These represent a kind of collapse of the complexities, weirdnesses and uncertainties of the music hitherto, but a collapse upward, a collapse that is also a lift.
Ms. Eshkol's works, from textiles and notation to choreography performed by her dancers after her death, forms the core of the project — although you wonder what dance purists or Ms. Eshkol might think about Ms. Lockhart's turning individual dances into a film triptych, a kind of collapse of modern works into a postmodern pastiche.
Frau von Stein suffered a kind of nervous collapse, and all but the most superficial communication between her and Goethe ceased.
Most runners run to achieve either or both of these conditions as often as possible — to provoke a kind of Cartesian collapse, mind and body suddenly in anguished or glorious collusion.
"The populace will suffer a kind of psychological collapse when they learn what has been done to them and what the real world is really like," predicted Radek Sikorski, who grew up listening to Voice of America and Radio Free Europe in communist Poland and now works at the American Enterprise Institute.
Obama had just mentioned the "grit and determination" that got us through "a decade of grinding war," a conflict that began in the wreckage of the Twin Towers; followed by "years of grueling recession," related to a different kind of collapse in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan.
When I first saw the figures in such a lifelike material, I felt a kind of time-space collapse.
What's going on in them is wildly different in scale and in kind, for one thing — accident, outrage, atrocity — and even picturing them alongside one another is a kind of devastation, a collapse of meaning.
"In a normal recession, things kind of collapse and get so weak that you have nowhere to go but up.
She handles Victorian materials, uses Victorian tools, wears and repairs Victorian clothes, in the hope that a kind of sympathetic magic will collapse the distance between the 19th century and the 21st.
The most stunning moment of the evening — a kind of augury of their collapse — was a sketch called "Pirandello," a twenty-minute exercise in which Nichols and May began as two little kids, playing at insulting each other like Mom and Dad, then became Mom and Dad yelling at each other, and then turned into a pair of actors having trouble with each other onstage.
