Word: avante
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...avant-garde became hot, even chic. Bianca Jagger and Diane Keaton joined the Next Wave Producers Council, young urban professionals who had never gone near Lincoln Center flocked across the Brooklyn Bridge, and a BAM ticket became the scarcest in town. The first Next Wave Festival in 1983 featured Director Lee Breuer and Composer Bob Telson's dazzling wedding of Sophocles and soul, The Gospel at Colonus, which was later televised on PBS. The next year saw a triumphant reprise of Einstein, while last season brought Wilson's incandescent play The Golden Windows. It also brought forth a full-fledged...
...work that has not been discovered, people working on the fringe," says Mark Russell, director of Performance Space 122, a funky theater carved out of an abandoned public school in Manhattan's East Village. "There is a whole wave of people working this way now, underneath the surface." The avant-garde must always remain one step ahead, testing and trying public sensibilities. But what Byrne, Wilson and the others have done is reassert that direct, simple communication can be a revolutionary concept too. And that is a true story...
...Heads were a prominent part of a creative community that kicked avant- garde American culture into a newer, more accessible shape. Music, dance, performance art and rock all flowed together into a single swift stream, which Byrne navigated effortlessly (see following story). He also wrote scores for the spectacular theatrical ruminations of Robert Wilson (The Knee Plays, segments of Wilson's grand-scale project, the CIVIL warS) and the spirited, quirky choreography of Twyla Tharp. "He is very precise and very careful," Tharp says admiringly. "He doesn't waste things, but he is also capable of being very adventuresome...
...wife, Bass Player Tina Weymouth, all attended the Rhode Island School of Design, and Keyboard Player Jerry Harrison came from Harvard with a B.A. and a semester of graduate school in design behind him. They were used to the behavioral extravagances and shock-therapy experimentation of the young avant-garde art world, and brought that same go-for-it attitude to their music. Playing at Manhattan's CBGB, the proto-punk club on the Bowery, the Heads dressed in strictly Ivy spiff, like floorwalkers from Brooks Brothers. Byrne, eyes bulging, long neck turning like a periscope, sang like a carny...
...American art today. Sargent was certainly no modernist, but the fiercely competitive atelier system of figure drawing that formed his style when he studied with Carolus-Duran in Paris also underpinned the high standards of early modernist draftsmanship in Matisse, Picasso or Beckmann. Hence, though his relation to the avant-garde was nil, he is no longer to be dismissed as a flashy bore. There is virtue in virtuosity, especially today, when it protects us from the tedious sight of an artist's guts on parade...