General informations

Duration – 75  minutes.
Director – Lucinda Childs and Robert Wilson 

My comment

Relative Calm, the dance show, disappointed me. It was too slow, not very interesting, repetitive and lacked strong moments. I wish I felt something more, but it didn’t happen. Overall, I don’t recommend it.

Synopsis

A reunion at the top for two legends: director Robert Wilson and choreographer Lucinda Childs reinvent Relative Calm. A fascinating work, which gains in scale and exuberance, more than forty years after its creation.

In 1976, the opera Einstein on the Beach kicked off one of the most fruitful collaborations of the 20th century. Lucinda Childs is a reciter and dancer while Robert Wilson pulls the strings of a hypnotic production. Five years later, the two icons of the new American scene created Relative Calm together, a ballet designed to music by Jon Gibson. It is not so much a cover as a reactivation of the memory of this piece that the two flamboyant octogenarians offer today. Repetition and variation are still the driving force, but the lights, decorations and structure are new. A ballet in three acts, danced to the rhythms of Jon Gibson, Igor Stravinsky and John Adams, by performers from the MP3 Dance Project company. Between each act, Lucinda Childs herself reads extracts from Nijinsky’s diary. (De)synchronization games, repetitive patterns, line movements and video creation bear the signature of the two legends.