John Adams – Lucinda Childs – Frank O. Gehry: “Available Light”

After seeing “Available Light” in 1983, Anna Kisselgoff, dance critic for The New York Times, called it “a work of blazing formal beauty”. In Kisselgoff’s eyes, the collaboration between chorographer Lucinda Childs, architect Frank O. Gehry, and composer John Adams took Childs’ career to a new level, two decades after she first started out at the Judson Dance Theater. In “Available Light” the austere mathematical minimalism with which Childs permuted, repeated, and varied the concentrated movement phrases was combined with a new richness, unknown in previous works. Also ground-breaking in 1983 was the style of presentation. The work was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to mark the opening of its new exhibition space in a former warehouse, Temporary Contemporary. The introduction of choreography to an exhibition space, today quite common, was a radical gesture at the time. “Available Light” has now been reconstructed for a world tour and will be performed for the first time in Germany. After the premiere in Los Angeles in June, “Available Light” will open the Kampnagel Festival in Hamburg and shortly after it, Tanz im August. “Available Light” is just another iconic collaborative project featuring Lucinda Childs’ work to go on show in Berlin this year; the other being “Einstein on the Beach”: In her review of Childs’ legacy, performance historian RoseLee Goldberg comments on how in “Available Light” Childs managed to find her own rhythmic pulse to Adams’ complex, structured music, while simultaneously devising an elegant, three-dimensional design for Gehry’s industrial stage construction.