Word: idioms
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...this is not a bash Celine Dion blurb. Too easy. And plus, I kind of feel bad for her. She's a very talented singer who just has no clue (look up the idiom "blank expression" in the dictionary and you'll find a picture of her). So it turns out that Thumper (or Tarzan--I call her various names, all reflective of her tendency to pound her chest in exultation) is writing an "intimate" autobiography to be released sometime next year. I have zero patience, so I came up with a possible page from the forthcoming biography...
...while View is sprinkled with pop (including a doo-wop quartet and a Puccinified version of Paper Doll), Bolcom has succeeded in smelting many disparate styles into a tightly unified idiom all his own. There are times when the openhearted lyricism of a Leonard Bernstein would have been welcome, but the lean, laconic score keeps the action moving, lending Miller's kitchen-table naturalism a freshening touch of poetry. Add in Josephson's star-quality performance as Eddie, the exemplary staging of Frank Galati (who directed Broadway's Ragtime) and Santo Loquasto's angular set--the Brooklyn Bridge as painted...
...When I have been fortunate enough to travel to London, I hear the many dialects but see through to the German and Anglo-Saxon roots, the transparencies just beyond. The idiom is more immediate, or in an alternate-universe way. How did we settle on "Call me" instead of "Ring me"? "Putting me on" instead of "having me on"? Drugs money, way out--the Latin "exit" just wrenches you ever after! When you are frustrated by a friend, do you say, "it really does me brains in?" Will you next time, instead of "it bugs...
...their work expressed the belief that the ultimate source of a sublime African-American art was to be found in the vernacular--the myths and folktales, the language games such as the dozens and signifying, and the sorrow songs and blues out of which each fashioned a sophisticated jazz idiom. And most audaciously of all, each believed the fundamental structuring principle of Negro art--improvisation--was also the essence of American democracy. The ultimate Americans, then, were Negro Americans. And America's self-generated curse was its perversely willed evasion of its full identity, an identity as black...
Unlike dancemakers who favor the hard-edged, stripped-down contemporary idiom that he crisply dismisses as "technoballet," Wheeldon is an unabashed classicist. His style, a bracingly confident fusion of George Balanchine's structural clarity with the sunny lyricism of Frederick Ashton, is respectful of tradition without stooping to imitation. He's also a sucker for tutus, toe shoes and moonlit pas de deux. "I don't have much angst in me," he says. "I love to be romantic...