Word: minotaur
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...Bell Telephone Laboratories at Murray Hill, N. J. lives a mechanical mouse named Theseus, the creature of Dr. Claude Shannon, Bell computer authority. It was named after the Greek mythological hero who went into the Cretan labyrinth and slew the Minotaur. But Theseus Mouse is cleverer than Theseus the Greek, who could not trust his memory but had to unwind a ball of string to guide him out of the labyrinth...
...which the abbé visited by long-distance desert safari. The central figure is that of a woman with clothes on (not a Bushman custom). Her features are European, the abbé decided, and her costume resembles that of the lady bullfighters of ancient Crete, home of the Minotaur. How she got to Southwest Africa the abbé does not know, but he thinks the painting must be at least 4,000 years...
Ballet Society, a new nonprofit company which had gone underground to experiment (for members only, who paid from $15 to $50 a season to look on), put on three premieres. The Minotaur was a well-conceived but not always well-executed marriage of classical myth, classical and modern dance (by John Taras), modern music (by Elliott Carter) and modern art (by Joan Junyer). In Zodiac, weak music and dance were overpowered by blinding costumes and sets. Highland Fling, in which sylphs run in & out of an interminable Scottish wedding to faintly Scottish and vaguely dissonant music, was an unhappy case...
...second new ballet, Errand into the Maze, was more maze than message. Shallow music by Gian-Carlo Menotti did not help to make Martha's journey into the labyrinth (of the heart) and the battle with the Minotaur (Creature of Fear) any more intelligible or rewarding...
...liveliest sculpture in the show, a bronze athlete somersaulting onto a bull's broad back (1600 B.C., see cut), reminded some visitors of the Minotaur legend. In the labyrinthine palace at Knossos was a bull ring where Minoan youths and maidens displayed their superiority to the sacred beasts. Captives from abroad probably proved with their lives that it was not really so simple to go up against an angry bull barehanded...