Word: french
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...each day during the ten-week course, "Communicating with the French," Wylie's students limber up their English-speaking bodies with exercises. Then they scream and yell for a while to loosen their inhibitions. Finally, they study 30-second films of French students in conversation. The Indiana-born parson's son looks a little like that quintessential boulevardier Maurice Chevalier. He grudgingly admits that listening to the dialogue is useful, assurément, "but more important is analyzing the movement and the distance between bodies...
...first things that students learn is to keep the pelvis straight, as the French do. The French also hold their shoulders square but show greater flexibility with the lower arms, hands and wrists. Americans are stiff-wristed, tend to wiggle and bounce more than Mediterranean peoples. There is also a difference between Old and New Worlds in arm swinging: Americans do it as if they owned the world; Frenchmen walk with their upper arms close to the body, as if moving through very limited space...
...addition to linguistics, history and psychology, Wylie teaches his class dance therapy to help them pick up le rythme of French body language. "If you're off rhythm, it interferes with communications," he says. "I think of communication as a dance between two people. Sounds are often just the music to accompany the communication that takes place." That is why so many American tourists, fresh from Berlitz, get blank stares in France instead of directions: they understand the words but not the music...
...When good Americans die," said Oscar Wilde, "they go to Paris." For anyone who has not planned on the trip, there is the Comédie-Française, a glorious traveling museum that has been presenting French classical drama for 299 years and sees little sense in breaking up a winning combination. A fortnight ago the Comédie opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with Molière's Le Misanthrope as part of a four-week visit to New York and Washington, D.C.'s Kennedy Center. It will also present Feydeau...
...Misanthrope is his bittersweet masterpiece. In a comedy of manners, Alceste's notion of telling the truth himself on all occasions and correcting the chicanery of the age clearly marks him as a crackpot bound for grief. But as the play proceeds and the caesuras required of French classic verse occasionally become pregnant pauses, Molière manages to give his compulsive critic's obsession a touch of nobility...