Counting on It

One of choreographer Lucinda Childs’ best-known pieces, “Dance,â€� with a score by Philip Glass, is opening Bard’s SummerScape festival, and will include the Sol Le Witt film that premiered with it 30 years ago.

   Salisbury resident Janet Kaufman joined the Childs company in the mid-1980s, and her debut performance was in a section of “Dance.â€� 

   As she told me recently, it did not go well.

   “I was out of college for a few years and dancing with a few small companies,â€� Kaufman said. “I was one of 150 women who auditioned for one spot in Lucinda’s company. Dancing with her meant I’d have made it to a real, professional company. Being chosen was truly one of the happiest moments of my life.  At first, I was given only a few small pieces to learn, as an understudy. But two weeks before the company was to leave for a European tour, the business manager called me and asked, ‘do you have a passport?’ ‘Yes’  I said, though I didn’t. It turned out that a male dancer wasn’t working out, and they were giving me all his parts. In Lucinda’s work gender roles aren’t significant. So I had to learn eight dances in two weeks.

   “At our first stop, in Cannes, I had only 20 bars of dancing to do. I spent most of my time backstage putting on lipstick. But when we got to Lisbon, Lucinda decided I should be in “Dance.â€�  We were performing in the Gulbenkian, a vast and beautiful cultural complex much like Lincoln Center.

   “We were only performing Dance No. 1, one section of the piece. It’s done with four couples, and consists of a series of entrances and exits across the stage. There are only a few phrases, and it can seem very simple: The New York Times critic Jack Anderson described it as ‘hopping, skipping and jumping.’  But the music is very abstract and repetitive, and everything depends on keeping track of the counts. Lucinda gave us all scores she had created. Each couple had a different score, with the counts you had to memorize.  It was like, ‘couple 1 goes on the 3; couple 2 goes on the 3 1/2, couple 3 goes on the 8. We always used to joke that you could tell a Lucinda dancer on the subway because she was the one muttering, ‘go on the 8 1/2, hold three, go on the four, hold one.’

   “And backstage is just as interesting to watch as onstage, as the dancers are all desperately counting to keep track of where they are and when to go.  If you miss an entrance, you miss the next one too. The Gulbenkian is way too large to be able to run around backstage and get to your starting place for the next one in time.

    If someone made a mis-

take, things could go downhill very fast. The stage was huge, but there were no extra steps to compensate for how much larger it was than, say, the Joyce in Manhattan.

   You just had to catapult yourself across.