The Fisher Center at Bard Presents Lucinda Childs: Momentary Reprise, a Program of New and Landmark Works from the Groundbreaking Choreographer, June 26–28, as Part of SummerScape 2026

Momentary Reprise includes a solo danced by Childs—who turns 86 the day of the program’s first performance—and Childs’s collaborations with Philip Glass, John Adams, Robert Wilson, and Frank Gehry

Tickets are available at fishercenter.bard.edu and 845.758.7900

The Fisher Center at Bard, one of the country’s leading multidisciplinary producing houses, offering extraordinary support to artists to realize ambitious and groundbreaking projects, continues its relationship with iconic choreographer Lucinda Childs in a program of North American premieres and beloved revivals, Lucinda Childs: Momentary Reprise, presented as part of SummerScape 2026, June 26–28. One of Lucinda Childs Dance Company’s rare North American engagements this year, this Fisher Center LAB commission brings Childs back to the Fisher Center following their revival of her “ravishing” (The New York Times) 1979 work, Dance, for which she re-formed her dance company in 2009.

A defining and transformative force in American dance, Childs is recognized for her rigorous, inventive, and hypnotically precise choreography. This program includes the North American premieres of several major new works, as well as her remarkable collaborations with some of the most influential artists of our time. These include her work with composers Philip Glass and John Adams, and two luminaries lost in 2025—the late theater director Robert Wilson and Frank Gehry, architect of the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Alongside new short works for her company, Childs—who celebrates her 86th birthday on the opening night of performances—will perform a solo, offering audiences a uniquely intimate encounter with one of the great living pioneers of contemporary dance.
 
The program begins with Actus, a duet set to the cantata “Actus Tragicus” by Johann Sebastian Bach, accompanied live by Russian star-pianist Anton Batagov. Then, Lucinda Childs herself performs a new adaptation of an original solo from 1965 titled Geranium ’64, with movement based on the 1964 NFL Championship Game between the Baltimore Colts and the Cleveland Browns. The solo continues Childs’s prolific collaborative record, with video work by the renowned visual artist Anri Sala, using footage from the actual game. Available Light brought together three giants of postwar American culture: choreographer Lucinda Childs, composer John Adams, and architect Frank Gehry in a new production first staged in 1983, and remounted in 2015. The company will perform an excerpt of the piece in honor of the late Frank Gehry (1929–2025), architect of the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College. Field Dance 2 is an ensemble piece staged in special tribute to Robert Wilson (1941–2025), excerpted from Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach, one of the most iconic stage pieces of the 20th century. The evening closes with Distant Figure, a new choreographic work for six dancers with music by Philip Glass. This final work is accompanied again live by Batagov, who will play the 2017 composition that Glass wrote for Childs, one of Glass’s long-standing artistic partners.

The last collaboration between Childs and the Fisher Center—Childs’s iconic 1979 collaboration with Philip Glass and visual artist Sol LeWitt, Dance—was a momentous occasion for contemporary dance that led to the re-formation of her company to take the revival throughout the country—resulting in the continued remounting of multiple Childs works and their return to the zeitgeist. Today, the Fisher Center remains the place to see the Lucinda Childs Dance Company in the United States, offering an unmatched opportunity to experience her artistry, legacy, and ongoing creative vision. Several dancers who were key to that first Fisher Center revival remain in the company and appear in Momentary Reprise.

Said Childs, “One of the wonderful things about coming back now to Bard after 2009 is that I formed a new company in 2009, including Caitlin Scranton, Katie Dorn, and Sharon Milanese, and they're still with the company 15 years later. That's something that I'm very proud of. When I told them about this project, they said, ‘oh, yes, we're on board, we want to do it.’ To be back at the Fisher Center is very exciting for us.”

