Word: avante
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...popularity of minimalist music spreads and the avant-garde of the '70s pushes further out into the culture, some odd alliances spring up in the artistic landscape. Who would expect to see dancers in the American Ballet Theater stride jauntily onstage carrying ordinary metal folding chairs and proceed to use them as partners? But that is what they do in Choreographer and Performance Artist David Gordon's clever new work--his first ballet ever --called Field, Chair and Mountain, and audiences on A.B.T.'s current national tour cheer them on at every performance. In a New York City Ballet premiere...
Laurie Anderson: United States Live (Warner Bros., five disks). Laurie Anderson's United States, Parts I-IV, which premiered two years ago at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is the work that first brought the avant-garde form of performance art to a wide audience. A dazzling synthesis of music, narration and film, Anderson's free-associating view of American materialism was marked by both wry humor (I dreamed I had to take a test in a Dairy Queen on another planet, goes one section) and an imaginative use of technology: with a device called a Vocoder, she can speak...
David Byrne is a riveting physical and emotional presence--a cult movie star who radiates otherworldly danger. Occupying the center of this glossy rock- concert film as leader of the avant-punk band Talking Heads, Byrne comes across as both stage-frightened and spellbinding. The dramatic contours of his gaunt face seek the shadows, where his most pounding, powerful songs (Psycho Killer, Burning Down the House) take form. The other band members, who appear to have been born on this planet, are along to provide white noise for the Showman from Outer Space as he surfaces in a big white...
Perhaps not. But increasingly, well-known playwrights are using legal pressure to insist that their intentions are respected. Last week Arthur Miller for the second time forced an avant-garde Manhattan theater troupe, the Wooster Group, to stop using portions of his play The Crucible in a production called L.S.D. In August, Edward Albee compelled a Texas stage company, Theater Arlington, to cut short its revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The production had converted Albee's squabbling heterosexual couples into a quartet of gay men. The director points to the oft-repeated rumor that this was Albee...
...group's influence, its value should not be underestimated. Ideas, like less durable products, reach the public through a network of production and distribution. Raw materials are imported and fabricated by artists and scholars. The newest images and thought are offered in galleries and boutique periodicals. Eventually the avant-garde attracts the journalists, and the elite get to take an uncertain bow be fore the philistines...