Lucinda Childs Choreographer

Biography

Lucinda Childs began her career as a choreographer in the early 1960s as a member of the Judson Dance Theater. She founded her own company in 1973 and, three years later, took part in the avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, for which she received an Obie Award. In 1977, she co-directed and performed with Wilson in I Was Sitting on My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating, which they revived for the Festival d’Automne à Paris in 2021, where they also created an evening-length work entitled Bach 6 Solo with violinist Jennifer Koh. In 1979, Childs choreographed Dance to music by Philip Glass with a set design by Sol LeWitt, for which she received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Dance toured internationally and entered the repertoire of the Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon, for which she also choreographed Beethoven’s Grande Fugue. In 2015, she revived Available Light, originally created in 1983 to music by John Adams with a two-level set by Frank Gehry, for the Festival d’Automne à Paris. Available Light was presented at New York’s Mostly Mozart Festival in 2018 and, that same year, Childs’ company performed some of her early works as part of the exhibition Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In addition to her work for her own company, Lucinda Childs has choreographed more than thirty works for major ballet companies.

She has also directed and choreographed several operas, including Akhnaten by Philip Glass for the Opéra de Nice Côte d’Azur; Orfeo ed Euridice by Gluck for the Los Angeles Opera; Zaide by Mozart; Le Rossignol and Oedipus Rex by Stravinsky; Farnace by Vivaldi and Doctor Atomic by John Adams for the Opéra national du Rhin in Strasbourg; Alessandro by Handel at the Megaron Concert Hall in Athens; Atys by Jean-Baptiste Lully and Scylla et Glaucus by Jean-Marie Leclair for the Theater Kiel in Germany; and Satyagraha by Philip Glass for the Opéra de Nice. Lucinda Childs also collaborated with Robert Wilson on Letter to a Man, based on the diaries of Nijinsky and performed by Mikhail Baryshnikov. She appeared in Wilson’s productions of Quartett by Heiner Müller and La Maladie de la mort by Marguerite Duras with Michel Piccoli.

In 2016, as part of an exhibition entitled Nothing Personal, Lucinda Childs’ choreographic scores were presented at the Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery in collaboration with the Centre national de la danse, to which she donated her archives. Lucinda Childs is a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in France. In 2017, she received the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale as well as the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award for lifetime achievement. She was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the National Museum of Dance in Saratoga Springs, New York, and received an honorary doctorate from Université Côte d’Azur in 2021.

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Immerse in the Paris Opera universe

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