Review: At Gibney, a New Lucinda Childs Stands Out (No Surprise)
Gibney Company puts on dances, as its company director recently said, that deal with what it means to be human. That's true of any dance — a moving body is alive and therefore human — but as the group's program at the Joyce Theater showed, there are different ways to convey it. Dances can have feelings, but feelings are not dances.
Unfortunately at this company, led by the founder and artistic director Gina Gibney and the director Gilbert T. Small II, too much repertory champions emotions born from gesture. Its latest program of three world premieres was heavier on feeling and manic movement than on rejuvenating choreographic content.
The exception, unsurprisingly, came from the program's last piece, 'Three Dances (Prepared Piano) John Cage' by Lucinda Childs, who never randomly arranges dancers on a stage, but moves them with formal, mathematical precision. Here, the dancers — or artistic associates, as they are called at Gibney — were transformed as they entered the sleek dance universe of Childs, a revered postmodernist known for her minimal aesthetic.
Choreographing to a John Cage composition, Childs interacts with the music in subtle, playful ways. There even seem to be fleeting nods to Merce Cunningham (Cage's artistic and personal partner), with whom Childs studied.
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