Ms. Schwartz has surely been inspired by various canonical playwrights of the absurd (particularly Ionesco), by later innovators like Caryl Churchill and perhaps by downtown fixtures like Richard Maxwell too.
There are precedents in everything from 20th century classical to cartoon music, and it is the cornerstone of hip-hop, be it early pioneers like Grandmaster Flash or later innovators like Dr. Dre.
Picasso's cultivation of powerful figures in the art world, who could enhance both his fame and fortune, made him a forerunner of such later innovators as Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst, who are also among the select few whose exhibitions can produce excitement and long lines at great museums.
Early Kool Herc b-boy and later DJ innovator Grandmixer DXT describes the early evolution as follows: "... [E]verybody would form a circle and the B-boys would go into the center.
That firmness was one of Depeche Mode's anchors during the 1980s and early '90s, first as new-wave renegades and later as innovators of industrial synth-pop.
Verdi became a bold innovator later in his career, but early on he struggled to find a balance between transcending the parameters of opera as it was practiced and honoring the bel canto heritage to which he was beholden.
Clayton M. Christensen and Joseph Bower brought this concept into the current vocabulary two decades ago with their landmark book, "Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave", as well as Christensen's later book, "The Innovator's Dilemma", which challenged new businesses to make radical changes in their business model, to reinvent, going far beyond merely refining their technologies.
History is full of shifty characters, antique visionaries, cusp figures, half-crazy oddball innovators, later overlooked because they're hard to pigeonhole.
Jack Straw suggested a "Senate of the United Kingdom" that would be between 80% and 100% elected, with members who served terms of at least 12 years; that hapless constitutional innovator Nick Clegg later came up with plans for an upper house split between a small number of appointed "independent experts" and members elected at 15-year intervals, with places still reserved for bishops.
Cignetti's coaching staffs also consisted of some of the best coaches in college football, including Nick Saban, Joe Pendry and Rick Trickett (who, along with Rich Rodriguez, was later credited as an innovator in utilizing the zone blocking scheme in conjunction with the run-based spread offense at WVU).
