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"... reminder why theater has a power no other medium can touch." -Seattle Weekly "UMO
stumbles, as if by accident, on the part of us that's closest to heaven."
"A remarkably adept company
... compelling, intriguing and a delight indeed." ****"CRITICS CHOICE!" "Go see them
while you can!" "A
fabulous circus of the body, mind & spirit!" "...a feast for the eyes and the
mind." "Breathtaking!" "UMO is the consummate
theatre experience." "...so
fantastical that you can't turn away." "UMO
strikes stage gold." |
THE VILLAGE VOICE UMO ENSEMBLE Improvisation Festival/NY's fifth annual event kicks off at one of Movement Research's great free Monday grab bags at Judson Church. That means the place is packed, and almost everyone knows someone there. Suddenly we hear ragged harmonies floating up from the stairwell. No, the voices aren't floating exactly; they're climbing, falling, soaring suddenly. The effect lurks, disquietingly, just shy of beauty In hurtle the singers, stooped under dark mantles. They're immediately disruptive. They grunt and squeak. One scuttles about swinging a censer in our faces. One drags a bouncy "pet" on a leash. Another has huge, misshapen black toes (three to a foot). The program primes us: the six members of the UMO Ensemble, from Vashon Island, Washington, have created characters for themselves; members of the group take turns guiding the pieces. This is "Buffoon Theater," inspired by the work of Jacques LeCoq (three members, including Buffoon Director Janet McAlpin, studied at his school in Paris). Ta-da! They whip off their coverings. Oh my God! With their horns, crowns, and cox- combs, they call to mind vagrant medieval clowns, but they're slightly subhuman, with a canny ability to sniff out our foibles and ape them hilariously Their attire (by PatriciaToovey) is padded to alter their shapes. One (Kevin Joyce), insanely happy with himself, is encased in black, with those feet and a generous paunch. Another (Esther Edelman), twittery but in charge, boasts ample breasts and buttocks. The head of a growly, skulking fellow (David Godsey) is stuck between huge shoulders. There's a little female shaped like a pear (McAlpin) and one who waddles on long pointed feet and has a smooth hump that extends from her hairline to her waist (Martha Enson). Musician-pet Ela Lamblin squats to bang on a variety of instruments, including a thunder- voiced drum and a mounted bicycle wheel decked with inverted (and tuned) ringers from old telephones. When the creatures aren't falling about in delight or deciding that they'll sniff audience members and inform us, say, that our shoes definitely smell of diesel fuel, they rally to perfonn tasks. Two manage to bump out homilies by alternating words ("Never stop thinking about how you can become bigger"). Edelman issues commands ("Look up," "See God"). Everyone contorts in indescribable mental and/or physical ways, trying to "look within." In pairs they mutter words and try attitudes until they've arrived at comprehensible expressions of. . . well, one phrase is "summer friend." And then at the end they line up, looking saintly, and make the church ring with beautiful Balkan-sounding harmonies. The poignancy takes us unawares. After the misfits' ridiculous attempts at "sane" human behavior, they've suddenly, as if by accident, stumbled on the side of us that's closest to heaven. |
VICTORIA TIMES COLONIST The
excellent at the fringe festival ELDORADO: We said it last year and we'll say it again: Go see Eldardo. Once again, Washington's UMO Ensemble has brought its show about the Spanish conquistadors' invasion of Central and South America to the Victoria fringe fest. Using clown, mime and movement techniques gleaned from the Jacques Lecoq school in Paris, UMO satirizes the 500-year-old gold quest with a potent, earthy savagerv and buffoon humor. The performers look like medieval mutants, with bizarre hunchbacks, tumorous sores, crippled knobbly legs, huge pot bellies ...even horns and dragon spikes. Each has created a distinct personality evidenced as much in movement as in words. One habitually sticks out her tongue and wiggles it like a cretinous peasant, another hobbles painfully -- an outward manifestation, one suspects, of moral putrefaction. Most spit and sniff habitually; an odd yet effective device contributing to the atmosphere of decay and baseness. Theatre can do one thing film and TV cannot - appeal to all the senses. In Eldorado the air is thick with incense smoke and live music/sound effects, ranging from a drum filled with pebbles (for sea noises) to a golden bicycle-wheel contraption that wails like a rubbed wineglass rim. It's a hugely entertaining show that ultimately serves to validate the unique power