Word: avante
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...Charleston, South Carolina, where in 1977 Menotti founded an American counterpart to his annual Spoleto Festival in Italy. Two years ago, Menotti resigned in a huff after a petulant, embarrassing two-year power struggle with the festival's board and management. First the board insisted on including an avant-garde art exhibit Menotti opposed, then it rejected Menotti's chosen successor, his adopted son Francis. When Spoleto Festival USA announced a shortened season and a $1.7 million deficit last year, there were fears it might not long survive its mercurial founder...
...this year is as uneven as it was under the Menotti regime -- ranging from the spectacular (Irish actor Barry McGovern in I'll Go On, a mordant one-man show derived from three novels by Samuel Beckett) to the mediocre (Hans Werner Henze's tired exercise in late-'50s avant-gardism, Der Prinz von Homburg) to the risible (the washed-up soprano Renata Scotto singing the role of the Marschallin in Richard Strauss's opera Der Rosenkavalier). Still, Spoleto seems on course to become one of the nation's most important and enjoyable arts events...
...Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, a new pop opera by avant-garde composer John Adams, radical black poet June Jordan, iconoclastic director Peter Sellars and 26 urban-graffiti artists, raises an interesting question: Is it possible to be so politically correct that one becomes politically incorrect? Or to put it another way, Are some groups of people so inherently villainous that it is perfectly acceptable to stereotype, ridicule and otherwise bash them...
Potential for concentration: High. It's small, Old World university library (with the strange exception of the faux avant-garde, silver "elbow lamps"). Since it's another sparsely attended library, you can definitely find quiet and solitude here. Robinson Hall is one of those buildings of such mediocrity that pretty much nothing short of a riot would prompt you to leave the library and explore...
...days later, Jean Colonna, the brash boy of grunge Parisian avant-grade, presented his fall collection of women's and men's clothing at the Institute of Contemporary Art. The event was a fundraiser for the Institute, the ideal location to the introduce Colonna's hybrid clothing. Both the women's and men's wear combined tight-fitting polyesters, black and silver leathers and a transparent, paper-like material. The models came swaggering down the runways in provocative, fluid movements, some dancing exotically to the grinding heavy metal. The whole event was very "in your face" with the women wearing...