Word: avante
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...choose naughty ranting, the alternative might be ever more rapidly recycled nostalgia. This is how everyone from Tony Bennett to Tom Jones and Wayne Newton -- all once the polar opposite of hip -- can qualify as hip, given time. But this approach presents the danger of not only turning the avant-garde into a permanent revival tent but also having old mistakes pop right back up. Of course, then you have to rationalize them. "The '70s clothes that are being rehashed are so incredibly ugly, so intentionally ugly, that they actually could be perceived as a rebellion against propriety," the designer...
Nobody could call it avant-gardist; but so what? What counts is its integrity and depth of feeling. It is, to use a more-or-less obsolete word, extremely earnest, not least in its relation to tradition. Boyd seems never to have felt the Oedipal hostility to the past that garbled the rhetoric of Modernism. He didn't think of art as a weapon against paternal authority, ^ because he grew up in an extremely nurturing family, a sort of artists' guild presided over by his grandfather, a painter, and his father, the potter Merric Boyd. (The only way to rebel...
Marivaux's plays were long derided as being wordy, high-flown and much alike -- they are all about the lengths to which people will go, the rules they will break and the indignities they will suffer in pursuit of romance. As rediscovery began a few years ago, European and avant-garde American stagings often emphasized the dark elements of his work. At the other extreme, some scholars saw only his fascination with Italian commedia dell'arte buffoonery. The premier Marivaux exponent Stephen Wadsworth, who directed his translation of Triumph at Berkeley and is staging his text of Changes of Heart...
WHEN ASKED TO MUSE ON THE avant-garde of the generation before his own, the man who became perhaps the most influential avant-garde dramatist of the 20th century savored the historical irony. "They all wanted to destroy culture," he said, "and now they're part of our heritage." The same thing happened to the father of "theater of the absurd" (he preferred the label theater of derision, saying, "It's not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it's mankind"). In 1950, Eugene Ionesco's The Bald Soprano opened in Paris to catcalls, and a performance...
...only man among the rhinoceroses. The rhinoceroses wonder how the world could have been led by men. You yourself wonder: Is it true that the world was led by men?" The horror behind this question never left. Ionesco's jokes were those of nearly all the 20th century avant-garde -- a whistling in the graveyard...