Lucinda Childs
Momentary Reprise
Fisher Center at Bard
June 26–28, 2026
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
Lucinda Childs
Limitless Time
Watermill Center
July 24–25, 2026
Water Mill, NY
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?
