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
The Arts Intel Report
Relative Calm, by Robert Wilson and Lucinda Childs
When
Nov 18–19, 2023
Where
Etc
Explore More
June 4–5, 2025