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ABSTRACT
In 1973, the Lucinda Childs Dance Company performed a dance called Calico Mingling on Robert Moses Plaza at Fordham University, Lincoln Center, on Manhattan’s West Side. Childs, who had a history of testing spatial barriers with performances, intentionally trespassed into the most central outdoor area of Fordham’s campus to stage her work. The dancers’ pathways crisscrossed the strict geometrical form of the plaza’s surface. By visually and corporeally disrupting this private university space, the dance challenged the New York City doctrine of modernist urban development and progress championed by the man it recognized, controversial planner Robert Moses. This article details how Childs – who dance critic Jill Johnston described as the preeminent descendent of the American modern dance tradition – subverted Moses’s totalizing masculinist program of modernist architectural design as it was applied to urban planning in the mid-twentieth century. Childs’s embodied approach to modernism employs the grid as a framework to construct movement. In the choreographer’s hands, the structure prompts variable possibilities, thus furthering the trajectory of modern dance’s formal experimentation. Ultimately, our study of Calico Mingling underscores the intersecting histories and overlapping forms of modernism, demonstrating that – much like Childs’s dance – it can be consistently reconfigured into new variations.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Zipp, Manhattan Projects, 200.
2 Here we are referring to the Foucauldian grid and Michel de Certeau’s discussion of it in his “General Introduction” to The Practice of Everyday Life.
3 Childs, “Notes: ’64-’74,”, 34.
4 Before moving to West End Avenue Childs lived on West 106th Street for a short time. By 1973 she had moved to the second West Side location.
5 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 30.
6 Gold, “Creating the Charter of Athens,” 225.
7 Chronopoulos, “Robert Moses and the Visual Dimension of Physical Order,” 212, 215.
8 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, 40.
9 Chronopoulos, “Robert Moses and the Visual Dimension of Physical Order,” 215.
10 Zipp, 162.
11 They include Morningside-Manhattanville (near Columbia University) (1955–1957), Washington Square Southeast (New York University) (1956–1972), Pratt Institute in Brooklyn (1954–1964), and Lincoln Square (1958–1969). Moses was involved in more university projects than those, including Long Island University and Pratt, but they were either in boroughs outside of Manhattan or did not use Title I funds.
12 Ballon and Jackson,Robert Moses and the Modern City, 280. Quote originally from “The West Side’s Turn” in The New York Times, April 25, 1955.
13 Ibid., 281.
14 Caro, The Power Broker, 741.
15 Forster, “Towards an Embodied Abstraction,” 14.
16 Manning, Modern Dance, Negro Dance, xx–xxi.
17 Foulkes, Modern Bodies, 17–18.
18 The development and performance of modern dance was inextricably linked to higher education from its inception. Foulkes, 115–116.
19 Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers, 133.
20 Interview with Lucinda Childs by Anne Livet in Contemporary Dance, 61.
21 Ibid., 61.
22 Sally Banes describes Cunningham’s innovations in dance as essentially breaking down the hierarchical elements of the body, dance ensemble, and performance space that was described by classical ballet and continued in modern dance. Banes, 6.
23 Lucinda Childs Interviewed by Amanda Degener 1985 (date of dub), interview in 1981 at Lucinda Childs’s Loft. Fales Library Special Collections. Judson Memorial Church Archive-Bennington College tapes (video) 25: 54 Camera: Tony Carruthers.
24 Banes, Democracy’s Body, i. Banes describes how the work of the Judson Dance Theater rejected the codification of dance vocabularies associated with ballet and modern dance by employing everyday movements and sought to rethink the format of the traditional dance concert by presenting dances outside of the theater.
25 Childs’s most notable “prop” dance was Carnation (1964). For this solo she used hair rollers, a metal strainer, and a house sponge.
26 Judith Stuart, “Lucinda Childs Structures Neutral Energy Dance Field.” Xerox, BAM Archives, no page numbers.
27 Rosen, “Some Dance Observations,” 5. Rosen was writing about Childs’s work of the late 70s in her article, but much of what she said is applicable to earlier pieces, including Calico Mingling.
28 Judd, “Specific Objects.”
29 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 127.
30 Ibid., 126.
31 Anderson, “DANCE VIEW.” Section 2, P16.
32 Sontag includes the terms “Minimalist” and “Postmodern” in her abécédaire describing Childs’s work, although she describes the inherent problems related to circumscribing an artist’s practice within the limitations of certain artistic “movements” or “styles.” Sontag, “For ‘Available Light’,” 106.
33 Sayre, The Object of Performance, 126.
34 Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde,” 161.
35 Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” 228.
36 de Certeau, xix.
37 Foster, “Walking and Other Choreographic Tactics,” 127.
38 de Certeau, 29.
39 Ibid., 17.
40 Kwon, “One Place after Another,” 95.
41 Ibid., 95.
42 de Certeau, 119.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Amanda Jane Graham
Amanda Jane Graham is a dance cultural historian and performance curator. She is currently Associate Director of Engagement at Carolina Performing Arts at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she is also an instructor in the Department of Communication. Graham has taught at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, University of Rochester, and Northwestern University, where she served as the Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Dance Studies from 2014 to 2016. Graham’s writing on dance, art, and politics has appeared in Art Journal, Dance Chronicle, and The Futures of Dance Studies.
Lauren DiGiulio
Lauren DiGiulio is an art historian and curator whose research focuses on contemporary visual art and performance. From 2019 to 2021, she was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Carolina Performing Arts at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Her writing has been published in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Momus, Lateral Addition, and In/Visible Culture. She has written commissioned texts for numerous museums and galleries, including the Institute for Contemporary Art at UPENN, the Barbican Centre, and the Kunstverein Langenhagen. She received her PhD from the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester.