Word: primal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...full impact of what Abakanowicz can do with this primal image, one must see her sculptures at P.S. 1. These are all part of the same series, titled War Games -- 16 sculptures so far, a growing family. Each piece is a trunk, a dead tree salvaged from the dying forests of the Mazury Lakes region, 200 miles north of Warsaw. Abakanowicz works these trunks to a degree -- stripping the bark, smoothing out some excrescences with chain saw and hatchet and applying some surface treatment -- but she does not carve them beyond that. Each wrinkled bole with its splayed limbs...
...pseudo-war chant songs make rap sound melodic. Yes, the plot is thin and predictable and the execution as slick as a frat-party drag show. All that has little to do with why a featherweight send-up of the men's back-to- primal-nature movement ran a year in Chicago and has chugalugged onto off- Broadway. The show offers fans of the departing sitcom Cheers, wondering how to cope without their favorite palookas, a two-hour maintenance dose of Norm, the fat, idle, beer-guzzling oaf with the inexplicably likable stumblebum smirk...
Forget the word circus; it conjures up nothing more magical than slapstick and animal odors. The grand, ethereal Cirque du Soleil is really primal theater -- an age-old blend of music and motion. The weirdly soothing, polylingual background score, which could be elevator music at a harmonious U.N., rolls out a verdant carpet of sound for all the pretty beasts to strut on. At every moment, in every corner of the Cirque world, stagecraft approaches genial witchcraft. It's an out-of-Broadway experience...
...housing assignments, theses, or MCATS will do the average Harvard soul a tremendous amount of good. The U.C. could use the money and a boost for its faltering image. But as the Luntz poll proves, the real reason to have the Grateful Dead here stems from a much more primal motivation--even Harvard needs to have one really large party...
There is a plethora of primal romance in Like Water for Chocolate, set mostly in Mexico's turbulent 1910s. While the eldest sister (mesmerized, of course, by Tita's food) runs off naked to join Zapata's forces of independence, Tita stays at home to mix her own sweet subversion into her food. As the movie proves, the most profound revolutions are the oldest -- the ones women have been cooking up since the cave days...