Word: hoof
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...Hoof. A zany new dance entertainment by Bob Fosse. Covers the period in his life just after the making of Chicago and just before Dancin' and All That Jazz...
...equal to the dramatic tasks at hand. Indeed, some of Fosse's conceits are embarrassing. An angel of death (Jessica Lange) trots in and out to recite banal Freudian explanations of Gideon's workaholism and promiscuous sexuality. Ben Vereen and dancers in cardiovascular body stockings hoof it up to songs with lyrics about death. A hospital fantasy sequence looks at once like an elaborate antismoking commercial, a parody of Fellini and a Vegas floor show. The results are shocking, but not in the way that Fosse intended...
...process has been difficult to identify. At the turn of the century, a horse called Clever Hans gave demonstrations of reading and factoring. By nodding and shaking his head and by tapping his hoof, Hans answered questions put to him by his owner, a German mathematics teacher. The animal's fame spread, until an examining board of skeptics discovered that Hans was cued by the gestures of his trainer. It appears that he made inadvertent movements whenever Hans reached the correct number of nods or taps, and that was enough to tell the animal to stop...
...appearance, wrote scribes of the era, was "cadaverous," and there was something so supernatural about 19th century Violin Virtuoso Nicolo Paganini "that one looked for a glimpse of a cloven hoof or an angel's wing." Onstage, the maestro would often contort his body into bizarre stances. His tours de force, like playing a pizzicato accompaniment with his left hand while bowing with his right, prompted audiences to whisper that Paganini was in league with the devil. But alas, he was merely mortal, according to an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The violinist, writes...
...earnest. This part of the film, at least, is fairly realistic. Big-time college sports are really professional sports in the guise of amateur athletics, and survival is dependent on both talent and an ability to accept a system that reduces athletes to little more than meat on the hoof, brainless creatures expected to deliver on the field and shut up, letting the athletic department worry about everything else, including the business of their education...