Word: awkwardnesses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When he came up for auction at a 1975 summer sale of Kentucky yearlings, he was just Hip No. 128, an anonymous colt with an awkward bearing and a slightly skewed front foot. He was gaveled off at the paltry price, by thoroughbred standards, of $17,500, and led away to his new owners, Karen and Mickey Taylor. It seemed hardly an auspicious union-an unassuming yearling and a stable whose racing silks were just two years and a handful of horses...
...shortly after siring Slew and had to be destroyed. On early form, the Bold Reasoning-My Charmer issue was not promising. His hindquarters were oversized and his gait was hardly classic. Exercise Rider Mike Kennedy recalled his early rides on the two-year-old colt: "At first he was awkward when he galloped. It felt like he had five legs and they were going everywhere...
...other minor acting flukes, however--ones that might represent drawbacks in another play--here add to the characters' concreteness. While the play's fifth character, a guard played by Paul Jackel, for instance, seems awkward when he tries to enter into insulting repartee with the prisoners, this is exactly how guards sound. They try to act tough, but can never quite match the prisoners' cool--a logical enough phenomenon, since guards are often men with the same frustrated and violent temperament as prisoners, but without the nerve to try to make society pay for their disappointment. John Alden's Rocky...
...sloppiness of this production surfaces elsewhere--in the lack of climactic tension in key scenes, in awkward exits and entrances, in cramped staging and choreography. While the size of the set seems to encourage movement, its construction on different levels actually inhibits it. There is almost no choreography to speak of--just a series of stiff, back-and-forth movements in waltz time. As the music swells expansively in the "Night Waltz," for instance, the dancers--to use the term in its loosest sense--remain rigidly in place, tracing out small, clumsy circles...
...barest feel of contorted frenzy. The climaxes seem to come from one root gesture, a balance on one foot with the other leg held stiffly to the side just off the floor. Paxton transforms this pose at another moment into a slippery soft-shoe, and later into an awkward stumble, buoying to stay upright. The image is of a swimmer with his head always just slightly above water...