The choreographer Lucinda Childs is having a moment. On June 26, the day she turns eighty-six, she’s opening a weekend run of “Momentary Reprise,” a program featuring new work, at Bard SummerScape (running at the Fisher Center, in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., through June 28). She’s also performing in it. This comes amid a flurry of activity rare for an octogenarian. A few months ago, Childs had a retrospective show at the Guggenheim Museum; more remarkable is a five-year contract she recently signed to step in as resident choreographer of Gibney Dance, a repertory company of young movers. An hour-long première for the troupe is in the works.
At Bard, Childs is performing “Geranium ’64,” an adaptation of one of the early, object-focussed pieces she made in the nineteen-sixties, as a member of Judson Dance Theatre; she grips a stretchy cord and leans into a state of suspension. The rest of the bill is in the mode of balletic pattern tracing that she developed in the seventies, in part through collaborations with the avant-garde theatre director Robert Wilson and the composer Philip Glass. In tribute to Wilson, who died last year, the Bard program includes a dance from “Einstein on the Beach,” his landmark 1976 opera with Glass. An upstate première, “Distant Figure,” is set to music by Glass, too: a passacaglia of the same name written for Childs and for the Russian pianist Anton Batagov, who will play it. Another tribute, to the architect Frank Gehry, who also died last year, comes in the form of an excerpt from “Available Light,” Childs’s 1983 project with Gehry and the composer John Adams. Childs’s art may not be as imperishable as the swooping steel of Bard’s Gehry-designed Fisher Center, but it should last. Chances to see Childs perform won’t.—Brian Seibert
About Town
Last year, the Chicago instrumental post-rock band Tortoise returned with “Touch,” its first album in nearly a decade, the further explorations of an inquisitive nature. “Post-rock” remains an ambiguous term, and yet Tortoise somehow embodies all of its wide-reaching implications, from progressive rock, jazz, and dub to Krautrock and electronica, the group’s compositions fluid but governed by grooves, which give the music structure amid complexity. Tortoise explored a fusionist wonderland in the nineties, with its opus, “TNT,” from 1998, collapsing the distance between ambient and funk. “Touch” is just as dynamic, a swirl of glitched-out electronics and sweeping guitars. The band is joined by the psychedelic singer-songwriter L’Rain, who shares its experimental sensibility.—Sheldon Pearce (Knockdown Center; June 25.)
Tucked into the bucolic Berkshires, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival is a dance oasis. The headliner of the first week is the Paul Taylor Dance Company, with three crowd-pleasers—the joyful “Esplanade,” the regal “Brandenburgs,” and the Second World War-era piece “Company B”—at the Ted Shawn Theatre. In the smaller Doris Duke, the choreographer and dancer Shamel Pitts takes on his intimate and exhausting duet “Touch of RED” with Channce Williams, a member of his ensemble, TRIBE. And a contemporary-dance group from Copenhagen, Uppercut Dance Theatre, has its American début, on the spectacular outdoor Henry J. Leir Stage.—Marina Harss (Becket, Mass.; June 24-28.)
It’s no surprise that “Yves Saint Laurent and Photography” is a sensational show of fashion images. In the years after becoming the quietly charismatic young star of nineteen-fifties Christian Dior (see Irving Penn’s penetrating 1957 portrait), Saint Laurent didn’t just work with every important fashion photographer—he inspired some of their most indelible and audacious pictures. The Dior gown that Dovima wore while posing between elephants for Richard Avedon was a Saint Laurent design. So was the men’s-tailored “Le Smoking” pants suit that Helmut Newton shot in the gloom and glare of a Parisian back street—now an icon of androgynous chic. Even before 1971, when Jeanloup Sieff photographed Saint Laurent naked on a stack of cushions, the role of the modern fashion designer had been redefined in his image.—Vince Aletti (International Center of Photography; through Sept. 28.)
