Lucinda Childs & Robert Wilson Relative Calm

In 1976, the opera Einstein on the Beach ushered in one of the most fruitful collaborations of the 20th century. In the piece, Lucinda Childs narrated the texts and danced while Bob Wilson orchestrated a mesmerizing staging. Five years later, the two icons of the new American scene created Relative Calm, a ballet based on music by Jon Gibson. What the two sparkling 80-somethings propose here is not so much a revival as the resurrected memory of that piece. Repetition and variation are still the driving force but the lighting, the sets and the structure are new. The ballet is divided into three acts, performed by the dancers of the company MP3 Dance Project to the rhythms of Jon Gibson, Igor Stravinsky and John Adams. Each act is framed by excerpts from Nijinsky’s diary read by Lucinda Childs herself. Plays with (de)synchronization, repeated patterns, ultraprecise movements and video designs bear the evident mark of the two legends.