Daimce/Childs; Music/Glass; Film/LeWitt

18 DANCE/Childs MUSIC/Glass F LM/LeWitt The surprise of Dance, a collaboration by choreographer Lucinda Childs, composer Philip Glass, and visual artist Sol LeWitt, is the film which is LeWitt's contribution . With his collaborator, Lisa Rinzler, LeWitt has filmed three of the work's five dance sections using an anthology of basic film techniques: closeup , freeze frame, overhead shot, split, screen, lateral tracking shot. These filmed sequences are projected on a large scrim (twenty by thirty feet) placed in front of the stage. The effect of the giant images is stunning , and gives Dance some badly needed spectacle to counterpoint its structurally brainy, constantly yoked-up music-and dance elements. For although Childs and Glass contribute some excelent work (at least two of the dances, 4 and 5, and two of the music pieces, 3 and 4, are as good as anything each has done), neither takes any big chances within the usual, rigorously systemic methods. And the dances' persistent echoing of the music's repetitions and permutations adds up to a didacticism which makes the logical collaboration between these compatible artists look almost too logical. LeWitt's film conforms to the unified procedures of Dance's thorough, thesis-like outline, but with pizzaz, making a real show-rather than a demonstration-out of its process. Like the work of an early LeWitt inspiration, photographer Edweard muybridge, the film examines simple physical motions in detail (here, Childs' limited vocabulary of steps) with an apparently "scientific," sequential store. Rnd the super-imposed projection clearly Illustrates its conceptual point, that the same action simultaneously seen from different angles yields another kind of action in both perceived and perceiver. Yet the impact of the huge Images isas exciting as it is logical. Such big visuakls function as close-ups even when the actual shot is a medium take, and therefore bridge the distance, both literal and figurative, at which Dance operates. The result is a nice touch of magic without any tacked on hocuspocus . When the film rolls, Dance moves. Text/Howell Photographs/Tileston 19 20 21 22 23 ...