The status of icon earns Lucinda Childs mainly thanks to her choreographies from the seventies and eighties

Less is more, is the well -known credo of the modernists. The program Icon Introdans shows that in the case of Lucinda Childs (1940) it is certainly true. The more minimalist the choreographies of this icon of the American (postmodern) dance, the stronger they are, especially if they are set on compositions of her musical fellow minimalists. Or if they are performed without music: in the oldest work of the program Icon From Introdans, Interior dramafive dancers put a always shifting course of simple steps in silence for twelve minutes, precisely to change direction, formation and movement theme on time and end up synchronously again exactly on time.

After the premiere in 1977 Interior drama Often performed on large roofs in New York. In such a place, at the time, the figures must have come over in white as alien beings. And that ‘inner drama’? An ironic reference of course, to the raging count-activity in the brain of the dancers, not to swirling emotions. Merce Cunningham already said it: Dance is motion, not emotion.

Childs was part of the Judson Church Dance Company in the sixties. A collective of makers that in mind the theories of Cunningham and John Cage kicked all the holy houses of the established dance order. Dance is possible anytime and anywhere, dance does not have to tell a story or express feeling and any movement can be dance.

With its classic appearance and the ‘Cleane’ movement style, Childs was an outsider within the Rebels group. Later she caused a furore with choreographies to music from, among others, Philip Glass, with whom she collaborated in the opera Einstein on the Beach, A milestone in theater history.

Decoration

Interesting and rightly so that Introdans existing work such as Dance (1979) and Concerto (1993) taken on the repertoire. But it must slowly be concluded that the more recent or specially created works are left in comparison. The new work Notes of lunging for example. The movement arsenal has been expanded with more and tighter, ballettesker set arm movements, there is partner work with lifts. Under a screen with a picturesque color -shifting cloudy skies, the ballet moves from picture to plate.

Due to the emphasis on aesthetics and the but continuing and pearling (piano) compositions by Matteo Myderwyk, the whole is missing. Even Childs’ choreographic signature, the persistent lightness of the passes, starts to annoy a bit. The Woman Trio is beautiful, with the soft wavy arms and in the middle Demi Verheezen, with its slender model body a kind of double of the young childs.

The final piece of the evening also strengthens that feeling of pictures, ideas without effect. For Kilar From 2013, her first creation for Introdans, Childs’ favorite designer Dominique Drillot made crinolines of iron wire for the women’s wire women, for the men’s cubes of wire steel. Photogenically enough, but inventive manipulation or confrontation with those objects – what you can expect – HO. It is refined decoration.

The three more recent works in the program make it long for the intoxicating, minimalist works from the seventies and eighties, the period at which Childs owes its status of icon.

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