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Luanda Chllds: The Act of Seeing UCINDA CHILDS grew up in New York City and began taking dance classes when she was six. But her ambition was to become an actress, not a dancer, and at eleven she started concentrating seriously on dramatic training . She resumed dancing when she was fifteen, studying at the Hanya Holm School. The following summer she went to Colorado to take classes from Tamiris , a choreographer who since the 1930s had developed an unconventional , eclectic style, and who had made dances for musical comedies (including Annie Get Your Gun and Touch and Go) as well as for the concert stage. Tamiris invited Childs to perform with her; she was terrified, recalls Childs, but "after it was over I wasn't sure I even wanted to be an actress anymore ."1 Determined now to become a dancer, she questioned the value of college, but Tamiris encouraged her to go to Sarah Lawrence, where she majored in dance, studying with Bessie Schonberg, Judith Dunn, and visiting teacher Merce Cunningham. She came to New York City for classes with Cunningham during vacations ("with all the other Sarah Lawrence girls") and after graduation moved back to Manhattan. For Childs, Cunningham was important because he "elucidated a kind of particularity and clarity in dance that felt distinctly separate from anything I had experienced up to that point."2 At the Cunningham studio she met Yvonne Rainer, who invited her to participate in the newly formed Judson Dance Theater. Impressed by the "strength and simplicity" of Rainer's work, Childs joined the Judson group, there to choreograph thirteen works of her own and to appear in the works of many others — including Rainer, Robert Morris, Steve Studio shot of Lucinda Childs. Photograph © Jack Mitchell, 1977. L Paxton, Aileen Passloff, and James Waring — over the next four years. From 1963 to 1965 she studied with Waring and, in 1964, took Robert Dunn's composition course. At the same time, she took ballet classes. Most of Childs' early works were solos, based on a method of construction that used objects and monologues as sources for movement. Like Rainer, she tried to find new movements, a new vocabulary that could still be considered dance, by mining the gestural lode of ordinary activities. In borrowing from actions not usually thought of as dance material, Childs has noted, "the movements do not in and of themselves evoke that [everyday] experience, but rather match that experience in the degree of exertion involved in doing them."3 Such a principle is allied to the project of minimalists in the visual arts who, during the early '60s, criticized abstract expressionism by eliminating painterliness and subjectivity. Rather than using chance techniques or tasks, Childs devised her own method of evolving movement material by manipulating objects. At first, she mixed that activity with pure dance phrases. Soon she incorporated monologues in the dances and used the movements to refer to the content of the speeches, drifting in and out of the context of what the spectators heard. She did not try to make any coherent illustration of subject matter but, rather, created a scattered context of words, movements, and objects. Her first dance at the Judson was Pastime (1963), which in one section involved the slow manipulation of stretchable cloth with her legs while seated on a long table. Music by Philip Corner ("that sounded as though all the plumbing at the Y was out of order," Louis Horst complained when Pastime was performed at the 92 Street YMHA later that year) provided the accompaniment .4 Carnation (1964) was a scrupulous manipulation of various ordinary objects, beginning with hair curlers and sponges, and punctuated with intense facial expressions. Jill Johnston described Childs' action in the solo: She puts the curlers between the sponges, places a salad colander on her head, pulls out each curler with a neat swift pull, and places them around her head on the prongs of the colander. That done, she sticks the sponges in her mouth, removes the curlers, the colander, gets up and dumps them with unceremonious relief into a blue plastic bag, into which she injects her foot. The next section involves a head stand, a sheet, and two socks (attached to the sheet) with some difficult maneuvering. Finally, she caps this perfect and meticulous nonsense with a meaningless assault on the blue plastic bag. After careful placement of the bag she runs toward it, jumps on it, stands 134 TERPSICHORE IN SNEAKERS [3.135...

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