Word: awkwardly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...effects. It is easy to point out influences in this respect: he places characters in their social setting with the exactitude of Sirk, revelling in the banal and vulgar in terms of taste (flowered wallpaper and knick knacks abound in Mother K.'s apartment); he makes Brechtian use of awkward camera positioning to alienate, shooting not from within the action, but as an observer so that his audience will be responsible for creating its own realism; like Godard, he favors a fade-out to black between shots, allowing his viewer a space to fantasize within the action. The total result...
...article, glued in the scrap book, called them "modern-day pioneers" --a condescending label that nonetheless contains an element of truth. When I left the house, I crossed the stream, walking over to the barn in search of a cousin. There I met Bessie, who kindly permited me, an awkward novice, to milk her. After the ceremony was over, I washed up in the fresh stream water heated on the stove, and drove into the town to meet Annie...
...main problem is that he overacts-perhps at Pullum's insistence. Certain scenes reach an emotional level which is entirely too high. The play seems to peak every five minutes, leaving the audience on a lurching roller coaster. And Landiss's method of attaining these misplaced emotional peaks is awkward. It is as though someone told him the only thing an actor can do to increase intensity is talk faster or louder or both. Landiss fails to realize that in many scenes a well-placed whisper can be more effective than an ear-shattering, rapid-fire sequence of unintelligible lines...
Sellars has had considerable experience as a puppeteer, but he forgets that people are not puppets. Unlike puppets, people get embarrassed, awkward and fidgety. Mime is a very difficult art which requires absolute control and subtlety. So when the actors are asked merely to improvise whatever they want on stage in approximate time to the poem, with little direction, they are often reduced to exaggerated gestures, uncomfortable muggings, and an aimless messy shuffling on stage...
...mystery and the dark. Then the fairy chorus is on stage, high voices piping "over hill, over dale..." and the stage, mostly bare of scenery, comes alive. What strikes the viewer, in addition to these spirits' freedom from Tinkerbell-ishness, is the 'fairies' self-consciousness and rather awkward stance, in sharp contrast with their lyrical singing. Harvard is hardly teeming with good dancers, but their absence in the opera rather detracts from the unearthly effect created by the music--these immortals are so obviously of-this-world. They wear a few wisps of gauze, to be sure, but leotards...