Dancing on the Outside
Source: www.hudsonreview.com
Topic: Street dance
Sort Desciption: MARCIA B. SIEGEL Dancing on the Outside I N 1964 THE DANCER L UCINDA C HILDS made Street Dance for a choreog- raphy class given by Robert Dunn in downtown New York.
Content Inside:
MARCIA B. SIEGEL
Dancing on the Outside
IN 1964
THE DANCER
LUCINDA CHILDS made Street Dance for a choreog-
raphy class given by Robert Dunn in downtown New York. The
assignment was to make a piece exactly six minutes long. With an
audience of fellow class-members and invited guests, the work was first
performed as part of a group showing at Judith Dunns loft in
Chinatown. To begin, Childs turned on a tape recorder and headed
downstairs in the elevator. Prerecorded instructions directed the
audience to go to the windows and look down at a certain portion of the
street below. A snapshot taken at the time reveals a row of shabby
brownstones and loft buildings, with cluttered ground-floor storefronts,
a fire escape, parked cars—the kind of scene New Yorkers pass through
every day without a glance.1At precise intervals during the next six
minutes a tape-recorded voice in the loft read a list of objects, spaces,
and actions visible in that slice of the streetscape. Childs and another
dancer, cued by the recorded instructions, motioned to objects or
details on the list that the audience in the loft above might not have
been able to see clearly. At other times the dancers blended in with the
scene. An excerpt from the score went like this (numbers refer to
minutes and seconds into the piece):
3:20 Dolls
3:22Face each other
3:30
3:35 (Action of performers)
3:42 Gurbob
3:50Fire escape
When the performance was over, the dancers returned upstairs and
turned off the tape recorder. Robert Dunn later commented on the
mysterious juxtaposition of Childss soundless image in the faraway
1
The photograph, published in a Childs souvenir book from 2000, shows the setting for
a later performance that began in Robert Rauschenbergs loft on Broadway between 11th
and 12thStreets. Since the instructions are so specific, Childs must have written and
recorded a set for each performance. Such was the ephemerality and profusion of even ...
dancing,
gurbob,
marcia b siegal dancing on the outside