Anton Batagov & Lucinda Childs
Piano & Spoken Word
Lucinda Childs began her career as choreographer in the early 1960s, as a member of the seminal Judson Dance Theater. She formed her own company in 1973 and three years later 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 1977, she and Wilson co-directed and performed in I Was Sitting on My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating, which they revived for the Festival d’Automne in Paris in 2021, where they also created an evening length work titled, Bach 6 Solo with the violinist Jennifer Koh.
In 1979, Childs choreographed one of her most enduring works, Dance with music by Philip Glass and film décor by Sol LeWitt, for which she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. Dance toured internationally and has been added to the repertory of the Lyon Opera Ballet, for which she has also choreographed Beethoven’s Grande Fugue. In 2015 she revived Available Light, created in 1983 with music by John Adams and a split-level set by Frank Gehry, for the Festival d’Automne in Paris. Available Light was presented at the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York in 2018 and that same year Childs’s company performed some of her early work as part of the exhibition Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In addition to work for her own group, Childs has choreographed over thirty works for major ballet companies. She has also directed and choreographed a number of contemporary and eighteenth-century operas, most recently, Philip Glass’s Akhnaten for l’Opéra de Nice Côte d’Azur with Childs’s role as the narrator on film. The premier was streamed in November 2020, and live performances took place in Nice in November 2021, and won the 2021 trophy for Best Lyrical Production by Opera Forum readers. Her additional opera productions include Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice for the Los Angeles Opera; Mozart’s Zaide, Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol and Oedipus Rex, Vivaldi’s Farnace, and John Adams’s Dr. Atomic for the Opéra national du Rhin in Strasbourg; Handel’s Alessandro at the Megaron Concert Hall in Athens; and Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Atys and Jean-Marie Leclaire’s Scylla and Glaucus for the Theater Kiel in Germany.
Childs has also collaborated with Robert Wilson for Letter to a Man, based on Nijinsky’s diaries and performed by Mikhail Baryshnikov. She appeared as an actor in Wilson’s productions of Heiner Muller’s Quartett and Marguerite Duras’s Maladie de la Mort with Michel Piccoli. In 2016, in an exhibit titled Nothing Personal, Childs’s choreographic scores were shown at the Thaddeus Ropac Gallery in collaboration with the Centre Nationale de la Danse, to which she has donated her archive.
Childs holds the rank of Commandeur in France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 2017 she received the Golden Lion award from the Venice Biennale and the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival award for lifetime achievement. She has been inducted into the Hall of Fame of the National Museum of Dance in Saratoga Springs, New York, and received an honorary doctorate from the Université Côte d’Azur in 2021.
Composer and pianist Anton Batagov is one of the most influential and iconic figures in the world of new classics. His discography includes over 60 albums. He plays on the world's most prestigious stages. His compositions have been performed and recorded by outstanding classical and rock musicians and orchestras. The philosophy of Batagov's projects eliminates any boundaries between "performance" and "composition" by viewing all existing musical practices—from ancient rituals to rock and pop culture and advanced computer technologies—as inseparable elements of his own practice.
Anton Batagov is one of the closest collaborators of Philip Glass, one of the key performers of his music. He has been touring internationally with Glass for almost a decade. His Glass albums—The complete Etudes, Prophecies (Batagov's piano arrangements of scenes from Einstein on the Beach and Koyaanisqatsi ), music from The Hours and Distant figure (a composition written by Philip Glass for and premiered by Anton Batagov)—have received critical recognition, thousands of sales and millions of streams.
As a composer, Batagov has his own unique voice. The post-minimalist language of his compositions is rooted in the harmonic and rhythmic patterns of Russian church bells mixed with the spirit of Buddhist philosophy, the dynamic pulse of early Soviet avant-garde, and the unfading energy of progressive rock. Batagov is an author of several movie soundtracks and original music for several television channels.
From 1997 to 2009, Batagov stopped his concert activity to focus on recording and composition.
Since 2009 he has been performing a series of unique solo piano programs. His repertoire includes contemporary classics and great composers of the past. Along with the music of John Cage, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass and Michael Nyman, Batagov performs Bach, Pachelbel, early English music, Mozart, Schubert, Debussy, and many others composers, as well as his own numerous piano compositions.
Mr. Batagov has performed at Walt Disney Hall (Los Angeles), Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York), Jordan Hall (Boston), Bing Concert Hall (Palo Alto, CA), Elbphilharmonie (Hamburg), The Berliner Philharmonie and Philharmonie de Paris, Musiikkitalo (Helsinki), Reduta Hall (Bratislava), Teatro Regio (Parma, Italy), Palau de la Musica Catalana (Barcelona, Spain), The Grand Hall of Moscow Conservatory, The Grand Hall of St.Petersburg Philharmonie, Moscow International House of Music, Zaryadye Hall, and many other venues. The list of festivals he has participated in includes Salzburg Festival (Austria), Diaghilev Festival (Perm, Russia), Ruhrtriennale (Germany), Next Wave and Bang on a Can festivals (New York), Aarhus Festival (Denmark), and others.
