Academic literature on the topic 'Lucinda Childs'

In the 1970s, choreographer Lucinda Childs developed a reductive form of abstraction based on graphic representations of her dance material, walking, and a specific approach towards its embodiment. If her work has been described through the prism of minimalism, this case study on Calico Mingling (1973) proposes a different perspective. Based on newly available archival documents in Lucinda Childs’s papers, it traces how track drawing, the planimetric representation of path across the floor, intersected with minimalist aesthetics. On the other hand, it elucidates Childs’s distinctive use of literacy in order to embody abstraction. In this respect, the choreographer’s approach to both dance company and dance technique converge at different influences, in particular modernism and minimalism, two parallel histories which have been typically separated or opposed.

The tendency to reduce the movements of performers in media art to data results in a flattening of identities and makes the performers’ essence seemingly insignificant. Two case studies showcase what might be lost through datafication, even as they resist it: Lucinda Childs “walking” in Bach 6 Solo by Robert Wilson, and Michael Jackson standing still at the start of his 1993 Super Bowl Halftime show. The desire to detach the body from aesthetic significance can be traced back to America’s historical racism.

Performance offers the chance to break through dead ways of being. Only by harnessing our longing can we unshackle from forms that no longer nourish us. Making performance means creating conditions where we can sense new possibilities for how we show up for our lives. Let the old structures shatter.Hope Mohr is a choreographer, writer, and advocate. She performed with Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown. In 2007, she founded Hope Mohr Dance. In 2010, she founded The Bridge Project, now Bridge Live Arts, which creates and supports equity-driven live art that centers artists as agents of change. www.hopemohr.org

Minimalist lines often show up in philosophical and theoretical writings to diagram accounts of human perspective. But they also show up to do the opposite: to diagram the possibility of structures that precede or exceed a human perspective. By inhabiting scored lines as bodies in performance and simultaneously imagining what it is to score these lines from above, choreography can animate philosophical and theoretical approaches to perspective to reveal how multiple even minimal lines can become.

This article examines children’s life in the city in Ruth Sawyer’s Roller Skates in light of New Historicism. It understands the literature on the connection between texts and their historical contexts. Its critics are interested in power, gender, race and socially marginalized people in texts. Focusing on interpreting the social, cultural and political factors in the text through the lens of New Criticism helps readers understand better the author’s intention. Traditionally, children’s literature has not paid attention to urban as the setting for child characters’ play and activities with hygiene problems and air pollution. Roller Skates, set in New York in the late 19th century, describes Lucinda Wyman’s city adventure on roller skates. The city already became a multicultural society with the increasing immigrants. Lucinda befriends with her neighbours and her empathy eventually enhances multicultural competence. The novel implies that a child-friendly city can be a good city for the citizen. This study suggests that using the environment is more important than the simple division between rural and urban.

This book review considers the challenges of raising a child with a developmental disability as seen in the book What time is the 9:20 bus? by Lucinda Hage. Beyond being an emotional and compelling narrative of a mother struggling to navigate Canada’s medical and social support systems, the book is also an excellent introduction to the fields of bioethics, disability ethics, and resource allocation ethics.

IN CAMERA LUCIDA, ROLAND BARTHES'S subject is the significance of photography's defining characteristic: the photograph's inseparable relation to its subject, that which ''must have been'' in front of the camera's lens. Or so it would seem. The present reading of Camera Lucida argues that Barthes's essay actually shows photography's nature as dependent not only on the intimate relation to its object, commonly termed ''indexical,'' but in accord with its relation to its user, its beholder. An examination of Barthes's encounters with photographs in Camera Lucida reveals the way in which identification and misidentification figure into the viewing of images, and suggests that contact between the beholder and the photograph actually eclipses the relation between the photograph and its subject. Barthes's focus on the emotional response of the viewer disguises the fact that he misidentified key details in Camera Lucida's photographs, most significantly in a 1927 portrait by James Van Der Zee and in the ''Winter Garden Photograph.'' This latter photograph of Barthes's recently deceased mother as a small child is famously not illustrated in the book. This essay argues that it is fictional. These ''mistakes'' suggest that Camera Lucida undermines its ostensible basis in indexicality. The subject did not have to be in front of the camera after all. The present rereading of the text from this point of view articulates a notion of performativity according to which the nature of the contact that exists between the image and the viewer informs the way an image is understood. Barthes's desire to find his mother again through her photograph to a large extent acts out his desire to re(per)form and make permanent his relation to her, a desire that he elucidates in the process of describing his search for her picture and his reaction to it when he finds it. This performative element is charged with identification; the person the narrator (Barthes) seeks, in his mother, is himself. A close analysis of the ''Winter Garden Photograph,'' as described by Barthes, shows how performances of identification are inscribed with gender and familial configurations.

