This excursion into the past at first seems deliberately reactionary, particularly at the New York City Ballet, the storied home of George Balanchine's abstract, no-scenery, no-costumes, no-story, nothing-extraneous aesthetic.
I picked this subject first deliberately: It's probably the most foreign to a person working at a lab bench, and it intimidates most people.
There is the controversial painting "Decline and Fall of the Empire of Grass," for instance, which appears at first full of "deliberately imprecise" shapes, "of no style known from history," and yet, when you step back, you can see "a painting of plants and soil".
At first these groups were deliberately nonmonastic; Vincent did not wish cloister.
At first, I decided that deliberately lying to a nun would finally guarantee my passage to Hell.
As they balance these competing imperatives, Republicans said they planned to move deliberately at first and avoid declarations that could box them in.
Soviet planners had done this deliberately at first, as a matter of strategy, to maximise the resources available for future investment, but under Khrushchev they tried to stop, and found they couldn't.
Mr. Holm gives a performance that is deliberately understated at first but that slowly warms up, just as Gould did after a few drinks.
Administration officials have told Congress that the C.I.A.'s program to arm the rebels would be deliberately limited at first to allow a trial run for American officials to monitor it before ramping up to a larger, more aggressive campaign.
Performed here by two violinists and two violists, the piece seemed unedifying at first: An unsynchonized microtonal scale, produced deliberately, will inevitably sound similar to what an ensemble of beginning string students might accomplish accidentally.
