ever, marvelous to see.

Just like her best work, Childs's very presence is somehow (to the likes of me, at least) chastening in its exquisite abstemiousness, its complete lack of excess, either physical or emotional. When Childs faces upstage to dance with her own shadow, her admirable back does not invite. And why should it? To all those out in the house applauding like mad at her new gimmicks, I say - nay, I beg - for heaven's sake, let Lucinda be Lucinda.