Word: rhythm
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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SIVA, the Creator-Destroyer of Hinduism's trinity, once stood on a demon and with one of his four arms began to shake a little hand drum. To the beat of this rhythm Siva moved his body, and with his movement the world took shape; he danced on and on until creation was completed...
...synthesis of such a diversity of subjective and objective elements, however, is only partially successful. The rhythm and consistently gaunt imagery give the poem a great amount of tonal unity, but there is little development toward the identity of the artist with his environment that the last stanza professes him to have achieved. Granted the painter may have felt this identity, but it is still up to the poem to help the reader partake of the process. But it's too static and remains as a whole nebulous and gray. Despite its other virtues, there is little light and color...
...source of exuberance is that, rather than seeming sung or danced or chanted, a lot of production numbers seem spieled or shilled; they have a contagious carnival air, a ballyhoo rhythm. Opening with a jingly, jabbery railroad-car recitative of traveling salesmen, the show soon catapults Actor Preston into River City. There he first catches the town's eye with a kind of stylish evangelical pitch called Trouble, then clutches the town by the lapels with a rousing Seventy Six Trombones. Later in a gay, public-library ballet, Preston soft-shoes a hard sell of love-making...
When he sat down two years ago to turn his recollections of Mason City into rhythm and song, Willson found the going slow. His trouble: too many memories and too many tunes. He rewrote the whole show, he vows, at least 20 times, turned out 38 songs that eventually were whittled down to 17. Finally he found he did his best work about 5 a.m. "I'd wake up and lie there and suddenly something would come clear," he says...
...while, Stravinsky's intention-the intention of writing purely abstract music-wins out, and the images vanish. What remains is a sense of irony or of elegy. The listener's mind wanders, but a foot begins to tap, a hand to twitch in time to the music. Rhythm alone, motion for its own sake, take over. And that is the clue to what George Balanchine has done by way of choreography. Unlike his previous "neoclassic" collaborations with Stravinsky (Apollo, Orpheus), this work is abstract dance: there are no costumes or scenery and the Greek title, Agon (contest), does...