Presented on October 16th and 23rd 1966, Vehicle is a musical and choreographic performance by Lucinda Childs staging three dancers, a system of mobiles and projectors, an ultrasonic transmitter, and a cabin on an air cushion. A reminiscence of the Bauhaus luminous machines, this device relies on the creation of sound by movement.

A disciple of Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage, Lucinda Childs participated in the Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s. In 1976, she was the choreographer and interpreter of Einstein on the Beach by Bob Wilson and Philip Glass. Fascinated by the interaction between the body and objects and by how dancers can produce their own music through their movements, the artist saw in Vehicle an unprecedented opportunity to work with large-scale technological resources. With the engineers from the Bell laboratories, she designed a work with geometric shapes around the transmission of audible and light signals. In this work, the performers act more like operators than real dancers. Isolated in a plexiglas cabin, Alex Hay hands three illuminated buckets to William Davis who suspends them from a frame. Lucinda Childs propels and controls their swaying, which causes the frequencies of an ultrasonic beam to vary, as well as the shadows that they cast. 

Source : Sylvain Maestraggi

Lucinda Childs began her career at the Judson Dance Theater in 1963 where she choreographed thirteen works and performed in works of Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, and Robert Morris. Since forming her dance company in 1973, she has created over fifty works, both solo and ensemble.

In 1976, she collaborated with Robert Wilson and Philip Glass on the opera Einstein on the Beach, as principal performer and choreographer for which she received a Village Voice Obie award. In the subsequent revival in '84 Childs choreographed the two "Field Dances" for the opera. Childs has appeared in a number of Wilson's major productions among them, Marguerite Duras' Maladie de la Mort, Wilson's I Was Sitting on my Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating, Heiner Muller's Quartett, and Wilson and Glass' opera White Raven and Arvo Part’s Adams Lament. and collaborated with Robert Wilson and Mikhail Baryshnikov on Wilson’s new production Letter to a Man which premiered in Spoleto Italy in 2015.

She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979 for her collaboration, Dance, with music by Philip Glass, and film décor by Sol LeWitt. In a Washington Post review of Dance, Alan M. Kriegsman wrote, "a few times, at most, in the course of a decade a work of art comes along that makes a genuine breakthrough, defining for us new modes of perception and feeling and clearly belonging as much to the future as to the present. Such a work is Dance".

Since 1981, she has choreographed over thirty works for major ballet companies which include the Paris Opera Ballet, Les Ballets de Monte Carlo, and Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Company. She has also worked as choreographer and more recently both choreographer and director for sixteen opera productions including Mozart's Zaide for La Monnaie in Brussels, Stravinsky's Le Rossignol et Oedipe, Vivaldi's Farnace, and Handel's Alessandro, voted "Opera of the Year" by Mezzo-TV 2013. In 2014 she directed a new production of John Adams Dr. Atomic for the Opera du Rhin and Jean Baptiste Lully's Atys and Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice for Opera Kiel in Germany.

The Summerscape Festival at Bard College commissioned the revival of Dance in 2009, which continues to tour in the United States and Europe and is currently included in the repertory of the Lyons Opera Ballet. Available Light (1983) with music by John Adams and set by architect, Frank Gehry was revived for the 2015-16 season, and she is recently choreographed Beethoven’s Grande Fugue for the Lyons Opera Ballet, which premieres in November, 2016.

Childs received the Bessie Award for Sustained Achievement in 2001, and was elevated from the rank of Officer to Commander in France's Order of Arts and Letters in 2004, and in 2009 she received the NEA/NEFA American Masterpiece Award. In 2017, she was awarded the Venice Biennale de la Danse Golden Lion Award, and the Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Lifetime Achievement Award. 

Source : Lucinda Childs’ Website

More informations :

http://www.lucindachilds.com/

We owe 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, a series of performances presented in the large building of the Arsenal of the 69th Regiment of New York, in October 1966, to the complicity between the visual artist Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver, an engineer with the telephone company Bell. The concept was simple: allow a dozen artists to achieve the performance of their dreams thanks to the technology of the Bell laboratories.

Born from the experimentations of the members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the Judson Dance Theatre, the 9 Evenings mark a decisive step in the changing relationship between art and technology. Evening after evening, projectors, video cameras, transistors, amplifiers, electrodes and oscilloscopes entered the stage at the service of ambitious, futuristic, iconoclastic or poetic visions – all filmed in black and white and in colour. When these films were rediscovered in 1995, Billy Klüver decided, in partnership with Julie Martin and the director Barbro Schultz Lundestam, to produce a series of documentaries reconstructing what had taken place on the stage and during the preparation of the performances. The original material was thus completed by interviews with the protagonists of each performance (artists and engineers) and a few famous guests. The 9 Evenings would thereby be restored to their place in the history of art. 

Source : Sylvain Maestreggi