Dance

...Only the heroic component is played down...

...The movie is going to be about what goes on in just one small corner of the world among people who know they aren't all there is to life...

...Strikes which would cause "great damage" to the "economy of the country, or national security" are prohibited...

...And the vague, open-ended nature of this language will make it possible to prohibit a wide variety of strikes in important sections of the economy...

...But it emasculates the Chilean labor movement...

...Childs's choreography, divided into five equal parts of twenty minutes duration each, was devised as a series of variations upon the rudimentary skipping step of childhood...

...The form of the presentation combined song, wordless vocalization, dramatic vignettes, group passages of operatic-like movement and chanting, film sequences, and slide visuals...

...The quest for simple information about immediate forebears has been enlarged into a delving inquiry into the nature of life and man's origins that proceeded quite logically from the more easily recoverable information...

...Childs's work was simply and accurately called "Dance" and included a stunning lighting design in , primary hues by Beverly Emmons, film sequences by artist Sol LeWitt, and a hypnotically repetitive score by Philip Glass...

...Although unions may invite outsiders to the negotiating table, collective bargaining at a level higher than the company is not lawful...

...The theory is that each side will be reasonable because it wants the arbitrator to accept its position--and that therefore the bargaining process will work so well that frequently arbitration will be unnecessary...

...On the basis of the above, one might nevertheless conclude that the government genuinely wants to engage in collective bargaining and not politics--and that a trade union movement which is depoliticized is more likely to function in a responsible manner...

...The couple on the stage danced slowly at another point to a nostalgic waltz, then films were shown of men and women being classified after examination...

...Nevertheless, Labor Minister Pinera proudly points to aspects of'the new legislation which are similar or superior to (from a union point of view) American law...

...The search for evolutionary forms has been joined to the previous search through recent ruins...

...It has an appealing modesty about it...

...All of these elements were linked by references to archeological exploration and discovery...

...So also is collective bargaining cooperation between different unions in different companies...

...Glass's music is insistent, pitched at a high level of aural saturation, and devoid of rapid changes in melodic or rhythmic line...

...aim is to move the nationwide federations out of collective bargaining...

...The hardest hit by this measure is the Farm Workers Union which has depended upon industrywide bargaining ever since that organization was promoted and encouraged by the Frei government in the sixties...

...Monk's imagination is as fertile as ever and her collection of moving images powerfully provocative...

...a keening wail emerged...

...It was like opening a family photo album for a casual scan of the fading snapshots and being led into speculation on the genetic code or the double helix...

...For her, myth as a category of narrative did not stop in prehistory but exists in the here and now, iml~licit in the lives of ordinary men and women, a thread linking present lives with those of past generations...

...Its one-sidedness ought to make itsuspect for foreign trade union movements which are attempting to assess the boycott issue and to make policy judgments generally with regard to contemporary Chile...

...This provides for selection of one party's last offer by the arbitrator...

...The film sequences were fastidiously synchronized with the movements of the dancers and were shown on' a transparent scrim covering the entire front of the stage...

...The influence was not in terms of subject matter but in the process, the technique of realizing a painting...

...The work had a disarming simplicity to it so that the viewer was carded along by the seamless flow of the dance steps, the aural environment, and the filmed interludes...

...The spare modulation Commonweah 116 and changes do, though, make a real impact once one has settled into the bath of sound...

...Spare, droning, or hypnotic music has been a fact of musical life in non-Western societies for a long time, but only recently has it made a significant appearance in major concert halls as a classical form...

...Wages and "'other monetary benefits" are the only subjects which are deemed "subject to collective bargaining...

...But the general tenor of the decrees is to weaken the ability of the unions to function on any basis...

...In the latter category, he points out that in the United States, workers engaged in a lawful strike may be replaced by strikebreakers, whereas this summer's decrees contemplate replacement in Chile only sixty days after the strike has commenced...

...Strikers said they were not only rejecting the copper company's new contract but were protesting the government's labor policies...

...How would it have sounded if Star Wars had been called Launching Out...

...Sections two and four had stark white lighting and were solos for the choreographer...

...Two of the brightest talents in the modern dance word, Lucinda Childs and Meredith Monk, presented separate concerts of their recent work and revealed how much Miss Childs has found minimalism a congenial working format and how indebted Miss Monk is to the collage construction...

...I Dance MINIMALISM & COLLAGE LUCINDA CHILDS & MEREDITH MONK I N THE SIXTIES,contemporary art started to exert a pervasive influence on modern dance which has continued to the present...

...There is an uncertainty to a gerund phrase, a kind of tentativeness...

...Figures huddled beneath capes from under which shone glimmers of light...

...Have you noticed the vogue for gerund phrases used as movie titles...

...Moreover, the strike weapon is so weak in most industries that this limited protection from strikebreakers is relatively academic...

