Collaboration, Movement, Projection: The Interdisciplinary Structure of Lucinda Childs's Dance, 1979
Type
Text
Type
Thesis
Advisor
. | Larson, Brooke
Date
2010-05-01
Keywords
Dance, Judson Dance Theater, Lucinda Childs, Philip Glass, Sol LeWitt | Art History -- Dance -- Performing Arts
Department
Department of Art History and Criticism
Language
en_US
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/71001
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
In 1979, postmodern choreographer Lucinda Childs, minimalist artist Sol LeWitt, and minimalist composer Philip Glass combined their disparate mediums to create a collaborative, multimedia performance work titled, simply, Dance. To date, this interdisciplinary work featuring a unique combination of movement, sound, and film has received virtually no scholarly attention. Childs's recent 2009 reconstruction of Dance provides a timely opportunity for a close examination of its component parts, one that reveals several key aspects that initially gained prominence among the 1960s practitioners of interdisciplinary art—particularly the visual artists, dancers, choreographers and musicians associated with the Judson Dance Theater—and continued to resonate in the outpouring of multimedia installation and performance-based work in the 1970s. These themes include collaboration, non-traditional forms of movement, the grid, and the screen, elements with clear ties to experimentation in postmodern dance, to Minimalism in both art and musical composition, as well as to uses of the moving image outside of strictly cinematic spaces. The currently touring version of Dance, however, is not simply a historical reenactment. While Childs's reconfiguration reveals that the factors that she, Glass and LeWitt, explored in 1979 share clear similarities with specific precedents, the re-staging also gestures towards the continued relevance of these major themes. A sustained exploration of the work's individual elements will in fact reveal the hybrid form of this collaborative effort, one that is at once a historical performative object, and a contemporary work of art.
Recommended Citation
Goldstein, Jennifer Hasher, "Collaboration, Movement, Projection: The Interdisciplinary Structure of Lucinda Childs's Dance, 1979" (2010). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 209.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/209