Word: avante
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Stirling's modernism was muted in the 1970s, when British avant-garde architects adopted the American and Italian nostalgia for architectural "references" and ornamentation. In a few buildings designed with Partner Michael Wilford, Stirling made halfhearted concessions to historicism. His first completed U.S. commission, Rice University's 1981 School of Architecture in Houston, for example, is a staid, humbly conventional structure -- with an asymmetrically placed porthole punched in an end wall, almost as a defiant postmodernist afterthought...
...Glass Ensemble performed at the Festival d'Automne in Paris, which was run by Michel Guy, a French aristocrat fascinated by the New York avant-garde. Appointed Secretary of State for Culture the next year, Guy later commissioned Einstein on the Beach, which had its premiere in July 1976 after a year of rehearsals. The unconventional Einstein was a near pantomime set to Wilson's typically elliptical spoken texts and allusive stage pictures of railroad trains and spaceships. There were no formal arias or indeed any set pieces at all; a small chorus sang "One, two, three, four, five...
...purpose of art is to reflect and illuminate the spirit of its age, then New York City's avant-garde scene in the '60s and early '70s was a worthy expression of a tumultuous time. Huddled together in a few low-rent blocks of lower Manhattan, a remarkable band of visual artists, theatrical innovators, dancers and composers, loosely allied in their rejection of both traditionalism and a previous generation's idea of radicalism, supported and inspired one another in what was then a lonely pursuit. "The collaborative element of those years was crucial," remembers Composer Philip Glass. "I mean...
...Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, which received its U.S. premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1973, Wilson welded elements of painting, set design, music, ballet and pantomime into a single twelve-hour work. Many found it initially difficult to come to terms with the avant-garde's startling modernist images, such as Stalin's dance for 19 ostriches or its chorus line of caricatured black mammies swaying to the strains of On the Beautiful Blue Danube. But those who did, witnessed the foundation of much...
...wronged him, could have been a routine exercise in nostalgia or camp. But Sellars obviously sees grandeur in the play and is determined to make the audience see it too. If that means flinging in poetry from Byron, music from Beethoven or borrowings from the past 20 years of avant-garde theater, so be it. His stage effects are frequently apt and memorable. When Dantes is thrown into a dungeon, he and a grizzled fellow prisoner (David Warrilow) wail about their plight as their bodies sink beneath the stage. Soon only their heads are visible, lighted starkly from below...