Word: avant
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...everyone is enthusiastic. "It is meaningless to describe anything as avant-garde today," says Hilton Kramer, editor of the New Criterion. "Once you had a success on the order of pop art in the early '60s, it was no longer possible to define anything as avant-garde because there was no longer anything that met with resistance. Once what was formerly regarded as avant- garde was embraced by the mainstream, you simply had novelty." While Kramer admits Wilson's work has an audience, he is nevertheless dismissive. "I think it's a terrible bore. But people of mainstream culture...
Still, for many the distinction between highbrow and low rent are increasingly arbitrary. "What we are beginning to see now is that people on both sides are taking with equal seriousness someone like a David Byrne," notes David White, executive director of Dance Theater Workshop, a favorite showcase for avant-garde choreographers in downtown Manhattan. Nor are there firm boundaries delimiting art forms anymore. Wilson, Glass and the others collaborate often, particularly in the realm of musical theater (and, by extension, film), which has become the avant-garde art form of choice. "There has been a general move toward...
Collaboration among prominent avant-gardists, of course, is nothing new. In 1910 Serge Diaghilev, the flamboyant Russian impresario and leader of the Ballets Russes, brought together Composer Igor Stravinsky and Choreographer Michel Fokine to create The Firebird; and Composer John Cage and Modern Choreographer Merce Cunningham have worked together frequently. Nor is it unheard-of for a rock musician to hang out with the classical avant-garde: Frank Zappa, formerly of the Mothers of Invention, has had his serious chamber works conducted by no less than Pierre Boulez. What distinguishes the SoHo artists is the familiar ease with which their...
...Meredith Monk, who choreographed the film's opening and closing tableaux. Byrne and Wilson will collaborate on The Forest, conceived as both a live opera and a film and scheduled for a Berlin premiere in 1988. Glass and Wilson joined forces on Einstein, the work that marked the avant-garde's uptown coming-out party at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1976, and earlier this year Glass released the album Songs from Liquid Days, which featured lyrics by Byrne, Anderson, Paul Simon and Suzanne Vega, with performances by Linda Ronstadt and the Kronos String Quartet...
...Rome section of Wilson's global epic, the CIVIL warS, which will be performed in December as the closing attraction of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival, now in its fourth season. The academy, affectionately known as BAM, has become a national showcase for avant-garde work; its president, Harvey Lichtenstein, is the movement's Sol Hurok. When Lichtenstein courageously produced Wilson's The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud in 1969, few thought Wilson's glacially paced musings would be the stuff of box-office success. But when Glass's opera about the early life...