Lucinda Childs’ Dance at Sadler’s Wells review: what a difference forty years makes

Dance by Lucinda Childs at Sadler’s Wells

(Picture: Jaime Roqu​e de la Cruz)

Before this show started, I bumped into someone who saw the European premiere in Paris in 1979. People left in droves, she recalled – driven to distraction by Lucinda Childs’ austere palette of movement and Philip Glass’ needling score.

What a difference forty years makes. If audiences once recoiled from Dance as an astringent geometry lesson, it’s now embraced as a modern classic: a sleek celebration of perpetual movement. It anchors the Dance Reflections festival of recent work by international choreographers in a founding mother of modern dance.