Word: motionful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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THAT WAS THE THEME of last week's recitals, as it has been of all Cunningham's choreography: the basic processes of the human body's motion, discerned with a painstaking and endlessly refreshing eye. Like a painter absorbed in something as slight as the fall of light on a glass jar, Cunningham is fascinated by the eloquent detail: a dancer's leg arcing upward like a searchlight against the sky, the drift of weight in space when the body leans slowly backwards, dancers bounding across the stage like stones skipped across water. The patterns aren't only visual, either...
...other crooked in the air behind her. Like a drop of oil spreading through cloth, the point of focus begins to color one's perception of all kinds of movement: a jump becomes weight gathered down and exploded upward; one dancer lifting another becomes weight gliding in slow motion, a leisurely delighting in the measure of lift and rest...
FROM SUCH SLIGHT BEGINNINGS--a weight change, a fleeting gesture--Cunningham builds dances of astonishing variety and imagination. He is one of the few choreographers whose complexity of motion suggests the intricacy of the body's inner processes...
...same way, Cunningham's dances go beyond emotional mood to achieve a sense of archetypal form. Familiar gestures are the stuff of much Cunningham choreography, but abstracted onstage from their ordinary context they appear as the organic prototypes of the motions of day-to-day living, acquiring a startling purity the more integral for its understatement. One's encounter with the choreography becomes a series of luminous recognitions; dance stripped of all overt meaning works on the viewer's mind with the power of symbol. And the large structures, wholly intent on unfolding patterns of motion and relation, resonate instead...
Penders's record at Columbia lends credence to the old saw that "quality players breed quality players." McLaughlin said he hoped the Crimson's staggering upset of Penn would persuade potential players to come to Harvard next year and set the recruiting cycle in motion. After last weekend's losses the Harvard basketball bubble burst but, as Jack Reardon, Harvard's athletic director noted, "it wasn't much of a bubble...