Lucinda Childs' Dance April 28, 2011

Thur-Sat, April 28-30, 8-10pm each night

San Francisco Performances presents Dance, a revival of the landmark work by dancer and choreographer Lucinda Childs, Philip Glass and Sol LeWitt, 8 p.m. Thursday, April 28 through Saturday, April 30 at Novellus Theater, YBCA. Dance is presented in association with YBCA.

Three dances, performed by the Lucinda Childs Dance Company, are set to a stunning soundtrack by Glass, performed alternately by the Philip Glass Ensemble and electric organ, against a backdrop of LeWitt's 1979 black-and-white film.

LeWitt filmed passages of choreography from each of the dances, which are projected on a transparent scrim downstage from the dancers and perfectly synchronized with the live movement. Through shifts in the camera angle and changes in scale-panning from close-ups to long shots-the film transposes and manipulates the audience's view.

Childs, whose "conceptual dance" pushed her to the forefront of important American choreographers, formed her own company in 1973 after training in Merce Cunningham's studio and dancing as one of the original members of the Judson Dance Theater company. She collaborated with Glass on his 1976 opera with Robert Wilson Einstein on the Beach, during which they came up with the idea for Dance. LeWitt, among the leading conceptual artists, joined them to create a work described as "a genuine breakthrough, defining for us new modes of perception and feeling and clearly belonging as much to the future as to the present" (Washington Post).

Dance is part of the James C. Hormel and Michael P. Nguyen Dance Series at SF Performances, presented in association with YBCA. Produced by Pomegranate Arts, the reconstruction of Dance was made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts' American Masterpieces: Dance initiative, administered by the New England Foundation for the Arts.

Tickets for Lucinda Childs' Dance start at $35. For more information, visit sfperformances.org or call 415.392.2545.

Official Website: http://sfperformances.org/performances/1011/LucindaChildsDance.html