Word: avante
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...though, a hardy band of revisionists is riding to the rescue. Performance practice, the study of how compositions were meant to be played on instruments of their period, has become a lively, avant-garde movement that promises re-examination of baroque, classical era and early romantic music. "The philosophy," declares Christopher Hogwood, director of England's Academy of Ancient Music, "is precisely the same as the one that leads museums to clean 18th century paintings and put them in the right frames. We like to see our pictures of music clean-without layers of 19th century varnish...
...Historian Irving Sandier remarks in his catalogue essay, Pearlstein "resumed what an avant-garde some three-quarters of a century earlier had proclaimed to be academic"-modeled painting of the naked human body. The studio nude, posed, had been the very protein (or, to its detractors, the basic starch) of salon painting from Ingres to Bouguereau. It was thrust into eclipse by impressionism because it carried an aura of the posed, the stagy, the allegorical, and post-impressionism finished it off. The nude became a casualty of the means painters chose to assert their pictorial honesty: the near religious cult...
Toko Shinoda, 70, lives and works here. She can be, when she chooses, one of Japan's foremost calligraphers, master of an intricate manner of writing that traces its lines back some 3,000 years to ancient China. She is also an avant-garde artist of international renown, whose abstract paintings and lithographs rest in museums around the world. These diverse talents do not seem to belong in the same epoch. Yet they have somehow converged in this diminutive woman who appears in her tiny foyer, offering slippers and ritual bows of greeting...
Audiences love Glass Pieces, and they are right. Despite all the talk about exotic influences, Glass writes likable music that is instinctively theatrical. His avant-garde operas (Einstein on the Beach) have a strong dramatic surge. Take material like that and entrust it to a magic man like Robbins, and you will get something better than Broadway, fresh as tomorrow...
West by Steven Berkoff. A Berkoff play (Greek, Metamorphosis, Hamlet) is simultaneously avant-garde and deja vu. Actors in whiteface mime extravagant gestures, confronting the audience with stylized, scatological invective. It is like being back in the rumble seat of '60s performance art, but with a raw poetic urgency. Other English play wrights may update Shaw; Berkoff wants to be an East End blend of Sam Shepard and Jean Genet. West, the first of his plays to infiltrate the West End, can be seen as a new West Side Story. Mike (Rory Edwards), leader of a quintet of Hackney...