of theatre. Eldorado's creatures caper, spit and gabble like a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life. And the performers suggest that these greedy, destructive beasts are us in such a delightful manner many spectators likely left the theatre before the satirical arrow sank home fully. P-form, The Magazine of Performance Art UMO Ensemble: Caravan of Dreams June 2-11, 1994; Seattle, WA Onto a darkened stage meanders a humble cart that seems propelled by the sheer energy of rhythmic chanting. The cart is alive with a riot of fabric animated by writhing limbs and comes to a halt in a pool of light. Five gaudy vagabonds tumble to the ground and proclaim that a true traveler has no fixed plan. And so begins Caravan of Dreams in which UMO Ensemble combines acrobatics and all manner of music with more traditional storytelling modes to relate the tale of just such a person who roamed the worldsearching for something that he could not define although he did know that he was lost if he did not find it. At the outset, one of the itinerants (Esther Edelman) interrupts her routine of mesmerizing contortions and clowning to say, "Between life and dreaming is a third way. Guess it!" Then, with a sly smile, she leaves us to ponder our own answers. Soon another vagabond (Janet McAlpin) appears to demand that we close our eyes and not see, clap our hands over our ears and not hear, hold our breaths and not smell. When we have followed her instructions, she spins around and announces, "Now you know what I know" before she waltzes back into the darkness. Throughout Caravan of Dreams, as in this routine, the balance between acrobatic clowning and philosophical puzzlers posed for the audience is adroit and light as a feather. Verve, high energy and spontaneity draw us so deeply into the performance of this antic group of vagabonds that only gradually does it become clear that we are hearing the story of Siddhartha Gautama's journey to becoming the Buddha. In developing Caravan of Dreams, director Martha Enson and the UMO troupe created the vagabond entertainers as myttuc tale bearers. Enson calls these vagabonds Djools, a combined form of the mischievous Arabic spirit Djinn and the archetypal Fool. As sacred clowns, the Djools are on their own spiritual path at the same time that they are bearing stories from the life of Siddhartha. Above all else, they are street entertainers who know how to hold their audience's attention. The Djools literally stand on their heads to embody tales that culminate in such maxims as "No one could teach you what you learned" and "One cannot have pleasure without giving it." Without a single self-conscious move, they cover the steps that mark Siddhartha's journey to enlightenment in what can be seen as a fabulous circus of the body, mind and spirit. The Djools are outfitted in costumes by Patricia Toovey and Julie James that are eye-popping fantasies of the medieval and oriental, yet leave all five performers free for any athletic feat imaginable. Both men and women exult in their bodies, in its power as well as its sensuality as women lift men just as easily as the reverse and men celebrate their own distinctive brand of allure. In one section dealing with desire, the Djools revolve in unison in five low flying trapezes. They may be physically separate, but they are also linked by the rhythms of music, the luxurious movement they experience together and the languorous heat they generate. Here in one luminous image is the holiness of the body wedded to the yearning for spiritual transcendence without any sign of a fracture between body and spirit. Although keeping on the path of the spirit may be the goal, the Djools let us know that at every step on that path all the senses are honored. Contributing immeasurably to the haunting and exhilarating mood of the piece was music performed by Ela Lamblin on instruments of his own invention. Lamblin played what looked like support wires of a huge church censer as if he were holding a cello and then moved on to a modest plastic milk bottle with a series of reeds poking through it to create a musical interlude that was anything but homemade. No matter what he picked up in his path, he made it produce sound with the same sense of startling beauty emerging from unlikely places and objects that radiates from all of Caravan of Dreams. Among so many memorable stories, one that dealt with a man who kept a bird captive in a cage particularly stood out for me. As the story goes, when the bird refused to sing one day, the man hauled it out of his house and left it on the road to die. And so, in a fit of pique, the man threw away his bird and its lovely song in one fell swoop. Through the hypnotic repetition worthy of Gertrude Stein, the Djools reweave the detalls of this story into one about a man who possessed a beautiful song but forgot it by not singing it. In this variation, the man is seen to have thrown himself away when he neglected to sing his own song. In this vivid tale, UMO Ensemble has condensed all the energy that fuels the universal exhortation to each and every one of us to find our own path and follow it with all our energy. If the storytellers who originally spread the story of the Buddha had the same virtuosity, sensuality and strength of Esther Edelman, Martha Enson, David Godsey, Kevin Joyce and Janet McAlpin, it is no wonder that these tales have come down to us in all their beauty and power. - John McFarland THE
