Word: minimalist
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...they never quite have time to become anyone. On one level the work parodies dance: Soll dressed in baggy pants and a sweatshirt punches her way through arabesques and pirouettes; one group (construction workers?) breathlessly executes Graham floor exercises; another trio plods in a circle as in many a minimalist dance. Even sections not broadly satiric take on a quality of harried work. In "Lunch Break" Soll inflects time and space with the opposite qualities of those in "Safari"; here place has no history, and time no memory...
Many black politicians, especially on the West Coast, distrust Brown as a minimalist whose constant refrain is "People must lower their expectations." Said California Assemblyman Willie Brown, who drives a sporty Porsche: "My expectations have not been lowered. I still want my Turbo Carrera"-a reference to a supercharged GT model with a $25,850 price tag. Nonetheless, Jerry drew cheers again when he pointed at Mervyn Dymally, California's black Lieutenant Governor, and shouted: "If I go to Washington, he goes to Sacramento. If I'm elected President, I will appoint the first black Governor...
...ESSAY titled "An Analysis of Trio A," Yvonne Rainier, an avant-garde choreographer of the early sixties, points out ways in which recent dance resembles minimalist sculpture, the latter an art "simple, clear, direct, and immediate" in the words of one critic. Rainier almost could be referring specifically to Chassler's language: indeterminate structure decided at the time of performance; neutral performance, the dancer rejecting character and pose; task-like rather than dance-like activity; phrasing in terms of consistent levels of energy. Whether Chassler consciously follows the avant-garde tradition described by Rainier, I don't know...
...Like the minimalist sculptors, Chassler's a reductionist, calculating how much she can cut away and still call her work dance. It's almost a game, playful and mischievous, simple and literal. Chassler runs, tumbles, turns; what more simple movement is there? The first section of "Calling Out" requires the dancers to give up their weight to one another: what more literal approach to group improvisation can be imagined...
...later, listing contemporary composers who have been thrown back on their "innate, long denied sense of tonality," he says that Stockhausen's Stimmung "spends seventy minutes in B-flat major." In fact, Stimmung is a radically minimalist work consisting of six vocalists humming and chanting a low B-flat fundamental and its various overtones--seventy minutes of some kind of B-flat chord, but not the key of B-flat major by anybody's definition, and certainly not anything resembling tonality...