Lucinda Childs est une figure majeure de la danse au XXe siècle. Au début des années 1960, elle participe à la fondation du Judson Dance Theater, un collectif de danseurs, danseuses, chorégraphes, artistes et compositeurs qui renouvellent à New York les formes et les pratiques de la danse. Avec sa compagnie crée en 1973, elle devient l’une des cheffes de file de la danse minimale et de la danse postmoderne américaines, tout en collaborant à partir des années 1980 avec les plus importantes compagnies de ballet en Europe et aux États-Unis. Dans le processus de création, répétition et représentation que Childs met en œuvre seule, avec sa compagnie, ou des compagnies de répertoire, l’écriture et la lecture jouent un rôle déterminant pour concevoir et incorporer ses danses. Grâce à une enquête anthropologique au cœur des studios de danse, Lou Forster montre que le geste technique consistant à danser page à la main se construit à l’intersection de deux histoires parallèles. Au cours des années 1950, John Cage et Merce Cunningham inventent un ensemble de pratiques de lecture et d’écriture afin de s’opposer, détourner et reconfigurer des approches académiques dans lesquelles l’écrit constitue un support pour assoir des partages disciplinaires et des hiérarchies. Cette approche néo-avant-gardiste joue un rôle primordial au Judson ; et parmi les membres de ce groupe, Childs est l’une des chorégraphes qui se montrent la plus attentive à ces pratiques lettrées car elles rejoignent un aspect méconnu de sa formation de danseuse. En effet, elle étudie la danse moderne de 1955 à 1962 au sein de l’important réseau de la diaspora allemande de New York. Elle suit en particulier la formation dispensée dans l’école de la chorégraphe Hanya Holm (1893-1992) où est enseignée une forme américanisée de danse d’expression (Ausdruckstanz). Childs y découvre la cinétographie Laban ou Labanotation, le système d’analyse et d’écriture du mouvement développé par le chorégraphe austro-hongrois Rudolf Laban (1879-1958), dans lequel les danseurs et danseuses répètent page à la main. C’est vers cet événement de lecture atypique pour le monde de la danse que Childs se tourne quinze ans plus tard pour travailler avec sa compagnie. L’histoire de l’art et l’histoire de la danse ont dissocié ces deux versants des modernités chorégraphiques lorsqu’à partir de 1933 une partie de la danse d’expression se compromet avec le régime nazi. Aux États-Unis se construit alors le mythe d’une originalité de la danse moderne américaine, qui s’accentue encore dans le cadre de la guerre froide. La position privilégiée que Childs occupe dans cette histoire connectée la conduit à faire des pratiques graphiques une matrice du postmodernisme. À partir de 1973, elle aborde l’ensemble des techniques canoniques de la danse occidentale, passant au fil des années de la danse d’expression aux activités piétonnières, au ballet néoclassique puis baroque. Se positionnant comme une appropriationiste, elle développe une perspective historique et critique sur ces techniques d’emprunt. Dans ses pièces, elle tend ainsi à rassembler des genres et des histoires de la danse qui ont été séparées et disjointes, élaborant une véritable poétique de la relation
Lucinda Childs is a major figure in twentieth-century dance. In the early 1960s, she was one of the founding members of the Judson Dance Theater, a group of dancers, choreographers, artists and composers in New York City who reinvigorated dance forms and practices. With the establishment of her company in 1973, she emerged as one of the leading figures of American minimal dance and postmodern dance, while collaborating from the 1980s onward with major ballet companies in Europe and the United States. Whether with her own company, with repertory dance companies, or at Judson, literacy plays a crucial role in the conceiving, embodying, and performing of her dances. Through an anthropological investigation within dance studios, Lou Forster demonstrates that the technical gesture of dancing, page in hand, is constructed at the intersection of two parallel histories. In the 1950s, John Cage and Merce Cunningham devised a range of reading and writing practices in order to oppose, divert and reconfigure academic methods in which literacy serves as a foundation to establish disciplinary divisions and hierarchies. This neo-avant-garde approach played a crucial role at Judson. Among the members of this group, Childs was one of the choreographers who paid the most attention to these literacy practices, as they tied in with a lesser-known aspect of her dance training. From 1955 to 1962, she studied modern dance within the extensive network of the German diaspora in New York. Specifically, she attended the school run by the choreographer Hanya Holm (1893-1992), where an Americanised form of dance of expression (Ausdruckstanz) was taught. There Childs discovered Kinetography Laban or Labanotation, the system of analysing and writing movement developed by the Austro-Hungarian choreographer Rudolf Laban (1879-1958), in which dancers rehearse with page in hand. Fifteen years later she turned toward this literacy event, unusual for the dance world, to work with her company. Art history and dance history dissociated these two aspects of choreographic modernity when, from 1933, part of the dance of expression became involved with the Nazi regime. In the United States, the myth of the originality of American Modern dance began to take shape, further emphasized during the Cold War. Childs' unique position in this connected history meant that graphic practices became a matrix for postmodernism. Since 1973, she embraced all canonical techniques of Western dance, moving over the years from dance of expression to pedestrian activities, to Neoclassical and then to the Baroque. Positioning herself as an appropriationist, she developed a historical and critical perspective on these borrowed techniques. In her pieces, she seeks to bring together practices, genres and histories of dance that have been separated and disjointed, crafting a genuine poetics of relation

