Word: avant
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...this, Cunningham's baffling, inventive choreography is almost as controversial as ever--and he himself, an intensely private person, has offered no comprehensive explanations on either philosophy or method. What is certain is that his 25-year collaboration with avant-garde composer John Cage has been of major importance. Cage's concern with reevaluating the whole idea of music, with both reducing its definition to an almost untenable minimum and expanding its material to an almost unlimited scope, is parallelled in Cunningham's approach to dance...
...friend who loves classical ballet. Reading the program note for the second dance "Locus"--"The score for 'Locus' is a random ordering of 27 points on a cube of space immediately surrounding the standing figure"--she moaned, "It sounds awfully theoretical." But an awareness of the theoretical nuances of avant-garde dance is an initiation to familiarity with the academic language of classical ballet. The initiation makes you an insider, one party to a compact between artist and viewer. Once you're familiar with the compact, you can appreciate the dance as dance...
...dancers perform. Visually the movement has a quality of matter-of-fact ease. Technically, this means movements are linked without transitions, or that, in Brown's words, "the preparation comes from the momentum of the preceding move." Some consider this convention of performance style among the avant-garde dehumanizing. On the contrary, it seems that performers often impose on themselves an impersonal constraint so that personal statement oozes through the pores of the discipline...
There was a time, long past, when modern art was thought dangerous. Its subversive reputation rested on two movements, Dada and surrealism. From them, most subsequent avant-gardes have sprung. Cubist paintings by Georges Braque now look about as threatening as a pastoral scene by Nicolas Poussin. But most of the "radical" gestures in these dying years of the avant-garde have emerged from Dada or surrealist precedents. The swarm of prototypes is so thick that when a Los Angeles body artist, a few years ago, created an "event" by shooting a pistol at a jet aircraft passing over Venice...
...Neapolitan ship wrecked on a seemingly deserted island, and the deposed duke who brought them there by sorcery. Reality is suffused with magic, and by the end of the play almost all of the characters have trouble distinguishing reality from illusion. This splendid confusion provides a perfect setting for avant-garde theater, in countless scenes where bizarre happenings become the norm. Thus the multiplication of leads is justifiable, even if it does not really work. The triumvirate of directors makes an honest stab at bringing elements of dance and mime into the production. but their efforts tend...