Word: avant
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What matters in this new off-Broadway collaboration by writer Craig Lucas and director Norman Rene (Three Postcards) is not the literal truth but the beguilingly hallucinatory fashion in which one vision blends into another. In an age when absurdism is yesteryear's avant-garde, a handful of American playwrights work this rowdy territory. Only Lucas and Rene understand how to make something beautiful out of a dream walking...
Sontag's first two collections of essays, Against Interpretation and Styles ) of Radical Will, also made her a crucial guide to the intentions of the avant- garde. She attacked Anglo-American fiction for being "deeply, if not irrevocably, compromised by philistinism," for clinging to realism instead of pursuing experimental technique, as James Joyce and Gertrude Stein had done. In all, the effect of her complaints was electric, a bracing shot at some of the more complacent positions in American thought. But her critics accused her of trendiness, of bowing to Europe, of hostility to art's moral purposes. They charged...
...between two approaches that 30 years before had been considered the opposed poles of French art -- Ingres's classical line, Delacroix's romantic color -- is achieved. There is no clearer instance of the way in which true innovators like Degas do not destroy the past (as the mythology of avant-gardism insisted): they amplify...
...professional company tries to present a variety of shows, which are, in the words of a theater spokesperson, "not too avant-garde." One of its recent presentations, a hilarious revival of the Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers, went on to have runs in other cities with the same principal actors...
Famous for introducing randomness in his musical compositions, the avant-garde composer John Cage took his talents to the next logical step when he delivered the first of his six Norton lectures in almost entirely randomly arranged phrases...