Omschrijving project Nicole Beutler

 Lucinda Child’s work is the result of an exceptionally coherent sensibility... It proceeds by the strict avoidance of cliché, and of anything that would make the work disjunctive, fragmented. By a refusal of humor self-mockery, flirtation with the audience, cult of personality. By a distaste of the exhibitionistic: of movement calling attention to itself. It’s beauty is first of all an art of refusal… (Susan Sontag)

“As maker I am extremely challenged and fascinated by the radical and deceptively simple minimalism of Lucinda Childs’ early work. My own work is rather opposed to these ideas, it is far more playful, derivative and fragmented. I focus on the human on stage, on the idiosyncrasy of the performer, on contact with the spectator and on the act of performing itself. But I do recognise a sensitivity for the intensity of rhythm and the sense of listening. Where do our universes meet? Where do they collide?

On invitation of the COVER-Festival I take the chance to remake two pieces by Lucinda Childs that are performed in silence. Both dances present themselves to me as beautiful, intense, almost ritualistic ‘objets trouvés’: In Radial Courses each performer follows a different sequence of the same material to a continuous beat. In Interior Courses the dancers are dancing as duet and trio in a seemingly perfect system. There is no space for mistakes. I will take these dances and place them into a new context focusing on individual responsibility and group systems, on the effort of the performer and on their ritualistic appearance.

MOTIVATIE

Nowadays the context for dance works has changed. The early works of Lucinda Childs are a solid example of what we consider modern minimalist art: closed entities, refusing any kind of narrative, banal everyday-reality, but rather emphasizing ‘l’art pour l’art’. But every repetition within these pieces causes minor changes, so that the underlying system doesn't reveal itself while witnessing. The surrendering of the dancers to this counted structure produces a seemingly organic and ever changing entity, almost ‘real life’: that's the aspect of the pieces that I want to focus on and that makes them still actual.