About Ruth
Geneva, Switzerland
British-American dancer and performer Ruth Childs was born in 1984 in London. She grew up in the United States where she studied dance and music. In 2003 she moved to Geneva to finish her dance training with the Ballet Junior de Genève. Following this, she started working with many internationally known choreographers and directors including Foofwa d’Imobilité, La Ribot, Gilles Jobin, Massimo Furlan, Marco Berrettini and Yasmine Hugonnet. Since 2015, she is also working on a re-creation and revival project of the early works of her aunt, the choreographer Lucinda Childs. In 2014 she founded her company Scarlett’s in order to develop her own work through dance, performance, and music. Scarlett’s favors intimate and collaborative artistic processes, cultivating intuition and the indefinable. In 2016 the state of Geneva awarded her a scholarship and research residency in Berlin of 6 months to develop her work. Her first stage piece in collaboration with Stéphane Vecchione, The Goldfish and the Inner Tube, premiered in April 2018. She premiered fantasia, her first solo at the ADC, Geneva in October 2019 and then Blast! in 2022 at the Festival de la Bâtie in Geneva and Fun Times in 2024 at Arsenic in Lausanne. From 2023-2024, Ruth was the associated artist at the CCN2 Grenoble. Ruth is currently one of the artists in residence at Arsenic in Lausanne.
Serious Play: Ruth Childs time in New York with NYU and L’Alliance New York will start off with the opportunity for her to perform her work for the first time in the United States during the Crossing the Lines festival (fall 2025.) Following this Ruth hopes to engage with the NY dance community through workshops, sharing some of her choreographic methods and exploring the idea of spontaneous musicality versus learned musicality, and how to challenge the body’s relationship to music. She will also start the research process for a new solo piece “My Blue Legs,” a poetic conversation of the dialogue between different states and levels of awareness: the living and the dead, the sleeping and the awake, the still and the moving, the happy and the sad, the imaginary and the real. She is interested in engaging with scholars who study dissociation, dreams, Out of Body Experiences, Fantasy Prone Personality and syndromes such as Transient Global Amnesia or the Exploding Head Syndrome as well as creative writing and experimental humanities. Ruth is dedicated to serious play, to cultivating the imaginary, all the while being curious about reality and a bit scared of virtual reality. She has an interdisciplinary approach. Movement, music, writing and drawing are important elements of her choreographic practice.
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