The Brooklyn Rail

Even though choreographer Lucinda Childs has been working steadily for five decades, she is having a moment, with a program at Bard’s SummerScape 2026, and a new, five-year artistic residency with New York’s Gibney Company, which beautifully danced Childs’s Canto Ostinato in its recent Joyce Theater run. And Works & Process just presented a Childs program at the Guggenheim Museum.

Childs’s conceptual work emerged as part of the Judson movement in the 1960s, before she forged her own path with more formal, rigorous dances incorporating pedestrian and balletic movement, repeating phrases, and musicality. In addition to maintaining her own company until 2018, she has worked extensively in opera, collaborating with Robert Wilson and Philip Glass on the revolutionary Einstein on the Beach, and in 2025 choreographed and directed Glass’s Satyagraha for Opéra Nice Côte d’Azur. We spoke by phone in May.

Susan Yung (Rail): Could you talk about your program for Bard SummerScape?

Lucinda Childs: Yes, we were invited a few years ago. In 2024 I was in Hamburg for a residency at the International Summer Festival Kampnagel. It’s a wonderful complex with a lot of possibility for choreography. I did a creation with contemporary visual artist Anri Sala, and Philip Glass had a new piece that he had written called Distant Figure. And we worked also with the Russian pianist Anton Batagov to have live music. We created a program, and I revived a work called Geranium ’64, which I’m performing, and we’re adding to that, in honor of Robert Wilson and Philip Glass, a dance from Einstein on the Beach, called “Field Dances.” And in honor of Frank Gehry, we’re adding to the program a section of Available Light from 1983, which he designed when we were at LA MoCA years ago.

Rail: My next question actually involves Frank Gehry. Two of the collaborators in the program passed away last year: Frank Gehry and Robert Wilson. Could you discuss their impact on your work?

Childs: Well, it’s total. I worked with Bob Wilson for around fifty years. I met him literally fifty years ago, in 1976, and we worked on and off on so many wonderful different projects—opera, theater, ballet.

I first saw one of Bob’s pieces in 1974. I’d come from such a different artistic background in experimental alternative spaces, and it was just the opposite, but I just loved it so much because his aesthetic got translated into this classical space in a way that was so unusual. And then he decided to ask me to work on Einstein, and I had no idea what exactly he wanted me to do, but I was very, very happy to be involved.

And now we’re hoping, out at the Watermill Center, to do a kind of revival this summer, a year after his death. I’m thrilled to be part of it.

Rail: How did you transition from the Judson conceptual work to your more formal style?

Childs: I think it was the minimal movement and Robert Morris, whom I actually knew personally because he was with the Judson Dance Theater and I’d seen his three “L-Beams” (Untitled [3 Ls] [1965]) in the Castelli Gallery—three totally identical objects, placed in three different positions—so simple and so complex at the same time. That became a way for me to think about just working in the studio by myself… on the simple change of directions, simple walking patterns, you know—simple things without all of the conceptual ideas of Judson, which of course was influenced by John Cage. I just wanted to get back to basics, and was largely inspired by Robert Morris.

Rail: Are your dances structured on specific works of music?

Childs: Yes, absolutely, they are. The structure of the musical score is the architecture of the dance.

Rail: Your choreography seems so straightforward and clean, but somehow impossible to replicate. I’m always amazed when I watch it, because it’s like, why doesn’t anyone else do this?

Childs: Maybe it looks easier than it is…

Rail: Oh no, I don’t think it looks easy at all; it just comes across so elegant and smooth.

You were recently named resident choreographer at Gibney. What factored into accepting the post and what are you looking forward to doing there?

Childs: We’re working on a piece for Glass’s anniversary. This is the third piece I’ve done with Gibney. I started out just watching the company, which is unique in the sense that they’re full-time. And the dancers are very young—some of them are just out of Juilliard; they’re so professional and they’re really quite amazing to work with… very, very skilled and they work so quickly—you get way ahead, which is nice. There was the first project, Three Dances (for prepared piano) John Cage, and then they asked me to revive an existing work, which we did. We’ve done two projects together, so I know them pretty well.

For this new Glass anniversary piece, I proposed the composition Another Look at Harmony, one of Philip’s early works from fifty years ago, which I love because it has a choral element. I said if I do it, I would have to do the whole thing; I wouldn’t want to do part of it. It’s an hour. And Gina Gibney accepted that, and wants that, and that’s what we’re working on now.

Rail: I did see the Gibney season at the Joyce.

Childs: Oh, the piano piece by Simeon Ten Holt, Canto Ostinato?

Rail: Yes. It was fantastic! You’ve worked at length on multimedia works—opera and other collaborative efforts. How do you collaborate successfully?

Childs: Well, I think every opera has its own story, its own persona. For example, the first opera I worked on was Salome in 1995, directed by Luc Bondy, the European director who’s rarely been seen in the US. One of his productions came to the Met. It’s just so interesting to figure out new ways to work, especially with the singers. There can be so much discussion; you can build things together. That’s critical when you’re working with singers, because they have to be comfortable—they have to be secure and they have to get to trust me. You know, I’m not going to make them do something that will interfere with their singing. It’s just been a wonderful experience to work with singers and choruses and to learn how to support them and get them through it.

Every opera is so different and most recently, I’ve done two Philip Glass operas in Nice, Akhnaten and Satyagraha. I’m invited to come there in 2028 or ’29 to do Einstein on the Beach, and I said, well, you know, we’ll see about that!

Rail: My final question: where, at your age, do you find the energy and drive to continue working at such a pace?

Childs: I get asked that a lot! I just feel fortunate. I’m still running around and everybody keeps reminding me that I’m eighty-five. I don’t think about that so much. I do work every day. I work out every day. I love it. I hate to miss a day. It’s the first thing I do and that sort of keeps me together physically. It’s critical for my health I think in general, and for being able to continue to work. I’m not gonna sit in a chair—I have to get up.

Rail: Anything else you’d like to add?

Childs: We’re coming back to Bard. Some of the same dancers who were with me back in 2009, when we were first invited, are still with the company. I’m very, very proud of that. It’s a big thing for us to do something in the US after touring in Europe with the program we created in Hamburg. So to bring it home, thanks to Bard, is a big treat for us.