Four New Works by Lucinda Childs Dance Company, which had its world premiere in August 2024 at International Summer Festival Kampnagel, Hamburg, was restaged on 7 and 8 December 2024 at the Berliner Festspiele.
64. 84.
Nostalgia is often sweet because it lives only in memories. What still exists of the source of the nostalgia, however, may seem fascinating. For example: seeing Lucinda Childs, a living history in herself, performing the solo Geranium ’64 at the Berliner Festspiele. At the age of 84, her long lean body looked so graceful that in the opening part when I did not yet recognize her face, I mistook her as the tall and elegantly masterful dancer, Caitlin Scranton, who I had just seen in the previous duet, Actus.
62, 63, 64.
Childs was one of the early members of Judson Dance Theater. Flourishing in the early 1960s in New York City among the other experimental artists and groups given space by the Judson Memorial Church, the movement included artists such as Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, and Steve Paxton who dedicated themselves to physical research, birthing a new genre of dance now known as “postmodern dance.” Living in New York City in the early 2010s, I had felt the ripples of reverence for the movement strongly pulsating in the veins of the city’s performance scene. I remember Judson Church being filled on Monday evenings for the weekly performances presented by Movement Research, which is in some ways Judson Dance Theater’s successor.
16.
New Yorkers in my circle loved to let out heavy sighs, reminiscing about how different the city was, back when it was really the hub of the arts. When I left in 2016 for Berlin, New Yorkers had a romantic view of the German capital: “Brooklyn before gentrification.” It wasn’t long after settling into my new city that I noticed Berliners also liked to murmur wistfully about the good old days when Berlin was real.
1, 2, 3, 4.
In an interview with András Siebol, the artistic director of the International Summer Festival Kampnagel, Childs mentions that her dancers are constantly counting. She adds that the “dancers keep a pulse going internally and collectively, which is very sophisticated.” Their fierce focus combined with physical virtuosity and precision translates into their total control over the choreography. In Dance, choreographed by Childs in 1979, the dancers are known to count up to 256.
37, 38, 39, 40, a friend’s rent increased by 40% in Neukölln last week.
11, 12, 13, 14, how many institutions in the arts and culture field will close next year due to drastic funding cuts currently taking place in Berlin?
8, 9, 10, how many grants will disappear for individual artists?
177, 178, 179, 180, how many artists have been cancelled as a result of the severe repression in freedom of expression in the arts that has been happening since last autumn throughout Germany?
201, 202, 203, how many more days until we reminisce about the good old times in Berlin when it was a city of diversity and artistic experimentation?
204, 205,
I will keep on counting until I can find
206, 207, 208,
a collective pulse that may be felt
209, 210,
in history
Four New Works by Lucinda Childs Dance Company was presented on 7 and 8 December 2024 at the Berliner Festspiele.
