With greater than seven a long time of trailblazing work that has profoundly influenced modern dance, Lucinda Childs stays a significant pressure in shaping its evolution. Gibney Firm has unveiled a groundbreaking five-year inventive partnership, appointing Childs as Resident Choreographer from 2026 by 2030. This uncommon long-term residency is rooted in continuity, rigor, and inquiry.
The collaboration extends an already vital inventive connection. In 2025, Childs created the acclaimed Three Dances for Gibney Firm, which debuted to widespread reward in the course of the Firm’s season at The Joyce Theater. This April, the Firm will additional combine Childs’ repertoire by including her luminous balletic quartet Canto Ostinato, choreographed in 2015 to Simeon ten Holt’s hypnotic rating, to its repertory on the Joyce, strengthening its dedication to her visionary physique of labor.
Spanning 2026–2030, the residency additionally establishes an prolonged inventive residence for Childs at Gibney. Quite than a single fee or short-term engagement, the partnership permits significant work to emerge over time, grounded in shared inventive values of readability, depth, and precision, and formed by course of moderately than immediacy. All through the five-year relationship, Childs will proceed creating new work with Gibney Firm, permitting concepts to unfold on her personal inventive timeline and in dialog with the Firm’s mission and evolving repertory.
At 85, she stays deeply engaged within the studio, persevering with to create, query, and develop her apply in dialogue with the dancers.Gibney will even present house and help for Childs’ broader inventive apply, together with tasks along with her personal firm and different commissions, in shut proximity to Gibney Firm and the Heart’s inventive neighborhood, fostering ongoing alternate throughout generations, practices, and disciplines.
Wanting forward, Childs will start creating a brand new full-length work in 2026, with a premiere deliberate for 2027. The work will honor a milestone birthday of one among Childs’ most enduring musical collaborators, persevering with her decades-long dialogue between choreography and music.
In response to the pursuits of the dance neighborhood and rising inventive questions, Gibney and Childs will even discover choose alternatives for engagement and knowledge-sharing, together with conversations, open rehearsals, and exchanges with artists, deepening entry to Childs’ work and pondering whereas remaining grounded within the inventive course of.
“I’m very happy to be becoming a member of the Gibney Firm as Resident Choreographer,” notes Childs. “I labored with them for the primary time in 2025 once I made Three Dances to John Cage’s 1945 piece for 2 ready pianos. This yr they may carry out Canto Ostinato, which I choreographed in 2015 to a piece by the Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt, and in 2026, I’ll make a full-length work to premiere the next yr. Gina Gibney has been welcoming and open and actually supportive of my work,” she continues. “I’ve collaborated with many firms over time, most of them in Europe, and I’m grateful to have a possibility to work right here within the metropolis with an organization of such excellent skilled {qualifications}.”
“Lucinda Childs is an artist whose work continues to open house—for precision, rigor, and deep listening,” provides Gina Gibney, Founder and Inventive Director of Gibney. “After working collectively on Three Dances, it turned clear that this was a relationship value investing in over time, and with intention. This partnership displays a shared dedication to depth moderately than immediacy and provides our dancers and neighborhood sustained entry to one of many nice choreographic voices of our time.”
“Working with Lucinda final season was a profound expertise for the Firm,” displays Gilbert T. Small II, the Firm’s Director. “I watched our dancers be stretched, challenged, and deeply fulfilled by her readability and precision within the studio. Lucinda’s legacy is extraordinary, however what’s most hanging is how a lot she continues to supply as an artist—how current, curious, and exacting she is within the work. This partnership appears like a pure subsequent step, and an extremely thrilling one, for the dancers and for the way forward for the Firm.”
Childs will likely be again within the studio with Gibney Firm subsequent week to start staging Canto Ostinato, which will likely be carried out as a part of the Firm’s upcoming Joyce Theater season, April 7–12.
Go to https://gibneydance.org/ to study extra.
