Word: inventive
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...last week, at 96, after a two-month battle with pneumonia, dance lovers -- from young members of her company to the thousands she trained and nurtured -- could hardly believe that she had succumbed to any physical weakness. She was the reigning deity of modern dance. If she did not invent it -- there are always forerunners in any movement -- she embodied it, propagated it, imposed a clear discipline and aesthetic on a new, inchoate art. By the 1950s she was the biggest dance celebrity in the country. She could inflame almost any audience, and she was a genius at dealing with...
Since then, Lampy members have strained their puny intellects thinking of ways to get rid of the sturdy trunk and graceful branches that obscured the building's view of Elsie's. Compers were asked to invent unique techniques for destroying nature's beauty. Lampoon officers made an annual tradition of asking the city arborist to remove the tree...
Boosler's kind of routine, as Professor Barreca sees it, is one thing that tends to separate the girls from the boys. "Women tell stories," she says. "Men do one, two, three, bop." The new funnywomen are anything but rote jokesters: like Robin Williams or Billy Crystal,they invent routines as they go along. Paula Poundstone, whose stand-up is a sprawl across a stool, ad-libs about 30% every night. When she was too broke to redeem her outfits from the dry cleaner's, she included the angst in her monologue: "It's like, the clothes are in jail...
...Leonardo, Botticelli, Durer and Van Eyck were all his elders, and in his youth he worked with Giorgione, the most shadowed and inward looking of Venetian quattrocento painters, on the fresco decorations of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. Giorgione's ambition to paint people in the act of thinking, to invent signs for internal reflection as well as external show, was carried forward by Titian into works such as the Louvre's Man with a Glove...
...team of scientist-crime fighters against a new foe: environmental villains. But no one should mistake these shows for anything but warmed-over variations on All in the Family and Mission: Impossible. The most audacious hits of the past few seasons -- thirtysomething, The Wonder Years, The Simpsons -- did not invent new genres, but at least they invested them with a distinctive style or voice. Even Twin Peaks did not depart radically from the conventions of TV soap operas: what the audience responded to was Lynch's idiosyncratic take on the format...