Counting on It

Listening to John Cage’s “Three Dances (for prepared piano)” is a wonderfully contradictory experience. The composer disrupts our auditory expectations by placing an assortment of small objects such as erasers, screws, and bolts, among the piano strings. A musician plays the piano in the typical manner, but instead of a harmonic tone, we hear more percussive sounds of kettle drums, timpani, xylophone, tin cans, even bells. One can imagine how an artist like Lucinda Childs, who was part of the Judson Dance Theater radicals in the ‘60s, might be attracted to such a composition. The choreographer is perhaps best known for her distinctive work in Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s opera “Einstein on the Beach,” and for “Dance,” based on the geometric grid patterns of artist Sol Le Witt. For her newest work, set to Cage’s prepared piano composition, Childs has chosen to showcase the Gibney Dance Company in New York. The piece will premiere as part of Gibney’s season at the Joyce, May 6–11.

Lucinda Childs in rehearsal for “Three Dances (for prepared piano)” for Gibney Dance Company. Photograph by Hannah Mayfield

At a recent rehearsal, the lithe 84 year old Childs rocks a precise chin-length bob. Friendly and welcoming, she’s nevertheless focused on the business at hand. “Three Dances (for prepared piano)” is equal parts dance and music, a pairing well-matched in clarity, precision, and surprise. Childs set the work on the eight Gibney dancers earlier this year during a three-week residency. Now mid-April, after working together three days to refresh and refine, the company is ready for an informal studio run-through with a small invited audience.

The work occurs in three movements, following the Cage construction, with a satisfying quality to the patterns and repetition. The piece is clearly abstract, which relieves me of any tendency to look for meaning. Instead, the rhythmic syncopation sweeps me up. In the opening section, the dancers square off to move back and forth, then switch to a diagonal path. A central motif begins with dancers clustered, then fans out repeatedly like a flower blossom opening and closing. A central suite of four duets is precise and restrained. The men lift their partners mere inches off the floor and keep them close to their sides, while leaning backward in a tight circle. They could almost be moving furniture.

Among the rehearsal audience is mathematician Michael Shelly. He and Childs were part of a residency created by Gibney and the Simons Foundation to explore the intersection of art and science. The two will participate in a curtain chat after the show on May 8. Fjord Review spoke with Childs a few days after the rehearsal. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I’ve been thinking about the work since the rehearsal run-through and I’m taken by how pleasing it is to watch. There seems a reason and logical origin for all the movement. I wonder how you came to work with this particular Cage composition.

Lucinda Childs: Someone told me about this piece of music. They said you should listen to it and I thought oh, this composer who has been so important to me. Merce Cunningham came to Sarah Lawrence when I was 19, in 1959. When Betsy Schoenberg came to announce our guest teacher, no one knew who he was. I didn’t know who he was. That changed my whole life and brought me into that world of Cunningham and Cage, and it’s just kind of thrilling to have this revisit.

Lucinda Childs in rehearsal for “Three Dances (for prepared piano).” Photograph by Hannah Mayfield

Had you been thinking about this particular work before you decided to work with the Gibney Dance Company?

I wanted to develop something for this company that would be special. And special for me too. It’s a wonderful company. I came to see them a few times. They’re pretty extraordinary and I felt I could do something that would be challenging for them, and they could handle it beautifully because they’re well trained.

What do you think the challenges are in working with this music?

There’s so much the dancers have to memorize. It’s as if the piece is the music. I went through the score many times because John Cage has very specific structures. The 2-6-2, 3-7-3 structure that he is very famous for is the structure for the entire piece. I had to think, how can I turn this into language the dancers will understand musically? We worked it out with the choreography so they don’t have to follow that kind of pattern. It would just drive them crazy. They have to know where they are in the music every second, even if they’re not dancing. You can see them counting.

In the middle section, each couple has a duet. It looked to me that each was unique. Yet they look almost the same.

There are four individual duets that are different constructions. Each couple knows four duets since they do the entire group of duets together in unison, but each couple has their own that I made for them.

