2: Dialogue with Lucinda

Fascinated by the radical and deceptively simple minimalism of Lucinda Childs’ early work, Beutler chose to remake two of her silent dance pieces, Radial Courses (1976) and Interior Drama (1977), setting the latter to a specially composed work by DJ/producer Gary Shepherd. In July 2011 Gary Shepherd also composed a new soundtrack for Radial Courses in collaboration with Aleksandar Grujic and Robbert van Hulzen.

The underlying choreographic scores are captivating and indecipherably complex. Radial Courses is based on three movement sequences in a constantly shifting, circulatory composition. In Interior Drama five dancers conform to an apparently perfect system, moving in repetitive and hallucinatory patterns. Childs describes her own work as an ‘intense experience of intense looking and listening’. Beutler’s reinterpretations centre on the individual dancer’s efforts and responsibilities within the group patterns, revealing parallel realities and the ritualistic qualities of both dances.

Childs often operates like a sculptor rendering her dances into objects that can be turned around, observed from many angles… each dance, for the spectator, is a process of remembering, noticing, making contrasts and comparisons, constructing patterns and making sense of their juxtapositions to other nearly identical patterns. (Sally Banes, “Lucinda Childs: Making the world Whole” In: Performance, December 1981)