Chapter 4 examines hybrid works of multimedia portraiture and the genre of the portrait opera. The chapter first views the Voom Portraits of the American avant-garde director Robert Wilson, an ongoing series of multimedia video portraits of celebrities begun in 2004, looking in particular at his portraits of actors Robert Downey Jr. and Winona Ryder, which combine high-resolution film image with eclectic sound effects and scores by composers Tom Waits and Michael Galasso. The chapter then turns to the portrait opera Einstein on the Beach, created by Wilson, Philip Glass, and choreographer Lucinda Childs, to explore how they produced a multimedia portrait of Einstein that employs disparate allusions to popularly known elements from his life in a highly abstract work of opera that leaves the viewer to engage in a particularly imaginative act of interpretation about how the music describes this well-known modern icon.

Parents and teachers today face a swirl of conflicting theories about child rearing and educational practice. Indeed, current guides are contradictory, oversimplified, and at odds with current scientific knowledge. Now, in Awakening Children's Minds, Laura Berk cuts through the confusion of competing theories, offering a new way of thinking about the roles of parents and teachers and how they can make a difference in children's lives. This is the first book to bring to a general audience, in lucid prose richly laced with examples, truly state-of-the-art thinking about child rearing and early education. Berk's central message is that parents and teachers contribute profoundly to the development of competent, caring, well-adjusted children. In particular, she argues that adult-child communication in shared activities is the wellspring of psychological development. These dialogues enhance language skills, reasoning ability, problem-solving strategies, the capacity to bring action under the control of thought, and the child's cultural and moral values. Berk explains how children weave the voices of more expert cultural members into dialogues with themselves. When puzzling, difficult, or stressful circumstances arise, children call on this private speech to guide and control their thinking and behavior. In addition to providing clear roles for parents and teachers, Berk also offers concrete suggestions for creating and evaluating quality educational environments--at home, in child care, in preschool, and in primary school--and addresses the unique challenges of helping children with special needs. Parents, Berk writes, need a consistent way of thinking about their role in children's lives, one that can guide them in making effective child-rearing decisions. Awakening Children's Minds gives us the basic guidance we need to raise caring, thoughtful, intelligent children.

Abstract The following appreciation by Tim Page, Pulitzer Prize winning culture writer for The Washington Post, accompanied the 1993 CD recording of Glass’s most famous opera. Einstein on the Beach (1976) is a pivotal work in the oeuvre of Philip Glass. It is the first, longest, and most famous of the composer’s operas, yet it is in almost every way unrepresentative of them. Einstein was, by design, a glorious “one-shot”-a work that invented its context, form and language, and then explored them so exhaustively that further development would have been redundant. But, by its own radical example, Einstein prepared the way-it gave permission-for much of what has happened in music theater since its premiere. Einstein broke all the rules of opera. It was in four interconnected acts and five hours long, with no intermissions (the audience was invited to wander in and out at liberty during performances). The acts were intersticed by what Glass and Wilson called “knee plays”-brief interludes that also provided time for scenery changes. The text consisted of numbers, solfege syllables and some cryptic poems by Christopher Knowles, a young, neurologically-impaired man with whom Wilson had worked as an instructor of disturbed children for the New York public schools. To this were added short texts by choreographer Lucinda Childs and Samuel M. Johnson, an actor who played the Judge in the “Trial” scenes and the bus driver in the finale. There were references to the trial of Patricia Hearst (which was underway during the creation of the opera); to the mid-‘70s radio lineup on New York’s WABC; to the popular song “Mr. Bojangles”; to the Beatles and to teen idol David Cassidy. Einstein sometimes seemed a study in sensory overload, meaning everything and nothing.

