Lucinda Childs, 85, Still Has a Full Dance Card

At 85, Lucinda Childs begins a five-year partnership as resident choreographer of Gibney Company while also revisiting early pieces this spring and summer. In June, the Fisher Center at Bard will present the Lucinda Childs Dance Company with a mix of new and old works, including an adaptation of "Geranium ’64" performed by Childs.

Next month, Guggenheim New York, with the Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival, will mount "Early Works," five largely silent dances first made beginning in 1963, to be performed in the museum’s rotunda with viewing from the ramps. Childs, a founding member of Judson Dance Theater, is known for pure dance pieces in which pedestrian movement—walking, running, turning, skipping, jumping—becomes virtuosic within tightly plotted structures.

There is a stoic, mechanical clarity at the outset of her work that often yields moments of vulnerability as dancers struggle to sustain the choreography’s architecture. "I’m not, um, young," she said from her home in upstate New York, "And I do have help.

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