Relative Calm

More than forty years after the iconic work Einstein on the Beach, the director Robert "Bob" Wilson – one of the world’s most important visual and theatrical figures – once again collaborates with the legendary American choreographer Lucinda Childs in Relative Calm, a multimedia show featuring music by Jon Gibson, John Adams, and the famous Pulcinella Suite by Igor Stravinsky.

Robert Wilson, artist, sculptor, video artist, and director of international standing, for more than half a century has never ceased to amaze us with his exuberant creativity which – combined with his personal stylistic rigour – still continues to cross and contaminate contemporary idioms. His latest work, co-produced by the LAC, is constructed in three parts: the first and last are a revisitation of two choreographies which Lucinda Childs and Wilson himself created together in 1981 for Rise by Jon Gibson and Light over Water by John Adams. The second part is his new original creation based on Stravinsky's Pulcinella, which serves as a counterpoint to the two contemporary musicians. The words spoken by Childs, taken from Vaslav Nijinsky’s diary, bind together this triptych of luminous beauty. “In its three symmetrical parts”, explains the Texan artist, who is considered by some to be the most important figure of the avant-garde of performing arts in the second half of the twentieth century, “the show is like a clock that measures time, like the succession of hours of the day.”
Relative Calm is an interdisciplinary work, a hypnotic machine of movements, sounds, lights and images, that brings on to the stage – in a harmonious architecture of space and time – the twelve young performers of the MP3 Dance Project, a company directed by Michele Pogliani.