Word: kabuki
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What's the matter with kids' movies today? There are too damn many of them, that's what, and they are all about the same damn thing. Since 1978, when National Lampoon's Animal House revived the teenpix genre, rites of passage have become Kabuki rituals: popping zits, snapping towels in the locker room, dancing in the streets, ogling the girls in the shower, getting crazy drunk and tearing up the strip in a "borrowed" Porsche and grossing out Mom and Dad. Sentient adults must unite to cry: Enough already! The glandular convulsions of adolescence are just not interesting...
...Amagatsu and his four dancers coil and slide, curl and waddle, spring and go still, they seem to shape themselves into grooves. Their bodies, whitened with traditional Kabuki makeup, can go as stiff as steel beams being hoisted skyward on a cable, as supple and serpentine as a garden stream. When Amagatsu moves diagonally across a stage past two huge brass circles in Jomon Sho, the movement is a piece of modest majesty that sets down a single, perfect line in Sankai Juku's geometry of mystery...
...political theater, Reagan's renomination will be as stylized as kabuki. The plan: Alabama, the first state on the roster alphabetically, will yield to Nevada, so that Senator Paul Laxalt, the party's general chairman, can put Reagan's name in nomination for the third time (Reagan lost out to Ford in 1976). The next state up, Alaska, will yield to the President's home state of California, so that Governor George Deukmejian can nominate Bush. Arizona, the third state in line, will promptly move to close nominations. Then there will be a single roll call...
...Scowcroft commission, the Midgetmanners and the build-downers all joined in what Aspin called a Kabuki dance intended to make the double build-down seem like a joint brain storm. After consulting closely with Scowcroft, Aspin released a letter calling on the commission to recommend a new START proposal. It was to meet a series of criteria spelled out in an accompanying essay, which in turn was written by Woolsey and was designed to elicit a proposal along the lines of the Kent double-build-down scheme...
...time for the Administration to join the Kabuki dance...