Intergalactic Sculpture

Gence was enchanted to see his painting, enlarged to such imposing dimensions, creating this 'living', moving, exhibition. I was already contemplating the possibility of further exploring this technique and discovering another painter. La Otimere de Saozi (Saozi's Chimera) I met the painter Saozi at a friend's house. She had exhibited her work at my friend's gallery, and her paintings were full of griffins, horsemen wearing fantastic helmets, and chimeras. It took me several months to reach an understanding of her paintings, which at first I sometimes placed upside-down. Slowly, her imaginary, yet often repetitive, world opened up to me, and I began to feel the desire to add my own interpretations to her work. Her paintings, teeming with life, lent themselves favorably to dance movements, but the problem remained to discover what choreography could add that was not already present in these paintings. At this point, Saozi unveiled a whole part of her work, abandoned for some time, that illustrated the theme of the 'city'. This central theme became La Chimere de Saozi: the men in this city only find refuge in sleep's departure, through dreams, to imaginary worlds. For the men of the city, I used a large white screen, onto which we projected the numerous paintings comprising the theme, along with coloured variations (Color Plate B No.4). A big white panel placed towards the front of the stage created an illusion of depth. Three small white panels were placed on the apron of the stage. At regular, repetitive intervals, three little men of the city appeared on these three panels, and three dancers in workmen's attire came and went in a mounting fever of accelerated labour. In order to capture the effect of the characters slowly drifting into slumber, I used aluminum panels that reflected the blue and silver rays of a chimera onto the white panels, while the dancers whirled around in long flowing robes. To show the departure to the dream countries, I asked Saozi to paint four pictures containing a red spot that would progressively transform into a crimson vessel, creating a boat that would appear from the screen. Thus, as the boat drifts out of the screen, bathed in the projector's beam of light, the white screen disappears behind the black background. The mood then changes. Dancers hitherto unseen slowly emerge from the boat. From this point forward, I played with the wildest fantasies that the paintings inspired in me. I used huge close-ups of the paintings as well as general views. A small panel suspended from the ceiling displayed the image of a little dog floating about in midair. The dance played along with these images. The five dancers in this piece were colourfully dressed, and not only were the panels used to create different spatial concepts, but they also 'participated' in the action with turning movements, occasionally very fast. This was very difficult to perfect and rehearse. The role played by dance was more anecdotal than it had been in L 'Arc en Ciel et Terre, the ballets created with the inspiration of Gence's paintings. The angular gestures in this new style were intended to recreate the poses of Saozi's characters. On several occasions, I played with the movement of the panels in order to gradually transform the same painting . The performance ended with a return to the red boat carrying the three characters towards what each viewer might choose to envision as an ending. This is 'where I am' at present: I desire to push farther on, beyond what I have done up until now with these techniques and ideas. In the meantime, however, my primary concern remains to make the work of these past few years better known. INTERGALACTIC SCULPTURE Ezra Orion (environmental desert sculptor), Midrashat Sde-Boker, Israel 84990 Received 28 August 1989. Acceptedfor publication by Roger F. Malina. This new project was conceived after the construction of my environmental sculpture, a stone 'staircase' near the Annapurna I basecamp, central Himalayas, 1981-1983; and after three feasibility talks (at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, 1982; and at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration [NASA], 1988-1990) about my proposed...