A gently oddball semi-solo musical about a maybe-romance on an Easter Sunday, Todd Almond’s “I’m Almost There” is, at its palpitating heart, about longing for love in a city of strangers. The show opens with Almond—the star of the musical “Girl from the North Country”—at his piano, confidently launching into a shaggy-dog anecdote, told in song, about a promising flirtation. But, right away, he gets derailed by tangents, as he struggles even to get down the stairs of his apartment. Time warps, in witty, surreal ways; we meet his neighbors: Noah Max Amick as Sexy Beast, on bass; Erin Hill as a curmudgeonly cat lady, on harp. Funny, lost, and a little wistful, Almond is an unreliable narrator whose dream logic we trust unconditionally—and when he morphs into a mouse in a glue trap, you’ll pray for the lurking feline (who claims to be fifty-three per cent his mother) to spare him.—Emily Nussbaum (BAM Fisher; through June 28.)
The police-drama template gets a vigorous update in the Saudi director Haifaa Al Mansour’s twisty mystery “Unidentified.” A teen-age girl’s body is found in a desert near Riyadh; the police need a woman to view the corpse, and the only one at the station is Nawal (Mila Al Zahrani), a young administrative assistant and a solitary divorcée who’s hooked on a true-crime series. When officials fail to identify the victim, Nawal hunts for the killer. Her quest reveals a wide array of misogynistic injustices, ranging from oppressive supervision, arranged marriages, and polygamy to honor killings. Though the engaging story is sometimes filmed dismayingly plainly, its main action sequence—a pursuit on foot through a vast warren of abandoned buildings—is both thrilling and wondrous.—Richard Brody (In limited release.)
A sense of life cooling its heels pervades Martyna Majok and Aimee Mann’s musical adaptation of the memoir “Girl, Interrupted,” by Susanna Kaysen, about Kaysen’s eighteen-month stay at the psychiatric hospital McLean, in the nineteen-sixties. Susanna (Juliana Canfield), looking back on her life, delivers lines about her younger self with her transfixing John Singer Sargent gaze and an icy repose, or reënacts painful episodes, trading Plath references with another patient like samizdat. But the book’s ruminative watchfulness is unsuccessfully conjugated in this overly sedate play with music, which has the feel of a song cycle, though sung by the fine cast with gorgeous, lonely sorrow. The production veers away from a documentary, “Titicut Follies”-like approach while also managing to dodge any great cloudbursts of feeling.—Rhoda Feng (Public Theatre; through July 12.)
Pick Three
Jennifer Wilson on Italian-lesson inspiration.
1. Learning Russian humbled me, or perhaps “humiliated” is the word. In Moscow, I apologized to a professor for being late. “I was sleeping with someone,” I explained. (I meant to say “overslept” but attached the wrong prefix.) I asked a babushka where I could find the nearest “semi-automatic.” Miraculously, she understood that I meant “A.T.M.” But, with Russia largely closed off, I’m rekindling a former flame: Italian. I bought an old textbook on eBay called “Prego!,” which I swear I didn’t choose just because it has a cup of gelato on the cover. Speaking of food, my new favorite phrase is cavoli riscaldati, or “reheated cabbage.” It refers to the futility of trying to revive an old love affair. That’s never stopped me before!
2. I was lured back to Italian by “La Chimera,” Alice Rohrwacher’s life-affirming film about the dead. It stars Josh O’Connor—who learned Italian for the role—as an archeologist turned leader of a band of tombaroli, grave robbers who raid Etruscan tombs to fence long-buried artifacts. He, like the objects, is stuck between here and the hereafter, and is mourning a lost love just as a new one introduces herself. Which brings me to wonder—come si dice “I can fix him”?
3. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Roman Stories” (written in Italian and translated into English by Lahiri and Todd Portnowitz), an American tourist is trying to read the signs at a bus stop when an Italian man steps in to help—though he takes her off course, that day and forever. They marry. Seduction, she later thinks, is “che ci fa smarrire,” or “what makes us lose our way.” I haven’t found a better translation.
P.S. Good stuff on the internet: