Word: goya
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...dream vicissitudes. The artist competes for this odd love-object against a baleful, glove-napping reptile-which, in The Abduction, sprouts wings like a pterodactyl and lurches off into the night sky with its prey. Such etchings, in their impassioned and somewhat poker-faced grotesqueries, are reminiscent of Goya, who gave visual substance to those monsters that wake when reason dreams. But Goya's repertory contains no more alarming beast than this...
Those who manage to escape could be models for Goya's Disasters of War. The lucky ones get into already overfilled tent camps that reek of caustic soda disinfectant and human excrement, and are ankle deep in filthy water from the first monsoons. Most huddle under trees or bushes trying to avoid the heavy rains. Some find cramped quarters on the verandas of now closed schoolhouses. Others near Calcutta have found large open drainpipes to live in. Around them is always the stench of garbage, polluted water, sickness and death...
Dissonant Morass. Not everybody liked it-and with reason. As one expects of Cranko, the ballet had dramatic cohesiveness. Settings, cleverly suggestive of Goya, managed to be both beautiful and forbidding at the same time. In Marcia Haydée (Carmen), Richard Cragun (the Toreador) and Egon Madsen (Don José), Cranko could field a trio whose ability to project feeling into narrative ballet can hardly be matched. What went wrong was the music. Scorning Bizet, Cranko got German Composer Wolfgang Fortner to produce a dreadful, cacophonous "Bizet collage" incapable of sustaining any nuance of emotion. Worse, the score picked...
...were of a fairly familiar kind: the witches and sphinxes, the demons and pop-eyed St. Anthonys that had haunted earlier European painters also infested Rubin's head, and even the massive silhouettes and delicately sprayed tones of gray in his backgrounds seem devised as a tribute to Goya's oneiric etchings...
...compensation, Joan Minto has provided costumes that would do the Laguna Beach "Festival of the Masters" proud. Warren Motley's Cardinal Richelieu, silently suffering from constant migraine as he tries to hold together both himself and the entire French state, could easily have stepped out of a painting by Goya, and Charles Smith, with just the slightest trace of foppishness under his dirty black hair, looks like Gainsborough's "Blue Boy" gone syphilitic...