Word: critics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Another aspect of Cunningham's art, which New York Times critic Anna Kisselgoff has compared to the Cubist principle of collage, is the relation between dance and such other elements of performance as music and decor. Here too the principle of dance-as-dance-only is carried to an extreme. In preparation for a typical performance, Cunningham meets with the composer and designer and tells them the general tenor of the dance, but not its specifics; then all three work separately, combining their efforts for the first time only in actual performance...
...likened his use of the stage to "a continuum, an Einsteinian field in which the dancers relate not to fixed points...but to one another," and most Cunningham dances can be viewed to almost equal advantage from any angle. There is no hierarchy of dancers, either: they interact, in critic McDonagh's phrase, with "molecular individuality." As with Cunningham's approach to decor and music, this too is essentially a respect for the integrity of individual elements rather than a surrender to anarchy. Carolyn Brown, long an outstanding Cunningham dancer, points out that "the dancers are treated more as puzzles...
Nightmares and dreams, through which devils dance and wolves howl, make bad novels." So wrote an American critic upon reading Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights soon after it was first published in December 1847. As so often happens, the reviewer was wrong. Emily's tumultuous tale of Catherine Earnshaw and the dark foundling Heathcliff, of the passion that raged between them across the Yorkshire moors, easily endured critical barbs and long ago became an English classic. If anything, the novel's popularity has grown steadily in the past 130 years. It has been filmed several times...
...time when Farrell was a lodestar of the non-Communist left. His Studs Lonigan trilogy is a genre classic, a cluttered memoir of graceless Irish poor whose lyricism and potential are crushed in the struggle to survive. H.L. Mencken called their creator "the best living novelist," and Critic Alfred Kazin noted respectfully that "Farrell was the archetypal novelist of the crisis and its inflictions ... all the rawness and distemper of the thirties seem to live in [his] novels...
...Hamlet is a "crude, immoral, vulgar and senseless work," complained the novelist. Man and Superman, he wrote to George Bernard Shaw, is not "sufficiently serious." The music of Beethoven, Schumann and Berlioz, he told Tchaikovsky, has "an artificial style-striving for the unexpected." The critic was Count Leo Tolstoy, and these and other remarks appear in two volumes of Tolstoy's Letters (Scribners; $35), the first comprehensive translation into English of the Russian writer's prolific correspondence. In notes to friends and fellow authors like I.S. Turgenev, Maxim Gorky, H.G. Wells and Rainer Maria Rilke, Tolstoy also takes...