Word: avante
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...avant-garde steps back
Such are the arresting components of Available Light, a 55-minute collaboration of three prominent minimalists that premiered last week in Los Angeles. Created by Choreographer Lucinda Childs, Composer John Adams and Architect Frank O. Gehry, Available Light is less a milestone than a signpost. Today's avant-garde has had to circle back on its forebears: the same impulse that gave rise earlier in this century to atonal music and flamboyant attitudes in dance now deals in the certainties of plotless movement and assertive major triads...
Just how far the pendulum has swung is evident in Available Light, which travels to the Brooklyn Academy of Music later this month. Childs, who collaborated earlier with fellow avant-gardists such as Composer Philip Glass and Theater Artist Robert Wilson, is a cool rationalist who favors organizational clarity over overt emotionalism. The repeating patterns that ripple through her dances are imitated and finally dispersed like waves spreading across a pond. There are no kicks, leaps or pronounced extension. Childs' dynamic level rarely rises above a whispered pianissimo...
...glimpses that Ozick gives us of the motivated and intellectually curious Brill though are carefully balanced by equally strong--and painful--images of the young man as an outcast, both as an alienated intellectual and a Jew in a strongly anti-Semitic country. The homosexual advances of a close avant garde friend, combined with the prejudice and hostility he repeatedly encounters, heighten his sense of disillusionment...
...more and more U.S. girls are now looking for a new parlor trick. Their skirts are soaring so high that no amount of hemming and hauling could help them hide those inches above the knee. Recently imported from Paris, the short, short skirt has been gleefully adopted by the avant-garde among U.S. teen-agers and coeds as the perfect complement to patterned stockings and leather boots-usually white. From San Francisco coffeehouses to Manhattan discotheques, girls are beginning to reveal more thigh than they have stocking to cover...