Fisher Center Artistic Director and Chief Executive Gideon Lester said, “Lucinda Childs is a national treasure. She's one of the most extraordinary American choreographers whose career has spanned many decades, taking her from the experiments of Judson Church in the 1960s to the stages of the greatest opera houses and art centers in the world. When I think of Lucinda's work, I think of rigor, purity, and an incredibly beautiful sense of formal patterns. I find it incredibly moving. She's a very pure artist who believes absolutely in the formal beauty of dance.”

Fisher Center Executive Producer and Chief Operating Officer Aaron Mattocks said, “Joining us for SummerScape this year to see the Lucinda Childs Dance Company is a moment to give yourself an opportunity to be in community with hundreds of other dance lovers, art lovers, music lovers, to witness pure dance with incredible music in its most transcendent form. It will be an experience of joy, elation, awe, and encountering the possibility of what the human body is capable of, in the incredible order of nature.”

The creative team is Lucinda Childs (Choreography), Philip Glass, John Adams, and Johann Sebastian Bach (Music), Beverly Emmons and Sergio Passanha (Lighting Design), and Anri Sala (Visual Design/Multimedia Design). Performers include members of the Lucinda Childs Dance Company—Robert Mark Burke, Katie Dorn, Kyle Gerry, Rachel Gill, Mary Lyn Graves, Sarah Hillmon, Sharon Milanese, Matthew McLaughlin, Matt Pardo, Lonnie Poupard Jr., Caitlin Scranton, and Anson Zwingelberg—and pianist Anton Batagov. The Lucinda Childs Dance Company is produced and managed by The Blanket. Production Management: Tricia Toliver; Company Management: Ammara Shafqat; Video Programming: Dominik Hildebrand; Lighting Supervision: Carolyn Wong.

Momentary Reprise is part of the Fisher Center’s summer-long SummerScape 2026 (running June 25 – August 16), a “hothouse for the creation of uncompromising, cross-disciplinary hits” (The New York Times) bringing eight weeks of opera, dance, Spiegeltent, and the 36th Bard Music Festival to the idyllic Hudson River Valley setting. SummerScape serves as an incubator for adventurous works that often go on to have extended lives and make significant impacts on the performance landscape in New York and around the country and world. This year, in addition to Momentary Reprise, it includes the world premiere of Suddenly Last Summer, a new opera by Courtney Bryan, with libretto by Gideon Lester and Daniel Fish, based on the Tennessee Williams seldom performed play of the same name, and directed by Fish (June 25 – July 19); a rare staging of Richard Strauss’s opera The Egyptian Helen, with a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, directed by Christian Räth, with the American Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leon Botstein (July 24 – August 2); the 36th Bard Music Festival: Mozart and His World (August 7–16); and multidisciplinary programming in majestic mirrored Spiegeltent, curated by Jason Collins (June 26 – August 15).
 
About Lucinda Childs
Born in 1940, Lucinda Childs began her career at the Judson Dance Theater in New York in 1963. Since forming her dance company ten years later, she has created over fifty works, both solo and ensemble, and received numerous awards, including the Dance Magazine Award, the Golden Lion award from the Venice Biennale, and the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival award for lifetime achievement. In 1976, she was featured in the landmark avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, for which she won an Obie Award. In 1979, Childs choreographed one of her most enduring works, Dance, with music by Philip Glass and film décor by Sol LeWitt, which toured internationally and has been added to the repertory of the Lyon Opera Ballet. Since 1981, Childs has choreographed over thirty works for major ballet companies and directed and choreographed a number of contemporary and eighteenth-century operas for the Los Angeles Opera, La Monnaie in Brussels, and the Opéra national du Rhin, among others. Most recently, Childs directed and choreographed Satyagraha for Opéra Nice Côte d’Azur, which premiered in November 2025.
 

Schedule & Tickets

Performances take place Friday, June 26 at 7 pm; Saturday, June 27 at 2 pm; Sunday, June 28, with a pre-show talk at 12 pm, performance at 2 pm. Tickets are available here.

Chartered coach transportation from New York City is available for Lucinda Childs: Momentary Reprise, Sunday, June 28.

