Word: phantasmagoria
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Tangle of Doom. The fuss began over a German performance of Phaedra, Graham's "phantasmagoria of desire" (TIME, March 16, 1962), that Congresswoman Edna Kelly from Brooklyn found "distasteful." One morning's hearing in Washington was enough to establish Graham's artistic merit, and she dismissed the affair with a sharp coup de grâce: "I feel as if I had been pawed by dirty hands." But the pawing paid off. Despite a repertory program that included two newer and better works last week, it was Phaedra that drew the loudest cheers...
...setting each curly ringlet in place with preparations of rancid butter, wax and oil; the fantastic feathered headdress of the "magajiya" (leader of the female dancers), the throb and beat of the swirling paces, the glow of sweat, the shining eyes of enthusiasm, all combined in a vivid phantasmagoria of colour and of sheer physical, animal magnetism...
...fantasy-life of the Renaissance was not a mass dream. The American Revolution, the French Revolution fostered great, stirring dreams-confined to history. To rediscover an imaginative form which includes the real and the unreal, emotions and the phantasmagoria, we must look back to our Middle Ages and their noble courts of love. But the fate of Christianity was not decided in the courts of love; it was determined by those who, looking quite objectively at the 10th century mercenaries they saw around them, resolved to bring knighthood into flower from them...
...says he did this to preserve the CIA secret -and that the statement cost him votes. "The covert operation," he writes, "had to be protected at all costs." The Nixon charge brought an instant denial from the White House. Then the whole incident turned into a historical phantasmagoria when former CIA Director Allen Dulles agreed that Kennedy had not been told of the Cuban invasion plans until after his election...
Phaedra is, says Graham candidly, "a phantasmagoria of desire." The dance tells the story of Phaedra (danced by Graham herself), who is cursed by Aphrodite with an unnatural lust for her stepson Hippolytus. The spectator is left in no doubt about the nature of her passion-Hippolytus is first seen as only a pair of spotlighted, near-naked loins. Frenzied when Hippolytus rejects her advances, she tells his father that the youth had raped her, and the dance's high point is the visionary enactment of this lie in all the vividness of Phaedra's inflamed imagination...