There was one powerful competing influence: that of the Bolshoi Ballet, when it came West for the first time, in 1956, a year before the première of "Agon".
It comes as the Army wrestles with two powerful, competing needs: finding enough soldiers to fulfill commitments in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and finding ways to make those tours less onerous for the soldiers and their families.
They insist that elected governments negotiate, and that the CFP protects them, even shielding it against powerful competing interests in Whitehall likely to trade UK fishing stocks for other concessions.
But the real reason that transformation is hard – as Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey make clear in their book Immunity To Change – is that people (and organisations) have powerful "competing commitments", or reasons not to change.
The scandal that brought down Mr. Bo is arguably the biggest one to shake the party in decades, and China's leaders have had to take into account powerful competing forces — from liberal party officials who have denounced Mr. Bo to revolutionary families still close to him — while preparing for the trial.
It would also enable those seeking judgeships without support from the powerful to compete on a level playing field -- something that an appointive system rarely provides.
For decades, hedge funds have been portrayed as the smart money, with the power to frighten chief executives and destabilise governments; rich individuals and powerful institutions competed to give them money.
But Kismayu has always been a tricky place to rule, with several powerful clans competing for influence and significant port fees to fight over.
Liot said Alcatel's new box can connect ten times more DSL connections than Redback's and is more powerful than competing gear from Siemens and Cisco.
It is a mess, most reminiscent of the UNIX operating system business of the early 1990s, when at least a dozen similar but just incompatible enough flavors of the powerful software competed for every customer's business.