This chapter focuses on the novel Palomita Blanca (Little White Dove) by Enrique Lafourcade. This best-selling novel in Chilean history, tells of counterculture, class, love, and heartache, with hippismo and Siloism making their marks in the lives of the story’s two young protagonists. Published in 1971, Palomita Blanca reflects the combination of lucid observation, misreading, and media-roused hogwash that characterized much of mainstream responses to both the youth question and counterculture. It is, of course, a work of literature, with all the leeway that grants. But the novel’s reach, including its extensive use in secondary schools, has done much to shape how more recent generations in Chile have come to understand the late sixties and early seventies.

Abstract When we were speaking of events in her town, we already had occasion to describe Teodora in the flower of her youth. Her hair was so long and abundant that had she not worn it braided it would have covered her back like a broad mantle of undulating vapor. With that sweet expression that conquered every heart, her appearance was so pleasing and attractive that in his mind Don Fernando could find something like an excuse for the subprefect. He asked the newcomers to sit down and called through the doorway, “Lucia, Lucia!”, at the same time throwing out the stub of the cigarette he had been smoking. Meanwhile Dona Petronila said to her son, in a low voice and smiling slyly, “I’ve caught you, you rascal; I see where you’ve been spending your time.” “Mama!” Manuel brought out like a child making excuses. Don Fernando asked Teodora, “Have you just arrived?”

Abstract Happiness pervaded the white house that morning, because Don Fernando’s return brought infinite joy to the home where he was loved and respected. Lucia, intent on finding a practical way to carry out her aim of helping the family of Juan Yupanqui, naturally thought of taking advantage of the sweetness and poetry that the first meeting after an absence holds for husband and wife. A few hours earlier she had seemed languid and sad like a flower deprived of the sunshine and the dew; yet now she regained her vigor and her freshness in the arms of the man who, when he A few moments after these scenes, Marcela was crossing the court yard of the white house, followed by a young girl, a marvel of beauty and liveliness who at once intrigued Lucia and made her eager to know her father, for her loveliness reflected that mixture of the Spaniard and the Indian that has produced stunning beauties in Peru. As she watched the girl approach, Don Fernando’s wife said to herself, “This child will no doubt be Marcela’s guardian angel, because God puts the mark of a special glow on the face that mirrors a superior soul ”.

Chapter Three focuses on the tumultuous episode where Atlanta’s most vulnerable citizens, primarily poor black children, were being hunted and murdered. To clarify this, chapter three explores the experience of the victims’ families through oral interviews, the FBI papers, and archival research to show how the popular political sentiment of Atlanta’s black working classes and poor towards Atlanta’s black City Hall was one of distrust that thwarts the black Mecca image. Crucial to understanding the Atlanta Child Murders again notes that the prism of race was not the only lens to better understanding this convoluted community, but that class stratification within black Atlanta(s) are lucid. The Atlanta Child Murders provide a unique counter-narrative on class to Atlanta’s black Mecca status, as victims who were poor black youth were labeled and dismissed as “hustlers and runaways” in effect suggesting that they deserved what happened to them. Chapter three accounts for the experiences of the Committee to Stop Children’s Murder (STOP Committee) and the Techwood Bat Patrol, organizations formed by some of Atlanta’s black working class and poor as they deemed it necessary to organize against the murderers because to them, Jackson was too busy bolstering the black Mecca image while sacrificing Atlanta’s poor to play politics. This chapter grapples with the idea that at this time, Atlanta’s black political leadership was already working with Atlanta’s white business elite to host the 1988 Democratic National Convention and the 1996 Olympic Games. As a result, it was widely believed by a large segment of the public that Atlanta’s black City Administration downplayed the murders to show that social and economic progress had been made in the South and thus promoting a “city too busy to hate.” Just as important, many in black Atlanta felt that Williams was not the killer and that another killer remained on the loose.

