Warren Street Festival

distance (the film medium, the highspeed) so that the kinesthetic transformations worked on her hard athletic body were not lost in any sexually-tinged overload. John Howell e****.0 A quartet by MOLISSA FENLEY worked out simple paths on various levels of spatial complexity . Reminiscent of Dalcroze Eurythmics, folk dance, and Lucinda Child's work, Fenley works with a basic clapping, stamping, and running motif. Using 4/4 time, she plays with aural counterpoint when the group splits to duets and visual complement in the simple sculptural arm shapes. Augumented at one point with wood blocks, the piece was most successful when the driving 4/4 tempo was matched with an almost loony-kids on the playground-enthusiasm. JLit from behind by the light of an empty film projector, YOSHIKO CHUMA sat in a chair, aggressively facing away from the audience, and performed several violent activities: deliberately smashing a beer bottle, reciting a list of English words (probably from a vocabularly list prepared for foreign language students), reading a Japanese story extremely quickly and theatrically, patterning her feet in a bowl of water and finally spilling it. These actions, and a short jumping , stamping dance on the chair were carried more by Chuma's very strong persona than by an imagistic cohesiveness. Apparently worn out at the finish, she sang a lullabyish Japanese song to the four walls of the space. CHARLIE MOULTON presented his brand of athletic dancing, often on the edge of violence. Dancing alone, he punctured his limb-throwing style with a walk from wall to wall with his eyes closed, complementing the apparent involuntary non-stop gyrations of his body with a literal image of blind urgency. A trio of GABRIELLE LANSNER, JANA JENSEN, and Moulton explored throwing the body to the floor, walking in skewed paths made interesting with pivot spins, catching, spinning, and throwing bodies plucked from phrases of violent semaphoric movement and then thrown back into the air to clumsily regain balance (these women are fearless). All of the above were tightened up and challenged by an insistent conforming to metrical fives and eights. Moulton posited this vigorous lexicon, then lightened it with a ball game, an intricate passing of three balls at breakneck speed. KAROLE ARMITAGE, resembling a stick figure on speed, walked hysterically on the heels of her feet in a figure-eight around two vaguely art deco occasional pieces. She punctuated this route with isolated arm and hand gestures lifted out of everyday contexts and a fixed, startled expression on her face. Periodically she stopped upstage to exhale breath in rapid puffs and flap her stiffly held arms. Three times she paused to crawl a step and a half. Although refreshing in its brevity (under five minutes) and successful in its girlrobot -on-rails character, the study suffered -from an unnecessary repetition of the odd arm and hand gestures; a longer listwould be more interesting. At the end Armitage fell into the audience, an attempt to theatricalize the basically workshop ambiance. DIANE TORR and JULIE HARRISON wrestled, mimed, talked, and massaged their way through It's About Time. Notable mainly for the unusual-for the "weaker" sex-forms of behavior such as fist fighting and bullying verbal challenges, the piece presented historical and behavioral stories of time. At one point they mime humanity's ascent from four-legged to two-legged beast; at another they lazily gossip on film while dancing in slow motion silhouette. A mini-lecture on the organs of the body (body tempo) is delivered, MOUL TONIJENSENI LANSNER c39 KAROLE ARMITAGE with Torr talking and Harrison limply serving as sample body. Two fine prime movers in a free-for-all, unpretentious and formally fairly tight. Margaret Eginton Daryl Chin and Larry Qualls, Apoplectic Fit. Theatre for the New City, July. For better or for worse, performance art practice has become virtually synonymous with presenting autobiographical elements in a performer's life. Although external elements do intrude upon the performance matrix, they are filtered through a subjective consciousness -reality is denied its autonomy in the melt-down process activated vis-a-vis personal mannerisms and one's own being in the world. The same was true of Daryl...