As a performer Lucinda Childs has always enraptured audiences with her cool yet mesmerizing demeanor accompanied by her ability to deliver text with a subdued passion and surgical precision inviting the audience into a world of complex sensation. In this new creation for the Dance On Ensemble, Childs will be onstage herself in an Encounter with dancer Miki Orihara, who’s long relationship with the Martha Graham company, performance works with Robert Wilson, award winning Broadway runs, as well as working with multiple choreographers, has formed her into a powerful and sensitive performer.

Biographies

Lucinda Childs

Lucinda Childs began her career as choreographer and performer in 1963 as an original member of the Judson Dance Theater in New York.

After forming her own dance company in 1973, Childs collaborated with Robert Wilson and Philip Glass on the opera Einstein on the Beach in 1976, participating as principal performer and solo choreographer for which she received an Obie award. She has appeared in five of Wilson’s major productions. Beginning in 1979, Lucinda Childs collaborated with a number of composers and designers on a series of large-scale productions.

The first of these was Dance, choreographed in 1979 with music by Philip Glass, and a film/decor by Sol LeWitt. It continues to tour extensively in the United States and Europe and was cited by the Wall Street Journal (2011) as “one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century.”

Since 1981, Lucinda Childs has received a number of commissions from major ballet companies and has choreographed and directed several opera productions including: Gluck’s Orfeo et Euridice for the Los Angeles Opera, Mozart’s Zaide for La Monnaie in Brussels and a new production of John Adams’s Dr Atomic for the Opera du Rhin in 2014.

Childs received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979. She is also the recipient of the NEA/NEFA American Masterpiece Award, and in 2004 was elevated from Officer to Commander of France’s Order of Arts and Letters. In 2017 she received the Samuel H. Scripps award for lifetime achievement at the American Dance Festival in Durham, North Carolina, as well as the Venice Biennale de la Danse Golden Lion Award.

Miki Orihara

Miki Orihara, born in 1960, is best known for her work as a principal dancer in the Martha Graham Dance Company, for which she earned a Bessie Award in 2010. She has performed on Broadway in The King and I and with Elisa Monte, PierGroupDance, Lotuslotus, Rioult Dance, Twyla Tharp, Martha Clarke, Anne Bogart (SITI Company), and Robert Wilson. She has presented her own choreography in New York, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and in Japan.

Her teaching credentials include numerous workshops in Japan, at Art International in Moscow, and at Peridance, the Ailey School, New York University, Florida State University, Henny Jurriëns Stichting (Holland), Les Étés de la Danse in Paris, and New National Theater Ballet School. She has set Martha Graham’s work all over the world, including for Diana Vashineva’s Dialogue and on Wendy Whelan of the New York City Ballet.

As a choreographer, Miki Orihara premiered her solo work Searching Dimensions in New York in 1995, followed among others by VOICE, a piece for eight women, for M’Deux Ballet in Nagoya, Japan (2001), Stage (2008), Prologue (2014) and Shirabyoshi (2017). In 2018 she released the first Martha Graham technique DVD, collaborating with Dance Spotlight and the Martha Graham Center. Miki Orihara was featured in the Inaugural performance of Peace is… at the United Nations as a part of the Permanent Mission of Japan in April 2017 and August 2018.