Word: cancan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...seen his work, he welcomed a collaboration. In presenting Gaite Parisienne, a fizzy romp set to Manuel Rosenthal's brilliant editing of Offenbach, Baryshnikov knew what he did not want. "I was certain that I didn't want the heavy Maxim's look with the black stockings for the cancan girls. I wanted something light and funny and young." Both men wanted to create their own vision of fin-de-siecle Paris...
Consider the following items, all displayed in the Paris couture shows: Louis XIV theater-curtain trimmings decorating a hooped mini; velvet bustles and derriere butterfly bows; tutus; white taffeta capes; page boy, cowgirl and matador outfits; satin tunics; bubble coats; cancan skirts up at the front and down at the back; and, even more of a burlesque, satin minis designed to reveal black garters...
...look at pinned-on paper fans printed with their personal drill. Most get six hours of relentless exercise, beginning with a brisk 1 1/2- to 5 1/2-mile hike at dawn and climaxing in the afternoon with the women's aerobic circuit, WAC in the appropriate acronym. As Offenbach's cancan blares, exercisers WAC out on each of 22 pieces of alternating equipment, moving every 45 seconds from arm weights to a stationary bike to leg presses to the rowing machine. To help the medicine go down, there is often a spoonful of sweetener (not sugar, naturally). After the hike, instructors...
...same frenetic style serves her much better as a dancer. Her timing and placement are precise, and she uses her body with humor (sitting on the floor and wiggling backward out of a cancan skirt), sexual invitation (in the bumps and grinds of a vulgar parody of some black choreography), and grace (in the irregular, Twyla Tharpish movements created for her by Director-Choreographer Alan Johnston). She highlights the dances' meaning with a panoply of facial expressions: she may be the best mugger since Lucille Ball...
...works of art meet Laguna's requirements in terms of style and content, they prove technically impossible to reproduce. For example, Eytchison has found that Toulouse-Lautrec's paintings have too much distance between figures in foreground and background for realistic reproduction: "In order to do a cancan scene and have real women recreating the dancers, the absinthe drinker in the foreground would have to be eight feet tall." The posers, who are picked from more than 1,000 applicants at open casting calls, are chosen not only on the basis of looks but because they...