Word: cobwebbed
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...ALWIN NIKOLAIS, 56, is a Flipped-Out, plugged into a high-voltage fantasy world where stage and sound effect share equal billing with the dancers. In Vaudeville of the Elements, figures in bulging fluorescent balloons waddle and contract like pregnant accordians. One dancer wrestles with a space-age cobweb. Others, with illuminated lampshades on their hands and feet, do a close-order drill. Now the dancers are drunken caterpillars, now they are partnering their own distorted shadows. All the while, nine speakers ringing the auditorium sizzle, crackle and explode with electronic music; twelve slide projectors and 30 spots splash colors...
Government itself spun much of the cobweb over British banking. It now insists that U.K. banks limit the total amount of overdrafts by their customers, forces them through other restrictions to lend no more than 55% of their deposits. Fifty years ago, the British Treasury put an end to an earlier wave of bank mergers by threatening legislation to control them. Backed by the Bank of England, that anti-merger doctrine persisted until last spring. Then the Labor government's Prices and Incomes Board called for a new policy, complaining that British banks had grown stodgy and uncompetitive...
...tomorrow" His entire output illustrates the question, picturing death in life, the swift passage of beauty as an integral part of growth, with a chilly poetry that haunts the viewer like the ghost of Savonarola. Crucifixion, a 7-ft.-high cross with a black, rotting cadaver, skeined by a cobweb of raveled nylon stockings, comments acridly both on the original sacrifice and its loss of contemporary meaning, while lesser works recall that Conner tried marijuana in the early 1960s...
...vaudeville shows go, it might have been conjured up by Ed Sullivan on an LSD binge. Right there onstage in living, quivering color, a formation of UFOs performed an aerial ballet. A chap in fluorescent lemon leotards wrestled with a space-age cobweb. Next came a drill team of Martian types outfitted with glowing lampshades, then seven creatures in baggy sacks who squiggled like giant amoebas in heat-all to the otherworldly twaaang, ratatatat, whizzz and kapow! of electronic music. It was called Vaudeville of the Elements, Choreographer Alwin Nikolais' latest excursion into the twilight zones of modern dance...
Nonetheless, to a world grown weary of cold-war fulmination, the thunder out of Hanoi or Havana often has a curiously chimerical ring; the Iron Curtain itself seems less an instrument of terror and repression than a gigantic cobweb of cliche. Particularly to the generation that has reached voting (or at least debating) age since the early coups and crises of the postwar era, the sounds of struggle appear almost as irrelevant and unreal as fragments of a horror tale recollected from childhood. Many of their elders see Communism in the confused, self-doubting terms that have characterized the recent...