Word: antically
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Author Fielding writes a torrential prose, and his imagist phrases, fabulous incident, antic characters and peripheral violence whip the story forward. He shares with the late Joyce Gary the belief that a novel's most important qualities are narrative and action. Too many writers, complains Fielding, fill their books "with things which rightly should be confined to their diaries, their lavatories or their psychiatrists." His greatest strength-dramatic invention-contributes to his greatest weakness: over-plotting...
...Cousteau has become as complex as any phenomenon he finds in the sea. He has tried his hand at painting (his pictures turn out vaguely surrealistic), relaxes aboard the Calypso with an accordion. Despite his scholarly air, accented by amber, half-lens spectacles, Cousteau is a man with an antic turn of mind, loves to improvise wacky film scenarios (a nearsighted bull gets contact lenses, routs the matador and escapes, only to starve because he cannot see the grass). But Cousteau is also a leader of men. When an inexperienced diver drowned trying to find the anchor of Calypso, Cousteau...
Motion & Stillness. On last week's program the two principal pieces, both choreographed by Cunningham, were Summer-space and Antic Meet, set to music by two modernists-Morton Feldman, 35, and John Cage, 47. The first, described as "a lyric dance," was an impressionistic work evoking the shimmering heat of summer, the play of light and shade. It was danced before a pointillistic backdrop of blue and green, and the dancers wore similarly dappled costumes (the spots were sprayed on with a paint gun), which permitted them to disappear into and emerge from the scenery as if they were...
...Antic Meet, set to squeaking, creaking, honking music conducted by Composer Cage himself, was mostly satirical-a spoof of social conventions, sports, the modern dance itself. At one point Cunningham pulled on and off a multisleeved sweater in a pointed jab at Martha Graham's fondness for dressing and undressing while dancing. At another he appeared in white coveralls and went through a marvelously loose-limbed parody of vaudeville-style dancing, with broad suggestions of Fred Astaire. The piece contained few outright ballet laughs, but it was distinguished by the clean, sculptural style that is the mark of Cunningham...
...stated; the prisoner's name carries echoes of Roman civic virtue, the jailers' names are Russian, and the executioner is known (in an echo of the French Revolution?) as M'sieur Pierre. The prison itself is timeless, universal, born of an idea turned into phantasm. Its antic rules ("the management shall in no case be responsible for the loss of property or for the inmate himself"), the handless clock on which a watchman hourly paints in the hands, and, above all, the jailers' constant and somehow insane concern for the prisoner's welfare...