E-Mail This Article to a Friend Woman of many parts Lucinda Childs’s world premiere for Boston Ballet BY IRIS FANGER

When choreographer Lucinda Childs was the same age as many of the Boston Ballet performers she’s instructing on a cold afternoon at the Ballet’s South End studio, she was sitting cross-legged on the floor with pink curlers and a colander stuck on her head and declaring it dance. Called Carnation, the work was shown in 1964 at the Judson Church in Greenwich Village, where Childs and a band of like-minded rebels were busy deconstructing the traditions of modern dance. Their manifesto proclaimed farewell to technique and the trappings of theatricality in exchange for ordinary movement and everyday tasks performed by anyone who wanted to take a place on stage.

Forty years later, after much rethinking of style, performing, and making works for her own company (1973–2000), not to mention being showered with awards and distinctions including the French "Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres," Childs is one of the most revered artists on the international avant-garde circuit. Her itinerary takes her from ballet and contemporary-dance companies to opera houses as she’s linked with the likes of theater artists Peter Sellars and Robert Wilson and visual artists Frank Gehry and Sol LeWitt.

She closed down her own company after a belated 25th anniversary celebrated by a successful European tour and a triumphant return to the Brooklyn Academy of Music with a program of works called "Parcours," a French term meaning route or journey. At the time, she said she couldn’t continue to keep the troupe together because of the dearth of substantial funding. She has never lacked for assignments as a solo performer and a freelance choreographer since.

Childs has been in residence at Boston Ballet this winter to create Ten Part Suite for the "Falling Angels" program that will be presented next weekend. (She took time out at the beginning of March to fly to Florence, where the contemporary troupe Maggio Danza is performing an evening-length program of three of her pieces this weekend.) Cast for 14 performers (two soloists and six couples), Ten Part Suite is set to music from four of the 14 Opus 5 violin sonatas by the 17th-century Italian composer and violinist Arcangelo Corelli — quite a departure for a choreographer who started her career by making dances without music after leaving Judson Dance Theater. The choreography she devised early on remains the basis of her distinctive, geometrically patterned, stripped-down style. Later, she progressed to making dances set to scores commissioned from contemporary composers, but she has no difficulty with Corelli’s ornamented style. "One of the comments about Corelli’s music is that within a set framework he does so much with so little, the kind of thing I do myself."

During rehearsal, the cast members patiently repeat the phrases Childs demonstrates. On the ballet dancers, the movement seems lyrical and flowing. When Childs shows the steps, there’s an additional authority of weightedness as she heaves into the combinations, shoulders first — and a thrust that the BB dancers have yet to master. "When I work alone in my studio, I improvise until I find something that makes sense to me, that I think belongs with the music but not necessarily illustrates the music. I want a tension between the movement and the music. Then I go in and teach the variations to the dancers and see what happens."

The hard work in the studio comes when Childs makes a framework for the steps, blocking the spacing and counting for the dancers. "Putting the material on the dancers makes me change it. There are a lot of differences in the way I do it and how they do it."

When I ask whether she ever explains meaning or emotional content, the answer is a definite no. "I feel that once they know the movement and it begins to register, their own presence comes through. I like that their personalities come out, their individuality."

For Childs, the "parcours" continues. Although she’s sold her downtown New York loft and bought a home in Gayhead on Martha’s Vineyard, she’s seldom there. From Boston, she’ll travel to San Francisco to audition dancers for the new John Adams opera Dr. Atomic, which she’ll choreograph in conjunction with Sellars as director; it opens in October. She’s slated to work on a new production of Stravinsky’s Le rossignol at Ballet de l’Opéra National du Rhin for 2006, and Robert Wilson wants her to perform in an upcoming project. Meanwhile, Boston Ballet artistic director Mikko Nissinen feels lucky to have her: in his note in the company’s current Playbill, he argues that her choreography "is not seen often enough in the United States" and concludes, "Her dance musicality, with its purity of movement, is a joy to see."

Boston Ballet presents "Falling Angels" — Jirí Kylián’s Falling Angels and Sarabande, William Forsythe’s In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated, and the world premiere of Lucinda Childs’s Ten Part Suite — March 17 through 20 at the Wang Theatre, 270 Tremont Street in the Theater District. Tickets are $18 to $98 (special $15 tickets are available with a student ID); call (800) 447-7400, or visit www.telecharge.com, or drop in to the Wang box office.