Large white papier-mache dogs - half sheepdog, half polar bear - and towering, eight-foot-tall white cardboard tubes offered pretexts for movement to the three dancers.
Like a yob who starts a fight in a pub by saying you have spilled his pint, the Russians offered pretexts that both parties knew were ludicrous.
If the Russians want to continue the argument over missile defense, they can offer various pretexts.
To justify using a dry-ice machine to create this epistemological fog, the producers offer as pretexts two substandard but common scholarly arguments.
He seems to be trying to provoke Mr. Djukanovic into overreacting, which could offer a pretext for a coup.
Many fear the militants' rise will offer a pretext for Assad and his allies to bomb the province in a manner similar to their violent reclamation of the city of Aleppo late last year.
But as Hasina, the head of the secular Awami League party, has clamped down on free speech in recent months, experts worry that the police crackdown could offer another pretext for her government to target its political opponents, including Jamaat-e-Islami.
On October 3 the murder by an insane patient of a leading republican figure, the distinguished psychiatrist Miguel Bombarda, offered the pretext for a rising that had already been organized.
Or is it merely because the Nazis offer an "objective" pretext for dismissal to those who subjectively disapprove of Orff's music for other reasons: reasons having to do, could it be, with prudery?
The Americans' reasons for not wanting to go after this group now, Kurdish officials say, appear to include an unwillingness to offer Mr. Hussein a pretext for attacking the Kurds before a potential American invasion, and a reluctance to provoke nearby Iran.
