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Score for Lucinda Childs' Melody Excerpt. This score represented all the possible pathways that each dancer may traverse during the course of performing Melody Excerpt, along with stage measurements in feet. Each dancer is represented by a discrete color. Courtesy of Lucinda Childs.

Transmitting Dance Across Generations: On the Making of A Steady Pulse: Restaging Lucinda Childs, 1963–78

Transmitting Dance Across Generations: On the Making of A Steady Pulse: Restaging Lucinda Childs, 1963–78

At the February launch of the Center’s new multimedia online publication, A Steady Pulse: Restaging Lucinda Childs, 1963–78, Bill Bissell, Director of Performance, and choreographer Lucinda Childs discussed the collaborative research effort that led to the creation of the Center’s fourth danceworkbook.

In the video that follows, Bissell recalls a 2011 visit to Childs’ home and archive in Martha’s Vineyard. “Lucinda’s is a living archive and we have tried to make that the case in the workbook,” he says. This archive “lives in a hybrid space that is about transmission…it could establish a living connection with dancers dancing.”

At the February launch of the Center’s new multimedia online publication, A Steady Pulse: Restaging Lucinda Childs, 1963–78, Bill Bissell recalls a 2011 visit to Childs’ home and archive in Martha’s Vineyard. Filmed at Danspace Project in New York on February 21, 2015.

In this second video, Childs reflects on the experience of seeing her archive come to life in the danceworkbook. “We came up with something very exciting in terms of accessibility,” she says. “The phrase ‘letting go’ I think is very appropriate… but how to let [the archival material] go was the real question, and how to let it get out there.”

At the February launch of the Center’s new multimedia online publication, A Steady Pulse: Restaging Lucinda Childs, 1963–78, Lucinda Childs reflects on the experience of seeing her archive come to life in the danceworkbook. Filmed at Danspace Project in New York on February 21, 2015.