Word: leapings
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Easy solutions to the ramifying problems of a technological age leap almost unbidden into Tichauer's mind, for he is both an inventive and a lazy man. His first impulse is to find an easier way to do anything. This ambition, together with a heartfelt concern for the physical vulnerability of man, has led him into a new and little-known discipline. Tichauer is a biomechanist: a scientist who is half-anatomist and half-engineer, and who seeks to improve the fit between man and machine. Under the prodding of human engineers like Tichauer, technology is beginning to accept...
...expand the stylized, confining vocabulary of ballet, which had been worked out largely as a series of infinite variations on two basic motions, the walk and the bow. To Graham, any human movement was a dancer's possibility, the fall to the floor no less than the leap into the air. She brought the alphabet forward from A and B all the way to Z. She emerged when Sigmund Freud was a major cultural hero. Partly as a result of his influence, she developed a symbolism that replaced ballet's traditional boy-meets-girl, boy-throws-girl-into...
...Folklorico's 55 dancers came to the company only after training in the disciplines of classic ballet, whereupon they went on to unlearn many of its basics. Their movements forsake the glide-and-leap patterns of ballet in favor of a staccato stomping in which the heel, rather than the toe, becomes the pivot for the action. Unlike Russia's Moiseyev folk ballet, whose dancers' athletic leaps are relatively close to the virtuoso tradition of formal dance, the Folklorico's characteristic moments find the troupe bouncing in position like so many bright-colored jumping beans...
...leap orders China's 74,000-odd communes to forget about any aid from Peking. They have been told that henceforth they themselves-not the government-must remunerate schoolteachers and medical personnel working in the countryside. Commune members are to make their own simple farm tools, freeing industry for more sophisticated production. Moreover, Peking is pushing a frugality theme to such a degree that celebrations for the New Year, China's biggest and happiest holiday, were woefully crimped last month...
What seems to distinguish the new drive from the old Great Leap, however, is its flexibility. There has been some advance planning, and there appear to be no rigid output targets. In fact, Peking is admonishing local officials to "leave enough leeway." Though not too much, of course. The goal of the latest campaign, as Shanghai radio explained it recently, is "a fruit that can be picked by jumping and reaching up, not a fruit that can be taken by stretching out one's arm from a lying or sitting position...