Through her use of patterns, repetition, dialect, and technology, she has created a unique style of choreography that embraces experimentation and transdisciplinarity.
During her second year at Perry-Mansfield, Childs auditioned for Tamiris and was cast in a trio with Daniel Nargin.
In the summer of 1959, Childs went to Colorado College to continue studying dance and composition with Hanya Holm.
Childs describes Cunningham saying that he “elucidated a kind of particularity and clarity in dance that felt distinctly separate from anything I had experienced up to that point”.
[1] Rainer was also the one to encourage Childs to be a part of the Judson Dance Theater in 1963 with dancers such as James Waring, Valda Setterfield, and Arlene Rothlein.
Here, Childs worked primarily as a soloist and was allowed to explore and experiment with her own dance style and choreography.
Childs also originated the role of Hubert Page in The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs Off-Broadway in 1982.
Janet McTeer would later go on to receive an Academy Award nomination for playing the role opposite Glenn Close.
Since 1992, Childs has worked primarily in the field of opera, starting with Luc Bondy's production of Richard Strauss's Salome.
[4] That same year, Childs directed her first opera, a production of Mozart's Zaide for La Monnaie in Brussels, Belgium.
[4] In 2001, Childs choreographed Los Angeles' Opera's Production of Wagner's Lohengrin, conducted by Kent Nagano.
[4] Childs choreographed John Adams' opera Doctor Atomic with the San Francisco Ballet in 2007.
[7] “As one of America's leading modern dance choreographers, she makes work which can often be described as conceptual dance.”[8] While her minimalist movements were simple, the beauty in her choreography lay in her spatial exploration.
Her work captivates the splendor of the different patterns the human body can create across a stage by basic repeated movements such as skipping or turning.
In a 2018 interview conducted by Rachel F. Elson of Dance Magazine, Childs states that she is “responding to the music” when she choreographs.
[1] As such, her exploration of this topic lead to Childs creating a diagrammatical score that noted each dancer’s path.
Childs discusses the performance stating that “the result was that the spectator was called upon to envision information that existed beyond the range of actual perception...".
Childs solo in Act 1 scene i was structurally linked to the three visual and musical motifs of the opera.
In this hour-long piece, the dancers move across the stage in pairs repeating the same balletic, geometric movements for 19 minutes and 55 seconds.
A projection of a filmed version of Dance (1979) allows the audience to view the piece from multiple angles at once, adding to the sense of a grid and geometric, abstract patterns.
[17] Childs first took the composition Glass had made and analyzed how the music was constructed and designed her own structure of movement to interact with it.
The focus of props in this piece goes back to Childs’ first interest in creating movement by manipulating objects.