Word: motifs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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With the coming of the railroad in 1880, trading posts sprang up throughout the Navajo territory. Traders supplied German-made Saxony yarns and synthetic dyes, and the Indians developed a series of new designs in which intense colors were juxtaposed against one another. The primary motif became a radiating diamond pattern of such bright colors that the blankets were called "eye-dazzlers." Pictorial representations-figures of horses and cows, bows and arrows, houses and trains-also came into fairly general use, thus breaking the long tradition of pure abstraction...
...mood and motif of the service gave no hint of the difficult situation of Baptists in the Soviet Union, many of whom are victims of government repression that is as bad as the better-publicized plight of Soviet Jews and dissident intellectuals. More than 500 believers have been jailed. Under the continuing pressure a deep schism has opened in their own ranks...
...Threepenny Opera, Bertolt Brecht refined the characters that Gay created, while Kurt Weill provided a tart and tangy score that is one of the marvels of the musical theater. The juice of art and life, however, flows richly enough through the original Beggar's Opera. The dominant motif-Gay's as well as Brecht's-is that money is thicker than blood. By now, the characters are classic, and they all live up to their names: Peachum (Gordon Cornell), the informer and fence; Lockit (Ralston Hill), the venal jailer of Newgate; and MacHeath (Timothy Jerome), the saucy...
Stoppard's themes are expressed in a Shakespearean motif: the constant juxtaposition of acting and living. Actors, directed by dramatists, whose actions are made meaningful by the approval of audiences, enjoy advantages that people in an indeterminate world do not share. While love and providence provide meaning for the characters of Shakespeare, Stoppard's people have no external frame of reference. Unable to see that they themselves create the significance of their actions, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are caught in a world where their identities and their living and dying are equally arbitrary...
...authorial talents by integrating three translations to compose the script, "to depart from the stiff, dull and awkward seventeenth century prosaic speech patterns to which the academic translators feel committed. But this departure from the sacred script," she goes on to explain, "is just an extension of the motif we have followed in every aspect of our production: anachronism." As she firmly guides the rehearsal she interjects suggestions that let her cast experiment with tones ranging from starkly modern to flamboyant seventeenth century...