Disrupting the Grid: Lucinda Childs’s Scores for Silent Dances

Between 1973 and 1978, the choreographer Lucinda Childs created sixteen silent dances that were composed according to strict choreographic rules. Using a discrete group of pared-down movements, Childs built up her dances in a highly ordered structure. She employed complex counting rhythms and repeated movements to form a series of patterns that modulated on the dance floor in relation to a grid form. Although the grid is not physically marked on the floor during the performance, it is visible in the dances’ scores, which are written directly on grid paper. The dances are a combination of solo and group works for her eponymous company, which at that time consisted of five dancers, including herself. They each last between ten and thirteen minutes. Throughout these works, the dancers repeatedly break the structure of the choreographic patterning by moving idiosyncratically in accordance with the distinctness of their individual bodies. The compositions of the dances themselves also regularly deviate from the set of choreographic rules that otherwise govern their structure. At the level of both performance and composition, dancers and choreographer break the dances’ strict delineation of movement, and “re-pattern” themselves in juxtaposition to the grid, using the moving body as a means of disrupting formal patterns.

Childs’s interest in concrete movement can be formally linked to developments in minimalism that emerged in the 1960s, in concert with conceptual art practices that turned toward language as a medium in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Her practice was influenced by her early involvement in the Judson Dance Theater, where she collaborated with choreographers Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown, among others. Judson Dance Theater connected her directly to artists working in minimal and conceptual forms such as Robert Morris and Robert Rauschenberg. In her performances throughout the 1960s at Judson Church, she worked with props and objects, and sometimes used speech. Her turn in the early 1970s to work performed in silence, focusing strictly on movement, signaled her interest in the way that patterns could be established and broken by the moving body.

This period of choreographic production is uniquely positioned in Childs’s long career. It is inaugurated by her return to choreography after her early, experimental work with the Judson group in the mid-1960s, and it ends with her turn to larger, proscenium-based productions at the end of the 1970s. Beginning in 1979 with the premiere of Dance, a landmark work created in collaboration with musician Philip Glass and visual artist Sol LeWitt, Childs began to work primarily in theatres, creating dances for the structure of the proscenium’s frame.¹ The period between 1973 and 1978 is characterized by Childs’s exploration of formal structure and the development of a movement vocabulary that provides the foundation for her thematic approach throughout her subsequent career.

Childs inaugurated her new formal vocabulary with a concert at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Friday, December 7, 1973. The concert consisted of four dances. Untitled Trio, composed of three ten-minute segments for three dancers each, had been revised from an earlier 1968 showing. The three other dances—Particular Reel, Checkered Drift, and Calico Mingling—were completely new. In the second section of Untitled Trio, she employs four basic steps: a steady walk, a prone position lying on the floor, a rotating lunge that lands with a pounding step, and a jump. These movements are assembled as the dancers trace a diagonal line across the dance space. In a thoughtful review of the evening published in Artforum, Noel Carroll observed that, “it is the linear pattern of the dance, rather than the correspondences of phrasing, that conditions attention. It becomes quite clear that the basic movements of the dance are being employed to literally measure the linear trajectory of the dance.”²

It is the overall effect of the dancers moving together—he establishment of a pattern and the consistent shifts in that pattern—that are of concern to Childs. For Carroll, Childs’s dances are made of lines. These lines are made up of discrete units of movement, and their accumulation...