Postmodern. Minimalist. Conceptual. These are all terms that have been attached to Lucinda Childs, a dancer of spectral presence. She began in ballet, but moved on to study with Merce Cunningham, and then performed with the Judson Dance Theater. Childs was the synaptic tissue in Einstein on the Beach (1976), a renowned collaboration with Philip Glass and Robert Wilson—the mathematical precision and repetition of her steps seemed the embodiment of abstract thought. Her hour-long masterpiece Dance was created in 1979 and grew out of her choreography for Einstein on the Beach. A collaboration with Philip Glass and the artist Sol LeWitt, Dance is spare and complex, shifting and crystalline, pedestrian and transcendent. Pure Lucinda Childs, it’s one of the season’s highlights. —L.J.