In July 23, 1964, Lucinda Childs premiered Street Dance, a site-specific dance performed from a loft. One of the work’s distinguishing features was an audio recording of Childs’s voice, guiding the choreography unfolding below on the sidewalk. Street Dance was a precisely timed six-minute piece, its duration determined by the length of that recording.

Around the same time, in April 1964, Yvonne Rainer was performing Room Service in Philadelphia and reflecting on the pleasures and labor of hauling a mattress. She later recalled this as the starting point for Parts of Some Sextets (1965). Eight months later, in January 1965, Rainer recorded the accompanying score—a selection of diary entries by eighteenth-century Reverend William Bentley of Salem, Massachusetts. His words, spoken in Rainer’s voice, cued phrasal shifts in Parts of Some Sextets. Childs just so happened to dance in Rainer’s work—another testament to the generative, collaborative spirit of the 1960s downtown dance community.

Six decades later, Lou Forster’s scholarship on Street Dance brings these two luminary figures of postmodern dance into renewed dialogue. This conversation reflects on the experimental conditions that emerged from Robert Dunn’s composition class and continue to reverberate through contemporary performance today.

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Presented in conjunction with the reenactment of Lucinda Childs’s Street Dance (1964–2025), produced by The Blanket and co-produced and co-commissioned by The Kitchen, Frac Bretagne, Frac Franche-Comté, and the Centre d’art Le Lait, with support from Villa Albertine and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.