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The Arts Intel Report

Relative Calm, by Robert Wilson and Lucinda Childs

Nov 18–19, 2023
6 Fenyang Rd, Xuhui District, Shanghai, China, 200031

In a season that includes many Lucinda Childs revivals, the return to Relative Calm, the mesmerizing minimalist’s 1981 collaboration with the director Robert Wilson, is less a revival than a remembering. The time between then and now intervenes as interpolated bits from their other collaborations: a few “knee plays” from the groundbreaking Einstein on the Beach as well as recitations from the Nijinsky diary that inspired the astounding 2016 Letter to a Man, starring Mikhail Baryshnikov as the mad Nijinsky. There is also a wholly new section, to Stravinsky’s Pulcinella. Wilson and Childs are a good match, both fashioning pristine, timeless order out of the ephemeral—he from light and she from an inexorable accumulation of simple steps. The work visits Shanghai mid–November before capping off a whole month of Childs stagings in Paris. —Apollinaire Scherr