![]() On the same day that he met her, the theater auteur Robert Wilson invited Childs to create the primary speaking role and to choreograph a marathon solo in his Einstein on the Beach (1976). Childs met Wilson when she was working on pieces she calls her "Works in Silence," in which the only sound is made by the dancers, as experienced in Radial Courses, performed there on December 16, 2009, at the Bessie Schönberg Dance Theater, Sarah Lawrence College. Lucinda Childs was the third mastermind, bringing choreographing and dancing in the initial performances, which helped her career after the end of the Judson Dance Theater, a major part of the 60s New York arts scene that revolutionized dance. The libretto (PDF) was composed, in part, of Knowles’s poems. Pieces from the past were falling into place, for both Glass and Wilson, with Einstein. Glass noted that the score was "a tippping point" in his career, and the culmination of about a decade of work, going back to a collaboration with Ravi Shankar in 1964. I composed music to these, and then Bob began staging it. I discovered that Bob thinks with a pencil and paper everything emerged as drawings. Then we thought about the images, and then the staging. We worked first with the time – four hours – and how we were going to divide it up. What connected Bob and I was how we thought about time and space in the theatre. The opera isn't a narrative about Einstein's life. Then he said, what about Einstein? That was it: I had been very taken with Einstein, he was really a popular hero in the 1940s. He countered with Hitler, which I didn't want to do. When we started talking about a subject, I suggested Gandhi, but Bob wasn't that interested. ![]() The two hit it off and talked about collaborating on a piece. ![]() That same year, Wilson and Philip Glass met after Glass saw show of Bob's called The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, a silent piece that lasted 12 hours. ![]() In 1973, a friend of Christopher Knowles's parents gave an audiotape he made to Robert Wilson, the avant-garde theatre director and playwright. ![]()
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