Word: decorative
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...affirmative and liberating: a respect for dance, and for music, and for visual art sufficient to trust the integrity of each as an independent entity, without the need to impose an artificial ordering. Perhaps this explains the paradoxical association between a choreographer who views neither music nor decor as a determining element of dance, and a succession of major composers (Cage, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, Gordon Mumma, David Tudor, Pauline Oliveros) and artists (Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns...
...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 than works of art: the pieces are space and time, shape and rhythm...
...passionate anticlericalism were authentically shocking within France's Catholic tradition, but resemble a charade when plucked from that context. But the freeing of imagination by the surrealists remains a tremendous achievement. Be yond the froth - the ideological absurdities, the rampant narcissism, the window display and chic decor - surrealism remains one of the century's noblest proposals of liberty...
Mushrooming 273 ft. into the skyline, sited in 52 acres of the central business district, the copper-toned Superdome looks like a happily defected UFO, or-more to Orleanians' tastes-a gargantuan cheese souffle. Inside, despite a decidedly sublunary decor, the building is a mechanical marvel, capable of seating in air-conditioned comfort the entire populations of Andorra, Liechtenstein and Monaco, with room left over for a couple of football teams, four trade exhibitions, a dog show and a few hundred ushers, guards and food vendors. Or, as Orleanians never fail to point out, it could swallow Houston...