...At another point in this collage, the preseniation juxtaposed images from the clearly remote past...

...A strike begun late in January by mine and smelter workers paralyzed the El Teniente copper mine that produces one-third of Chile's copper, the country's main export...

...For instance, the principle of exclusive bargaining status for a union was accepted practice before 1973...

...The individual projections used a quarter, half, or all of the space to intersperse low, medium, or close-up views of the dancers...

...The company of four couples danced sections one, three, and five, which were lit with one of the three primary colors, blue, yellow, and finally red...

...It seems to admit right up front that the movie it names gives us c~nly a partial and incomplete view of life, a fragment...

...On the one h~nd it's a verb, but on the other 29 February 1980:117...

...Coordinated bargaining across company lines is forbidden...

...In summary, the legislation does indeed provide the opportunity for some activity by trade unions which has not been permitted since 1973...

...These were like "paintings" compared to her "drawings" and the idea of making them both the same length was a slight miscalculation in terms of audience attention...

...We can tell just from the title that the movie must deal with some divorced schlemiel in suburban Connecticut or a kid from an Indiana college town who has delusions of grandeur--with old codgers trying to get by on Social Security, or a halfwit whose world is circumscribed by his TV and his garden...

...The closest thing to it in the extant repertory was Ravel's Bolero, whic~ also attracted its share of hostile commentary in the beginning...

...A woman, of earth mother proportions, stalked through the space like a prehistoric huntress tossing and breaking objects, which presumably would be examined by later generations for their significance...

...DON McDONAGH Screen / I GOING NOWHERE THE SOFTWARE OF EMOTIONAL LIFE S TARTING OVER, Breaking Away, Going in Style, Being There...

...Collectively negotiated agreements can be superseded by an individual contract of employment negotiated between employer and employee...

...Not only did the doctors peer at them but they were measured for length by the zebralike marking sticks of the professional archeologist...

...It won't be terribly moving--just touching...

...Childs's solos were lean and precise and slightly overlong, since they were devoid of the interest generated by the changing combinations of dancers in the group portions...

...The 1979 laws provide for multiple unions in one plant--and most Chileans believe that this will divide and thus undermine the union side...

...A gerund phrase isn't a complete thought, of course, and it suggests a movie that isn't either...

...Minister Pifiera notes that in industries where a strike is not lawfully acceptable, "final offer" arbitration--a procedure which is now used in the public sector in much of the United States--is to be utilized...

...We can be sure that a film with a gerund phrase for a title won't try to overpower us...

...We know we're definitely not going to be seeingStar Wars...

...M EREDITH MONK'S concerns are less with the feelings of dance itself, though these play an important part in her work, but more with the examination of myth...

...These passages had a draftsmanly spareness compared to the richer orchestrations that characterized the ensemble sections...

...The strike was the most serious since the military regime of President Pinochet seized power more than six years ago...

...It dealt with an enclosed world of highly disciplined movement and presented varying aspects of intentness, fun, formal relationships, and ecstatic abandon that are the experience of dancing...

...At times stop-action sequences broke down the movement into its component parts...

...Later these were examined by two women dressed as Victorian" antiquarians" as the profession was then known...

...A man and a woman labored at a table at one end of the long room in which the work was presented, examining and assembling shards of pottery...

...Her work "RecentRuins" was an imaginative examination of recently lost societies of Eastern Europe whose present-day descendants painfully feel the loss of their immediate past...

...These bursts revealed large, white tortoises crawling painfully along after an intermittent light while a line of large insects whited animatedly on the ends of sticks...

...A step followed by a short hop gradually developed into almost balletic sequences of hnked small turns and~ leaps--yet they all progressed out of the skip...

...Finally the entire space was darkened, only to be illuminated by photographer's flash guns...

...What must be added is that in Chile workers will be automatically terminated if they do not accept the employer's offer as of the sixty-day period and that previously existing job security rights are abrogated...

...This balkanization has been formulated so as to remove all federation influence--the federations constituting one of ~he main sources of opposition to the government...

...And with regard to a number of fringe benefit items such as vacations and hohdays, the statutes make it appear that unions cannot bargain above the minimum provided for by the legislation...

...Below them and at the far end of the hall a couple in hiking clothes proceeded down opposite sides of the space chalking lines and descriptive symbols on the floor...

...I wonder why that is...

...The role of unions in connection with the subject matter of collective bargaining is severely circumscribed...

...The difficulty in Chile is that the arbitrators will be named by the state--and for obvious reasons the unions are extremely suspicious of any roster which the state formulates unilaterally...

...In the copper industry where strikes have been of substantial duration, labor-management relations are to be handled by special legislation...

...Childs, with her collaborators, has found subtle complexity in this repetition...