Lucinda Childs: «Firebird»

The new creation by Lucinda Childs, for Maggio Danza, the city ballet of Florence run by Giorgio Mancini, is quite a surprise. Her version of “Firebird“ to Stravinsky's music is a strange mix of pure, geometrical dance with rather neo-classical, romantic pas de deux for the Czarevitch and the Firebird and the Czarevitch and the Princess. Kastchei is played here by a woman in blue, Antonella Cerreto.

For the ensemble moments, Childs uses the strong beat and the occasional roundness of the score to design abstract, straight or turning, lines; as if the music were the “minimal” kind she has used masterfully many times before. In the same program for the Tuscan company she gave a perfect example of her own peculiar style by re-staging the smart, red “Chairman Dances,” originally  choreographed for Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, to some recursive passages of “Nixon In China” by John Adams. But Stravinsky is not the right composer to do this with, particularly regarding the narrative character of his composition, telling the old Russian legend of the Firebird. So, if the group sections, for tender young girls in white and solid, sometimes immobile, men in grey, do work without any ...