"The best thing someone can say to me is that while watching my performance they began to cry. It is not important to understand what I am doing, perhaps it is better if they don't understand, but just to respond to the dance." Kazuo Ohno did not begin performing or choreographing dance until th
Sometimes an artist's greatest works arise out of a short whirlwind of creative activity, a kind of concentrated period of labor. For example, Faulkner produced his most acclaimed novels in the short span of eight years. Carol Reed is another prime example -- between 1947 and 1952, this director mad
Some works of art effortlessly draw the core of their subject to surface. William Blake, the great predecessor to the Romantics, understood this well. Whether in a lyrical, allegorical poem like "The Echoing Green" or in the almost futuristic engravings for "The Book of Urizen," he exemplified the ar
It was at an Abel Gance retrospective in 1967 that Henri Langlois broke the news. Film historians had always considered Gance's "La Folie du Docteur Tube" (1915) a harbinger of Surrealism. But, Langlois explained, its extraordinary mess of distortion and hallucination was an accident. The opening