SEATTLE TIMES - Tempo/Theater At one with the movement UMO's "Body Inheritance:" all limbered up l hmbered up Theater review "BODY INHERITANCE" by the UMO Ensemble. Directed by Mary Forcade. Thursdays-Sundays through June 22 (extra show on June 18), On the Boards, 153 14th Ave.;206-463-212& BY
MISHA BERSON A row of bare, muscled torsos sway expressively in the dim light. A cluster of agile bodies embrace on a swinging rope, like a clan of monkeys on a tree limb or a clump of blossoms on a stem. A woman with a goofy grin becomes a floppy, boneless puppet dragged across the floor and manipulated by another woman. Voices rise in layered harmonies, crooning: "I like death in the aftenoon." Whether singing, swinging through the air or straddling and skidding on terra firma, the UMO Ensemble achieves an intense, multifaceted physicality in its intriguing new work, "Body Inheritance." Every year or two this exploratory Vashon Island-based performing troupe emerges with a new excursion into the quirky and unexpected regions of the mime and movement zone. Riffing on 'bodyjazz' In its current, long-in-the-making work at On the Boards, the company employs an arsenal of movement skills - some airbone, some earth-bound acquired from recent studies in "body jazz," contact improvisation, circus techniques and other physical venaculars. Accompanied by continually strange and arresting sounds on original instruments (constructed and performed by Ela Lamblin), and vividly mapped out for the stage by director Mary Forcade, this dream- like "body landscape" achieves at its best an exquisite balancing of virtuosity and vulnerability. While the echoes here of the dance theater, body-mind experiments of such noted artists as Martha Clarke and Pilobolus may not be too original, they are pleasurable to see. It's only when the performer creators pin words and concepts on corporeal images better left to speak for themselves that "Body Inheritance" stumbles out of the meditative state it also induces. The buffoons and masked characters featured in earlier UMO shows are banished here. Instead the attractively fit and agile ensemble - Esther Edelman and Janet McAlpin (who co-conceived the piece), and cohorts Martha Enson, David Godsey, Kevin Joyce and Bradley McDevitt - appears before us open-faced, bare-limbed and (briefly, artfully) in the buff. They are fascinating to watch. In short sequences clearly developed through improvisation, the performers flex their bodies electric in a neo-primitive terrain designed by Lamblin. A wardrobe of filmy white clothes hangs in one comer. Piles of small stones line the perimeter of the playing area, as if to mark off a sacred tribal circle. Another scenic element is the archway of stones hanging on taut strings, which when strummed and pulled by l,amblin can sound like an organ, a harp or a cello. (He also plays drums, harmonica and a swol- len banjolike instrument, meshing his tones with an electronic music score by Bill Moyer.) Brushed with light and shadow by lighting designer Lara Wilder, the movers undertake a series of absurd, exhilarating and mysterious rituals. Two get wrapped from head to toe in clear plastic wrap, then adoned with graffiti as a litany of sensual pleasures is recited. At another point, a pair of the men tell tall tales, while the female alter-egos sitting atop their shoulders caress, smack and tug at the fibbers' faces. Phantom figures A rope "cloud swing" and a horizontal trapeze afford displays of limberness and freedom. And when garbed in their gauzy white garments, or dusted in powdery chalk like Butoh dancers, the moving figures become eerie, phantomlike. In spurts the performers speak, too, chanting and shouting non- sense phrases ("I'm digging a hole and shouting into it!"), names, desires. The words add little, though, and sometimes break the overall spell. While "Body Inheritance" could be analyzed as an archetypal journey from womb to tomb, the show sits much better when allowed to settle in subliminally where its sensual pleasures float free. |
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