ABSTRACT In 1973, the Lucinda Childs Dance Company performed a dance called Calico Mingling on Robert Moses Plaza at Fordham University, Lincoln Center, on Manhattan’s West Side. Childs, who had a history of testing spatial barriers with performances, intentionally trespassed into the most central outdoor area of Fordham’s campus to stage her work. The dancers’ pathways crisscrossed the strict geometrical form of the plaza’s surface. By visually and corporeally disrupting this private university space, the dance challenged the New York City doctrine of modernist urban development and progress championed by the man it recognized, controversial planner Robert Moses. This article details how Childs – who dance critic Jill Johnston described as the preeminent descendent of the American modern dance tradition – subverted Moses’s totalizing masculinist program of modernist architectural design as it was applied to urban planning in the mid-twentieth century. Childs’s embodied approach to modernism employs the grid as a framework to construct movement. In the choreographer’s hands, the structure prompts variable possibilities, thus furthering the trajectory of modern dance’s formal experimentation. Ultimately, our study of Calico Mingling underscores the intersecting histories and overlapping forms of modernism, demonstrating that – much like Childs’s dance – it can be consistently reconfigured into new variations.