Word: pithoprakta
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...opening night, the Pennsylvanians dared a world premiere-and a difficult one it was. Ceremony, by protean choreographer John Butler, a Martha Graham disciple, is cast in the new mold of dehumanized abstraction that Balanchine recently demonstrated in Metastaseis & Pithoprakta (TIME, Jan. 26). The score for Ceremony, by Polish avant-garde Composer Krzysztof Penderecki, is an aggressive compendium of cacophonies-growlings, twitterings, bongs and clashes, punctuated by police whistles and sirens...
With a memorably unpronounceable title that sounds rather like the medical diagnosis of an awful disease, Metastaseis & Pithoprakta was named after two works by far-out Greek-born Composer lannis Xenakis, 45. Each member of the orchestra has a totally different part, and the resulting sounds are more like electronic than man-made music-a succession of crepitations, squeaks, creaks and mutterings, punctuated by sudden rifle-like reports...
...Pithoprakta (meaning actions by probabilities) has twelve dancers skittering, scuttering, rolling across the stage like nodes and waves of electrical energy. A lithe, half-naked Negro in black (Arthur Mitchell) and a tall girl in white (Suzanne Farrell) do a fluid, sex-charged pas de deux that builds to brief contact, then breaks to a tense conclusion, with the girl's body straining alone as the curtain falls...
Whops & Skeletons. The opening program, last month, was a shocker; lulled by Beethoven's Second Symphony, the audience was suddenly jolted by the whapping of wood blocks and the toneless horn-blowing of Yannis Xenakis' Pithoprakta. The Greek composer's work was so radical that this first U.S. performance sounded something like skeletons dancing in a wind tunnel. The audience found Bernstein's comments condescending. "A lot of mathematical formulas which I cannot follow," he said of the composition...
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