Childs herself performs “Geranium ’64” (2024), a reimagination of her 1965 solo of the same name. Across the stage stretches a gray wall, which, as the somber cello music (mixed by Olivier Goinard) comes in, appears to be cast in moving shadows or a wash of fog. Then, faint flickers of a football game come in, as does the Childs’s original accompaniment: radio broadcast of the 1964 NFL Championship game between the Cleveland Browns and the Baltimore Colts. Finally, Childs enters from stage right, wearing a utilitarian jumpsuit and holding onto a tethered cord. 

For the duration of her time onstage, Childs creeps across the stage diagonally, the cord allowing her to shift her body off balance. She’s walking, but with absolute presence and spacial awareness, occasionally twisting her torso and switching her grip on the cord. Intermittently, she turns her face to the audience and makes a remark about the football game whose broadcast is muffled. Often, she laughs to herself at the end of her commentary, which provokes a sprinkle of laughter through the audience. At the end, Childs makes her way to the floor and quickly tosses her legs, both bent, up against the wall. She stays in that position—a sort of abdominal hold—until the stage lights come down. I find myself thinking of the splay of limbs that some ballerinas employ at the end of “The Dying Swan.”

Childs’s 1983 collaboration with the composer John Adams and the architect Frank Gehry, “Available Light, Part 2” opens to a blank stage wall, with a slash of light illuminating the floor. (Bard’s Fisher Center is fittingly housed in a Gehry-designed building). The dancers, dressed in black, white, or red, follow repetitive phrases. They frequently piqué and sauté in arabesque, pivot in fourth position, and swirl their bodies around in renversé. They move with little to no port de bras. In examining the steps alone, it can seem like little changes. But the dancers also repeatedly shift the orientations of their bodies and pass into different formations. As Adams’s epic score grows more pronounced and the stage lights shift to red, the piece starts to feel trancelike—almost as if you’re gazing at a mandala. Against the beat-less music, the dancers create a clearly defined sense of order.

The same motifs repeat in the final numbers of the program. Repetition, the pairing of pedestrian steps with ballet, and the repeated shifts of the direction the dancers move establish the structure of “Field Dance 2,” from the 1984 Philip Glass opera “Einstein on the Beach” and “Distant Figure,” a 2024 work set to Glass’s work of the same name for piano. While these pieces share Childs’ elemental principles of choreography, they display differing levels of intensity.