When explaining the physical sensations of her movement, Mary Wigman seemed to describe an intimate duet in which the surrounding space was her partner. Space for Wigman was animate, actively molding and defining her movments. She described the way air pressed down on her limbs to create gestures, an

Dramatic, Ecstatic, Intense, Physical force

Among the foremost members of the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno launched a tirade against the modern world. With an arsenal of unsupported assertions strung together without obvious connecting elements, Adorno set out to critique what he called the "phantasmagoria" of commodity consumption. A c

Angry, Dark, Depressive, Dystopic, Frankfurt school, Intense, Marxism/ideology critique, Severe

He earned his name from the frenzied, high-pitched solos that make so many heads spin. By climbing into the trumpet's two highest registers and belting out syncopated feats of harmonic daring, Dizzy Gillespie developed an indubitably revolutionary sound. Bebop, that high-speed, rhythmically and tonal

Bebop, Ebullient, Ecstatic, Improvised, Intense, Pioneering, Swing/big band

When Naguib Mahfouz serialized his novel 'The Children of Gebelawi' in Arab-language newspapers, the fundamentalist Muslim group al-Jihad promptly put a bounty on his head. Thirty years later, in 1994, the Nobel Prize-winner was stabbed in the neck outside his Cairo home. Though he lived to tell the

Dramatic, Epic, Intense, Modernist literature, Mythic