They'd been described by some British anthropologists in the 1950s: 150 families of small-statured Asians who lived together in a remote village in an almost inaccessible Himalayan valley.
Patrick De Bana's "Labyrinth of Solitude, " for a bare-chested Mr. Vasiliev, used the "Ciaconne" attributed to Tomaso Antonio Vitali to underpin a vignette for the intense, short-statured Russian that intermittently launched him into applause-winning spins and jumps meant, perhaps, to show the agony of art.