Gibney Dance Company rehearse Lucinda Childs' “Three Dances (for prepared piano).” Photograph by Hannah Mayfield

How does your exchange of ideas with mathematician Michael Shelly enter this project?

It’s sort of unusual to ask me to collaborate in that way. But I was excited about getting to meet him and finding out that his research is cellular movement. He showed me some videos and I was struck with how beautiful it is. The fact that there is this diverse activity in a cell that becomes unified in a certain way, is something I can explore a little bit. The way in my piece each dancer has their own duet and then merges into all of them together in a slo-mo fashion, reminded me a little bit of what I saw in the video. When he came to rehearsal I said, this is the connection I can make, which is very superficial of course, but at least it’s something.

You don’t know if in the videos the cell particles create the movement to the other particles, or if it’s the liquid—you never know which is which. I said to the dancers (about the slo-motion section), it’s a little like you’re submerged in water. I think that helped them a little bit in connecting with each other.

What role would you say humor plays in your process?

Oh, when I first listened to the Cage piece one of the things that I loved is that it’s kind of comical, like a cartoon in a way. At a certain point in the third movement, I said to the dancers, please play with that.

Do you mean the part where the hand gestures occur? Two flat hands behind the head, next to the ears, over the mouth, and so on? I love the way they pop up randomly and seem to multiply. It seems so fresh.

Yes that’s it. It was a chance for the dancers to interact with and project what they feel with this music. And it was spontaneous when they first introduced it—of course it’s less spontaneous now but it’s the same material. They’re not having to create it every time they do it, but they don’t necessarily do it in exactly the same way each time.

Another place where I noticed humor is in a bit of a traffic pile up at the end. It looks like a dancer bumps into another. It’s so quick and subtle that I thought maybe it was a mistake.

Yes. I mean they don’t crash. But the ending is very abrupt and they just barely have the time to come back to their huddle before the music ends.

Gilbert T. Small II rehearses Lucinda Childs' “Three Dances (for prepared piano).” Photograph by Hannah Mayfield

I also love the place where the dancers move in a seesaw fashion from side to side with elbows flexed. I’m not sure exactly why it charmed me. Is there anything you can say about that?

The movement material that I prepare is very much movement that comes from my improvisation. I think that particular movement just comes from what the music was saying to me. I wanted to try and translate it into something that can fit—not necessarily to illustrate the music, but to be connected in some way to the music. It belonged to the music. Perhaps also at the moment of the choreography, I felt that was needed.

So that’s the way you create. You work on your own body.

I improvise, I listen to the music and I don’t worry about counts. I don’t worry about anything. I just try to find the material that makes sense. And then I look at the score and I look at the counting and the way I can deliver it to the dancers. I have to prepare it by myself.

It sounds very efficient when you’re restricted with how much time you have with a particular group of dancers.

Oh exactly, and all the music and all the possible variations of how we would use the music. That’s all prepared in advance so I can give them something they can look at and it’s something they can use. Especially when they came back to it after a couple of months. It’s just numbers, but still, it’s information. They know that at a particular place in the music, such and such begins, and where such and such ends.

What I’m hearing you say is the same qualities of the piece that made it satisfying for me to watch, also make it satisfying for the dancers to learn and know the piece.

I purposely don’t show them any paper at the beginning. But at a certain point I said, this is going to be useful for you to have a look at—to see the structure and to write in your little notes. And they said yes. And then we can talk it through. One can say let’s look at this part and go over that part. And I was happy because I don’t like to bombard them with paperwork. But they appreciated it and they used it.

The Gibney Dance Company will also perform works by Peter Chu and Roy Assaf for its season at the Joyce Theater. Details and ticket information is available here.

Karen Hildebrand

Karen Hildebrand is former editorial director for Dance Magazine and served as editor in chief for Dance Teacher for a decade. An advocate for dance education, she was honored with the Dance Teacher Award in 2020. She follows in the tradition of dance writers who are also poets (Edwin Denby, Jack Anderson), with poetry published in many literary journals and in her book, Crossing Pleasure Avenue (Indolent Books). She holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Originally from Colorado, she lives in Brooklyn.

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