Renowned US dancer and choreographer Lucinda Childs' Dance (1979), performed by the Lyon Opera Ballet, opened the Shanghai season of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels at the Shangyin Opera House, with three performances from Oct 14 to 16.
The Lyon Opera Ballet added Dance to its permanent repertoire in 2016, after years of performances by Childs' own ensemble, and presented it at Dance Reflections Van Cleef & Arpels in New York in 2023.
Established in 2020, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels is an international patronage program that supports choreographic preservation and contemporary creation.
The Shanghai run was the work's China premiere. What stood out was not only its geometry but the force with which the dancers carried it.
Dance was created with composer Philip Glass and visual artist Sol LeWitt. Childs came out of the Judson Dance Theater, where her early pieces treated walking and other everyday movement as material, used ordinary domestic objects, and were performed in settings outside the theatre. In Dance, she redirected that austerity toward dance technique, setting aside narrative to build a steady structure of pathways and momentum.
A large transparent scrim hangs across the proscenium and receives LeWitt's black-and-white film, while the dancers perform behind it. The film is not a recording of the 1979 cast. Instead, the Lyon dancers filmed their own version of the full choreography within LeWitt's design. The stage floor holds a single even color that changes from section to section. When the film is bright, the projected figures appear with immediate clarity and the live performers behind the fabric seem to melt into the moving image. As the projection dims, they re-emerge with sharp physical presence.
LeWitt's compositions keep changing the scale and angle of what the audience sees. A monumental figure spans the scrim and floats above the stage. In another shot, the screen divides, with filmed dancers gliding across the upper half while live dancers cross below. A tall vertical projection then takes over the right perimeter of the stage, and at other moments an aperture is cut into a wide rehearsal room view to reveal a second camera angle within it. This visual layering offers multiple viewpoints simultaneously, combining high-angle overhead shots of geometric floor patterns with close-up frames centered on the dancers' torsos. As the dancers traverse the stage behind these varied frames, the performance space presents different dimensional perspectives at once, uniting wide overhead paths and immediate physical crossings in a single view.
Glass' score drives the evening with rapid, repeating arpeggios on amplified electric organs, joined by flutes and saxophones. Above them, a soprano sings solfège syllables instead of words, looping figures such as mi-fa-mi-fa and shifting their accents and note lengths against the steady tempo. These vocal lines shift their rhythmic accents and note lengths against the ongoing tempo, providing a steady breath and cadence that moves the musical ensemble forward.
Childs' choreography meets this score through an intricate coordination of steps and changes of facing. The vocabulary draws on chassés, pas de bourrées, small hops and travelling jetés. Dancers cross the stage along parallel lateral paths, slice across diagonals and circle one another in clean geometric formations. Rather than marking every beat, they ride the expanding and contracting phrases, changing their step counts or arm positions to produce rhythmic offsets. In ensemble sections, one dancer may pivot on an unexpected beat while the others continue straight along their track, so that staggered entrances and diverging pathways keep reconfiguring the floor.
This is where the Lyon company gives the piece its own character. The 1979 film shows a lighter and looser execution of the movement, including simple turns and relaxed arm swings. The Lyon dancers deliver the same material with muscular drive and technical control: spines centered and upright, sustained arm carriage, footwork that cuts across the stage with clean directional stops. The uniformity of lines and the crisp articulation of their leaps make each geometric shift land with force. The choreography remains minimalist, but ballet training gives the movement greater force while preserving its lightness.
The performance drew an audience that included Chinese and international choreographers, artists and invited guests, whose warm response culminated in sustained applause. Opening with a piece that asks the audience to follow nothing but pure form was a demanding choice.
Dance Reflections continues in Shanghai through Nov 8, with works by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Robert Wilson, Trisha Brown and Tao Ye, among others.
Wei Xinyi contributed to this story.
