Between the 1940s and 1980s, a phenomenon occurred in the arts. Boundaries were smashed and new zeniths of creativity were reached.
In Europe, Japan and America, (where the phenomenon was based in the Lower East Side and West Village of New York City), creators challenged staid traditions by forging new modern and avant garde approaches to their art forms.
Composers combined their instruments with electronics, architects worked with new materials, designers made angular clothing, photographers found new ways to develop prints, and paintings extended beyond canvases onto the walls where they hung.
The choreographers’ revolution was distinct in that they took dance even further by going beyond modernism, into post-modernism.
Merce Cunningham used the I Ching by casting yarrow stalks to determine the sequences of his choreography. In German choreographer Pina Bausch’s 1975 masterful work to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, female dancers wear silk slips and the company runs, leaps, and falls on stages coated with over 6,000 pounds of soil, an even more compelling interpretation than Nijinsky’s original scandalous choreography in 1913.
In 1962, some of Cunningham’s students gathered in a West Village church and formed the iconic Judson Church Dance Theater (JCDT). Experimenting with improvisation, they both collaborated on dances as well as cast each other in their own works. JCDT members Steve Paxton created a work in which he danced with three chickens and Tricia Brown placed 17 red clad dancers (and her audiences), on downtown roofs.
Several JCDT members formed their own companies and word of their choreographic foray’s spread. Some were invited to perform their works in venues around the world and were commissioned to set their works on established ballet and modern dance companies.
When dance department heads decided to incorporate JCDT methods into their curriculums for dance degrees, members became esteemed university professors. Aileen Passloff was chair of the Dance Department and taught at Bard for 40 years. Paxton taught his Contact Improvisation technique around the world for decades.
Trained as an actor, dancer, and choreographer, JCDT member Lucinda Childs has created over 70 works for dance companies, opera and film, collaborating with musical and architectural giants around the world.
During the constraints of Covid in 2020, she managed to produce, choreograph, and provide narration for Opera Nice’s production of Phillip Glass’s monumental “Akhenaten,” which had to be filmed and shown online.
Childs turns 86 on June 26, the day her company returns to the Fisher Center with “Momentary Reprise,” a retrospective performance of her works. Childs herself will perform “Geranium ’64 from 1965. Composed of off-balance movement that incorporates various items as counterbalances to her challenge to gravity, the original version included attaching herself with a chain and padlock to a hammock.
In remembrance of their passing last year, the production also includes excerpts from Childs’ work with two of her foremost collaborators, architect, painter, stage director Robert Wilson, (with whom she co-created “Einstein on the Beach” with composer Phillip Glass in 1976), and titan of architecture Frank Gehry, who created the set for her “Available Light” in 1983 (and designed the Fisher Center), with a score by John Adams. Both works will feature the original lighting from dance lighting designer icon Beverly Emmons.
Said Glass of their collaboration, “We were overthrowing the notion of the narrative, the movement itself becomes the content.” (Which could also be said of the libretto’s inclusion of numbers, solfeges—musical syllables like do, re, mi used in vocal training—and snippets of sentences.)
Childs will also be presenting two new works, “Actus,” a duet set to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Actus Tragicus, and “Distant Figure,” a sextet to music written for Childs by Phillip Glass, both danced to live accompaniment by Russian piano soloist Anton Batagov.
Some rehearsals for “Momentary Reprise” were held in The Fisher Center’s new circular Performing Arts Lab building, designed by Maya Lin containing housing for professional residencies, and teaching and rehearsal spaces for Bard’s undergraduate performing arts programs.
This article appears in June 2026.
