ABSTRACT
In certain ways, Childs’s work seems the perfect embodiment of the analytic postmodernism that Sally Barnes has identified as an outgrowth of the Judson Church dance experiments.1 Rejecting the overt, intentional expression of classic modern dance, with its carefully honed technique and measured phrasing, its significant lighting and music-let alone the codified, virtuosic vocabulary and spectacular presentation of ballet2-this new approach tended to objectify movement, both in the sense of doing away with subjective, emotive rationales for dance, and in the sense of making movement itself a detached object of scrutiny.3 Yet, Childs’s choreographic sensibility is rather different from other Judson choreographers, and she has pushed certain of the concerns of American postmodern dance further, and for a longer period of time, moving in directions that may be surprising, but which conform to the logic of her own concerns.
