Available Light

Three legends of the American avant-garde -the composer John Adams, the choreographer Lucinda Childs and the architect Frank Gehry- have come to the Onassis Stegi to restage a seminal work which set its seal on their first and only collaboration, back in 1983. Borne of an era much taken with experimental collaborations between star artists, “Available Light” reveals the individual artistry of its three creators but also the shared aesthetic that was common to their experimental approaches.

Lucinda Childs, whose Greek debut this is, is a living legend of modern dance. She was a student of that star of the international dance scene, Merce Cunningham, and a key member of the Judson avant-garde dance company which revolutionized modern dance in the early 60s. In 1976, her collaboration as a choreographer and performer with Robert Wilson and Philip Glass on the epic, five-hour opera "Einstein on the Beach" revealed that, as well as being a dancer of rare talent, she could choreograph ground-breaking solos and ensemble pieces for opera with equal ease. Wilson once said that Childs was “so many opposites… soft but hard, natural but unnatural”, while Childs has said that what drew her to Wilson was her “taste for the unusual”. In any case, everyone who got to watch their collaboration on stage spoke of a seminal post-modern performance.

John Adams, the award-winning post-minimalist composer, is equally at home with electronic music –the work he composed for this work, for instance, which is entitled “Light over Water”– and chamber works, soundtracks and contemporary operas.

The architectural star Frank Gehry, well-known for Bilbao’s emblematic Guggenheim Museum, returns here to his childhood love for industrial materials and simple, functional constructions. For the premiere of “Available Light” in 1983, Gehry created a split-level set out of industrial platforms and fencing which placed the audience in banked rows of seats above the stage. Childs danced in the original production; now aged 75, her role will be performed by two dancers.