Word: courtesanly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When the samurai hordes poured across the Sea of Japan into Korea almost four centuries ago, a legendary Korean kisaeng (courtesan) named Gae Non vowed to kill the invaders' leading general. She toasted her prey at an outdoor party, then bound herself to him with a sash as a token of eternal love. A moment later, so the story goes, she plunged into a nearby ravine, dragging the general with her to death and fulfilling her vow. In Seoul these days, the kisaeng response to a new and different kind of Japanese invasion is a lot more affectionate...
...Sleeping Beauty, with Lynn Seymour, are both classical works. Field Figures, with Deanne Bergsma, choreographed by Glen Tetley, is a modern ballet. And Marguerite and Armand, with Dame Margot Fonteyn, choreographed by Sir Frederick Ashton especially for the pair, is based on Dumas's story of Mme. Recamier, the courtesan immortalized by Garbo in Camille. Ashton calls his ballet an "evocation poetique," but it is more like sentimental prose. The other pieces are adequate, but hardly thrilling. The biggest problem with using bits of complete works is that the audience stands a good chance of being bored, since there...
...rights Offenbach's opera Tales of Hoffmann should belong to the tenor in the title role. It is he, after all, who goes awooing, however unsuccessfully, after Stella the actress, Olympia the windup doll, Giulietta the courtesan and Antonia the consumptive soprano. If he is not careful, though, the tenor can be easily upstaged by the soprano who normally portrays all four heroines. Her music is uniformly exquisite, and on top of that she gets to show her legs in the gondola scene...
...Tour's themes was the vanity and vulnerability of youth; he embodied it in his extraordinary masterpiece The Cardsharp with the Ace of Diamonds. A boy, caparisoned in plumes, brocade and lace, is gambling against a courtesan who is about to get, from the cardsharp's waistband, the crucial ace. It is a familiar genre situation, but La Tour impregnated it with a subtle psychological tension. The shifty ballet of the eyeballs runs its counterpoint to the expressive gestures of the hands - the soft, uncertain dandyism in the boy, the momentary apprehension of the serving girl, whose glance...
Cubist. There is something quite abstract in La Tour's art, which is as evident in the serene, egglike oval of the courtesan's head, seen in broad day, as it is in the cuirasses and helmets of the gambling soldiers in The Denial of St. Peter, glimpsed by candlelight. A body or a hand is silhouetted against a shielded flame in order to display, with effortless virtuosity, its linear nature as form. Indeed, La Tour's night pieces look like predictions of Cubism; the background is as active as the figure, voids read as strongly...