Abstract Manuel was in an extremely difficult position. During the long hours-all day and most of the night-that he spent shut up in his room, he would frequently say to himself, “Even though Don Se bastian’s name does not yet appear in the court records, it’s on everyone’s lips as a guilty party. For now I can’t give a satisfactory explanation of my conduct to strangers who might see me visit Don Fernando Marin’s house, and what they’re likely to say won’t be to my credit. And so I’ll have to be strong; I’ll accept the sacrifice so as some day to be worthy of her... I won’t go there anymore. But good God, what a time to be banishing myselfl Just when my heart belongs to Margarita, when I yearn to take part in the plans Senora Lucia is making for her upbringing! Oh heartbreak, your name is Fate, and I am your child!” As he spoke these last words Manuel dropped onto the sofa in his small room; and with his elbows resting on his knees and his head between his hands, he sat like one plunged into the boundless seas of speculation and doubt. Manuel certainly had a plan, formed by his brain but perhaps in spired by his heart; and feeling compelled to carry it out, he had begun to prepare the terrain for doing so. One day, after much struggle and hesitation, his feelings triumphed over his will, and he told himself, “Whatever people may say, I’m going there tonight.” And for the first time since his arrival he took pains with his hair and his clothes. From the depths of his trunk he took out some gloves that he had bought for his examinations at the university; he prepared his patent-leather boots; and he went out into the garden of his home to wait for the right time.

The New York Post, a New York City daily, ran a sensational headline on the front page of its April 12, 2000, issue: “Breast Cancer Hot Spots”. The news story reported that statistics and maps of breast cancer rates just released by New York State health authorities showed unusually high rates of breast cancer on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, as well as on Long Island and several other areas in New York City and upstate. These high rates were described by the state authorities as “not likely due to chance.” The residents of the Upper East Side, one of the most affluent areas of the city, were understandably alarmed. One woman interviewed was considering whether to move elsewhere, but had not yet decided. A second demanded that the two major party candidates for the U.S. Senate state their positions on the high rate. A third noted that there were no obvious sources of pollution in the neighborhood, no pesticide spraying or toxic waste dumps, that could explain why the breast cancer rate was high. Many people believe that breast cancer is caused by toxic agents in the environment. Victims of breast cancer we have met at sessions of support groups have described vividly the pains and discomfort of chemotherapy, radiation, and radical surgery; the nagging anxiety about a possible recurrence, the sense of disfigurement, of mutilation; the ignorance and insensitivity of many of the so-far healthy; the strengthening or weakening of bonds to those close to them: husbands, sons, daughters, parents, who either grow in understanding and compassion or fall short. But there is one common thread that runs through their stories: each of them feels there must be a reason why she, at this particular point in her life, should have gotten this terrible disease. Why me? Lucia D., in her late thirties, remembers that as a child of eight or nine growing up in Panama she and other children used to run after the truck that periodically sprayed DDT in their neighborhood and dance around in the spray. She is convinced that this childhood exposure is the reason she has breast cancer at such an early age.

Resumen: La figura de Le Corbusier ejerció una influencia sin contrapeso en la arquitectura moderna chilena, caracterizada salvo excepciones, por una adopción superficial y figurativa de sus ideas y formas. Entre estas excepciones está el singular caso del arquitecto Juan Borchers Fernández (1910-75) quien mediante sus agudas observaciones y lúcida crítica expone su adhesión mientras al mismo tiempo desmonta las contradicciones, los errores de interpretación y las falencias de las tesis lecorbuserianas. Para el análisis se utilizaron dos libros fundamentales (Vers une Architecture, 1923; Le Modulor, 1950) y dos artículos (L’angle droit, 1923; L’espace indicible, 1946) de Le Corbusier y las referencias a ellos en los libros, artículos, manuscritos, correspondencia y libretas de viajes de Borchers. Abstract: Corbusier’s influence in Chilean modern architecture is unique and it is characterized, with few exceptions, by superficial and figurative adoptions of his ideas and forms. Among these exceptions is the singular case of the architect Juan Borchers Fernández (1910-1975), whose acute observations and lucid review expose his adherence while at the same time they reveal the contradictions, misinterpretations and shortcomings about corbuserian’s thesis. This analysis is based on two fundamental original books (Vers une Architecture, 1923; Le Modulor, 1950) and two articles (L’angle droit, 1923; L’espace indicible, 1946) by Le Corbusier and references to them in Borchers’ books, articles, manuscripts, correspondence and travel journals. Palabras clave: Chile, teoría de la arquitectura, plástica, escala. Keywords: Chile, Architectural theory, plastic, scale. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/LC2015.2015.631