 

Funding Credits

The Fisher Center is generously supported by Jeanne Donovan Fisher, Rebecca Gold Milikowsky, Daniel Shapiro, Stephen E. Simcock, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, Felicitas S. Thorne, the Advisory Board of the Fisher Center, Fisher Center members and general fund donors, The Shubert Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
Fisher Center LAB is funded by the Lucille Lortel Foundation and the Fisher Center’s Artistic Innovation Fund, with lead support from Rebecca Gold Milikowsky and additional funding from The William and Lia G. Poorvu Family Foundation.

The Fisher Center LAB Commission of Lucinda Childs: Momentary Reprise is made possible with the support of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels. Actus, Geranium ’64, and Distant Figure were created in 2024 as a production of International Summer Festival Kampnagel with The Blanket in co-production with Berliner Festspiele, Chaillot Théâtre national de la Danse Paris, and La Bâtie-Festival de Genève, funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation) and the Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media), and were additionally supported by Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels, James Madison University’s School of Theatre and Dance, and UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance.

About the Fisher Center at Bard

The Fisher Center is a premier professional performing arts center and a hub for research and education that demonstrates Bard College’s commitment to the performing arts as a cultural and educational necessity. To support artists, students, and audiences in the examination of artistic ideas, the Fisher Center develops, produces, and presents performing arts across disciplines through new productions and context-rich programs that challenge and inspire.

Home is the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry and located on the campus of Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley. This world-class theater building will be complemented by a new studio building designed by Maya Lin, scheduled to open in 2026. More than 200 events and 50,000 visitors are hosted at the Fisher Center each year, and over 300 professional artists are employed annually. As a powerful catalyst of art-making regionally, nationally, and worldwide, the Fisher Center produces 8 to 10 major new works in various disciplines every year. The Fisher Center offers outstanding programs to many communities, including the students and faculty of Bard College, and audiences in the Hudson Valley, New York City, across the country, and around the world. Building on a 166-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders.

The Fisher Center was born from the Bard Music Festival, founded in 1990, which, for the first 13 years of its existence, occupied several spaces on campus, including a large tent. Each summer, the Music Festival focuses on the life, work, and influences of one composer, promoting new ways of understanding and presenting the history of music to a contemporary audience. When the Fisher Center and its two theaters opened in 2003, the summer festival expanded to include a fully staged opera, as well as theater and dance performances. The highly acclaimed opera program brings unjustly neglected works to the stage in major productions—often making their U.S. debuts.

Through Fisher Center LAB, the Center’s acclaimed residency and commissioning program, artists are provided with custom-made support toward their innovative projects, and their work has been seen in over 100 communities around the world. Resident choreographer Pam Tanowitz’s 2018 Four Quartets was recognized as “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century” by The New York Times. In 2019, the Fisher Center won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical for Daniel Fish’s production of Oklahoma!, which began life in 2007 as an undergraduate production at Bard and was produced professionally by the Fisher Center in 2015 before transferring to New York City. Illinoise, a 2023 Fisher Center world premiere from artists Sufjan Stevens, Justin Peck, and Jackie Sibblies Drury, was recognized with a Tony Award for Best Choreography following its tour and transfer to Broadway.

The Fisher Center is home to several of Bard’s academic programs in the performing arts. Year-round, it hosts performances by the undergraduate Dance Program and Theater and Performance Program; the US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music; The Orchestra Now (TŌN), a Bard graduate program that is training the next generation of classical-music ambassadors; and students at the Bard Conservatory, the first (and so far only) conservatory to require all its students to pursue a bachelor of arts degree in a field other than music in addition to their specialized music studies. As a hybrid institution, the Fisher Center brings together professional and academic art-making of the highest caliber, where student and professional artists work side by side, learning from each other and informing one another’s practices.

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For more information, please contact Blake Zidell of Blake Zidell & Associates at [email protected] or 917.572.2943.
 

This event was last updated on 04-15-2026

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