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Lucinda Childs (born June 26, 1940) is an American postmodern dance dancer and choreographer. Her compositions are known for their minimalism movements yet complex transitions. Childs is most famous for being able to turn the slightest movements into intricate choreography. Through her use of patterns, repetition, dialect, and technology, she has created a unique style of choreography that embraces experimentation and transdisciplinarity.
Continuing her dance training, she studied with Harriet Ann Gray and Helen Tamiris at the Perry-Mansfield of Theatre and Dance. Childs also worked with theater director Barney Brown from the Pasadena Play-House. During her second year at Perry-Mansfield, Childs auditioned for Tamiris and was cast in a trio with Daniel Nagrin. In the summer of 1959, Childs went to Colorado College to continue studying dance and composition with Hanya Holm. This is where she meet Merce Cunningham and began to focus exclusively on dance.
As a musical theater choreographer, Tamiris gave Childs her first acting job which proved to be a frightening experience for Childs. After this traumatic experience, Childs decided to focus on dance and pursued a Bachelor of Arts degree in dance. She was able to broaden her technical experience by studying with Judith Dunn, Bessie Schonberg and Merce Cunningham. Childs describes Cunningham saying that he “elucidated a kind of particularity and clarity in dance that felt distinctly separate from anything I had experienced up to that point”. While studying at the Cunningham studio, Childs was introduced to Yvonne Rainer who encouraged Childs to show her early works at the weekly Judson workshops. During one of these workshops Childs performed a solo, Pastime (1963), at the Judson Memorial Church. Rainer was also the one to encourage Childs to be a part of the Judson Dance Theater in 1963 with dancers such as James Waring, Valda Setterfield, and Arlene Rothlein. Here, Childs worked primarily as a soloist and was allowed to explore and experiment with her own dance style and choreography. Childs states, “Judson made me interested in dance, but it also made me feel torn between different things – technique, working outside the dance vocabulary, using objects and texts.”Roslyn Sulcas, “Dance: Freeing the Inner Childs: Talking Dancer” The Village Voice (2001), IIPA, 67
After opening her own dance company, The Lucinda Dance Company in 1973, Childs collaborated with the likes of Robert Wilson and Philip Glass. Childs, Glass and Wilson joined together on the opera Einstein On The Beach. Childs participated as the leading performer and choreographer and won an Obie Award for Best Actress for her performance. Lucinda Childs Biography She also appeared in a show titled I Was Sitting on My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating in 1977. Childs also originated the role of Hubert Page in The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs Off-Broadway in 1982. Janet McTeer would later go on to receive an Academy Award nomination for playing the role opposite Glenn Close.
Since 1992, Childs has worked primarily in the field of opera, starting with Luc Bondy's production of Richard Strauss's Salome. She also choreographed Bondy's production of Macbeth for the Scottish Opera in 1995. That same year, Childs directed her first opera, a production of Mozart's Zaide for La Monnaie in Brussels, Belgium. In 2001, Childs choreographed Los Angeles' Opera's Production of Wagner's Lohengrin, conducted by Kent Nagano. In 2002, Childs directed Orfeo ed Euridice for the Scottish Opera. In 2003, Childs choreographed Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé for the Geneva Opera Ballet. Childs choreographed John Adams' opera Doctor Atomic with the San Francisco Ballet in 2007. She also choreographed and directed Vivaldi's opera Farnace for the Opera du Rhin in 2012. Her most recent work, THE DAY, premiered in the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival on August 1, 2019.
In 2009, Childs received the Lifetime Achievement Bessie Award. She was also awarded by the French government, which designated her as among the highest rank of dancer performers. Besides her own productions, Childs has also choreographed for the Paris Opéra Ballet, Lyon Opera Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, and the Berlin Opera Ballet.
In 2015 she played a major part in Robert Wilson's and Arvo Pärt's Adam's Passion.
At the 2017 Venice Dance Biennial, she was awarded the Golden Lion for her lifetime achievements.
As of 2018, The Lucinda Dance Company has been shut down. When interviewed about the closing of her company, Childs states that “it’s almost a natural thing. Everybody’s ready to move on". While this is not the first time her company has closed, this does appear to be the last.
Childs' work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou. (2025). 9780500094372, Thames & Hudson Ltd. ; Thames & Hudson Inc. ISBN 9780500094372
In a 2018 interview conducted by Rachel Elson of Dance Magazine, Childs states that she is “responding to the music” when she choreographs. She will listen to the music then think about all the different sequences, trying to figure out “where there could be musical transitions that we abide by, and where there are ones we don't abide by”. Childs also mentioned, in Speaking of Dance: Twelve Contemporary Choreographers on Their Craft (2004), that the works of Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg influenced her works. When she began her Company in 1973, Childs was interested in “creating dances with simple, geometrical spatial patterns”. As such, her exploration of this topic lead to Childs creating a diagrammatical score that noted each dancer’s path.
Dance (1979) was composed of three ensemble sections containing eight dancer or four couples, then there were two soloist sections. Childs first took the composition Glass had made and analyzed how the music was constructed and designed her own structure of movement to interact with it. Childs choreographed this piece to come together with the music at points, and to counter it at others. The two structures were similar but not a true reflection.
Childs had the couples on stage during this piece as she feels the couples heighten the spatial relations between the dancers and the audience. Having two dancers on stage versus one opens up and charges the space with energy. The dancers were also accompanied by a film projected on the screen in front of the dancers. The dancers were visible from behind the screen, dancing in sync with the dancers in the film. The film aspect of this collaboration came from Sol LeWitt. In the original staging, the filmed dancers were the same as on stage. In the 2014 remount of Dance (1979), the dancers portrayed in the film are the original dancers, while the live performers have changed. LeWitt filmed the original dancers from various angles. Close-up shots, long shots, and overhead shots were used to create the abstract, almost ghost-like projection. The most frequent way to combine the dancers on stage to those in the film was a horizontal split-level, so the couples on stage were dancing along below the film. For the solo sections, a vertical split was used to show the front and back of the dancer at the same time. Childs describes the use of the projection as the dancers becoming the decor, the scenic element, instead of using a piece of abstract art which was the original suggestion before LeWitt came up with the idea to pair the dancers with a film.
Childs began choreography in the second part as it was more abstract. Each structure in the first part, with the text, took on a different meaning depending on the props used and Childs was able to drift the structures in and out of relating directly with the text or not. There were a lot of props in the first half, and it was all mainly performed through improvisation. While not set with specific movements, the first part of THE DAY (2019) was set in the way of prop movement. Childs and Whelan explored how to move each prop and let that be the focus of how the rest of the movements should flow, letting the material be similar but a little different every night. The focus of props in this piece goes back to Childs’ first interest in creating movement by manipulating objects.
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