Word: statically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
THROUGHOUT the opening of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith director Fred Schepisi continually dissects static tableaus. The camera suddenly cuts from the scene at hand to a minute corner of the picture: In the lapse of conversation suddenly one is looking at a swarm of termites on a windowsill. A domestic portrait gives way to an extreme closeup of a rusty knife cutting through bread--the sound suddenly amplified and grating. Idyllic farm panoramas are interrupted with scenes of chicken roosters being slaughtered, huge shears go through sheep's wool, the camera slowly absents itself from a sermon and creeps...
Perhaps the major difference between then and now is choreography. Then there was none; today theatergoers would be dismayed by the static foot thumping of the first productions. "Dancers could not do then what we do now," says Dan Siretta, the company's choreographer. "We're doing something old, but we're also doing something new." For the second of Johnny Jones'show stoppers, Yankee Doodle Boy, Siretta used clog dancing, a style that was common in 1904 and looks a bit like flamenco dancing, with feet and legs moving up and down in one spot...
Less exciting, but no less exotic is a more static number, The Jade Bracelet...
...souls in limbo shuffles about the stage, awaiting reincarnation. Their doubts and frustrations are chastened by the Archangel Gabriel, effectively sung by Bass-Baritone William Dooley. The music, first sketched around World War I and completed later, has more lateromantic intelligibility than Erwartung, but it is so somber and static that one eventually wants to cry out with the chorus: "Is it really to go on like this forever?" Yet there is a moving finale. Soprano Janet Northway, as a soul who is dying into a new life, slowly ascends a series of platforms, singing an eerily ecstatic duet with...
Because it responds more rapidly to fluctuations in readers' tastes, TIME'S new bestseller list is less static than its predecessor. Says Books Assistant Sharon Lauver, who helped coordinate tests of the new method: "Not only do books shift position more frequently, but new titles show up sooner." This week three works appear for the first time. To make such information more readily available to American readers, TIME is furnishing displays of its new bestseller list to bookstores around the U.S. TIME'S readers, of course, need look no further than our Books section...