Jay Dockendorf Photo
Jock Reynolds, Lucinda Childs, and Philip Glass
Responding to a question from the audience, Philip Glass told a packed house at the Yale University Art Gallery Sunday afternoon, “John Cage used to say to me, ‘The audience completes the work.’”
“Was your music [in the second act of last night’s performance of Lucinda Childs’ “Dance”] phonetically sounding out the word ‘crazy’?” an audience member had asked.
“No, that was personal for you,” Glass deadpanned to riotous laughter and applause.
Glass, a renowned American music composer, was a featured performer during the first weekend of this year’s International Festival of Arts and Ideas.
Saturday night, his soundtrack to “Dance,” a large-scale production by his contemporary, choreographer Lucinda Childs, was heard in the Shubert Theater. Sunday evening, he performed selections of his work, solo and on the grand piano to a sold-out audience at Sprague Hall at Yale.
In a third event on Sunday afternoon, Glass, Childs, and Yale University Art Gallery Director Jock Reynolds sat down in the gallery’s auditorium to take questions from and directly converse with festival-goers.
“Glass was one of the first composers you really worked with,” Reynolds remarked to Childs at the beginning of the talk. In 1976, Childs was the featured performer in Robert Wilson & Philip Glass’s “Einstein on the Beach,” although each had been familiar with the other’s work for years before that, they said.
Members of Childs’ dance troupe, post show at the Shubert. Childs is center.
Saturday night at the Shubert Theater, Childs and her personal company of 11 presented “Dance,” a 1979 collaboration with Glass and Connecticut-based painter Sol LeWitt. A transparent cloth separated the audience from movements onstage, catching projection of a black & white film. Childs’ dancers onstage synchronistically followed the same movements as those in the film. Glass had provided the pulsating, glacial orchestration. The film itself and the “cartesian grid” backdrop had been created and captured in 1979 by the painter Sol LeWitt, whose work Reynolds discussed at an “Ideas” lecture Saturday afternoon.
Sally Cohn Photography
The piece was divided into three movements. In the second movement, Childs, a floating and ethereal image caught in the 35 mm film of 1979, danced a “duet” with her live apprentice of today. The two women were strikingly similar looking and equally impressive dancers. They danced with precisely the same steps, but their ways of moving their arms were slightly different. “How does the self that one shows the world [on the screen], differ from the self that lives within one’s own self [alone on the stage]?” this portion of the piece seemed to ask.
The next day, when the artist took questions with Glass, the theme of the audience’s private connection to the piece emerged from different angles. Childs and Glass revealed that despite the many layers of coordination necessary between the different elements of “Dance,” minimal verbal communication had gone into its creation: “I wouldn’t say we were talking a lot about what we were doing. We were mostly doing it and responding to each other,” Glass told the audience.
The valued-added benefit of having multiple artists in attendance at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas’ is that their presence further embellishes performances of genius. Yet, in person, Glass and Childs were both somewhat reluctant to divulge too much in language.
Childs and Glass are often categorized as “postmodern” or “minimal” but when asked about these designations by an audience member at Sunday’s talk neither was willing to share much of their feeling on the terms.
Childs expressed hesitation over delving too deeply into dance and music history, and Glass followed her with simply, “I pay no attention to labels.”
Next weekend, three films of Errol Morris, “The Thin Blue Line,” “A Brief History of Time,” and “Fog of War”, all of which Glass scored, will be shown at the Whitney Humanities Center, followed by a talk with Morris. Tickets are free on a first come, first serve basis.
The conception and performance were wonderful which made our experience all the more frustrating. We purchased tickets in the rear orchestra and the overhanging balcony blocked 2/3's of the film being projected on the scrim. There was no warning of obstructed view; sort of like buying a ticket to one of the old ball parks and finding yourself behind a pillar. Everyone in the rows underneath the balcony was straining their neck. Someone from A&I needs to sit through a rehearsal of each performance, changing seats to test sight lines and ensuring that the performance space (or at least the tickets being sold in the performance space) accommodates the performance. If we had purchased the cheap seats in the top balcony we would have been better off.