I experimented with movement events in relation to objects. I then altered and extended these events in time and space, connecting them in a specific sequence until a kind of logic emerged which indicated a necessary design for the dance. — Lucinda Childs
Lucinda Childs is one of the most influential figures in American postmodern dance. Since the early 1960s, she has developed a singular body of work that has profoundly transformed the relationship between movement, space, time and musical composition. Working across choreography, performance, drawing, film, opera and theatre, she has established an artistic language distinguished by formal rigour, spatial clarity and an exacting attention to the structures through which movement is organized and perceived. Her practice, which emerged from the experimental milieu of downtown New York, has evolved continuously over more than six decades.
Childs began her artistic training with piano before studying dance with Hanya Holm, Helen Tamiris and Mia Slavenska. While attending Sarah Lawrence College, where she initially pursued an interest in theatre, she encountered choreographer Bessie Schönberg, Merce Cunningham and Judith Dunn. Through Dunn, she was introduced to the composition classes of Robert Dunn, whose approach encouraged dancers to reconsider choreography through structures, processes and formal decisions rather than inherited principles of expression and virtuosity. These encounters led her into the orbit of the Judson Dance Theater, the experimental collective that emerged in the early 1960s around Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan. Alongside artists including Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton, Childs became part of a generation that fundamentally challenged the conventions of modern dance.