Make More Room by Yoshiko Chuma, and: Umi Aui Owe by Simone Forti, Peter van Riper (review)

Carl Paler BELSHAZZA R'S FEAST presence as a store clerk set designer centered a nicely timed flow of comic surprises. But most of the piece suffered from a casual pace and activity which barely sketched rather than established its points. A lengthy sequence presented in a marvelously rendered luncheonette never got beyond some repetitive mimicry of banal exchanges. An entre-acte reading of Allston's letter which had been re-edited by some lawnmower method was simply aimless. Belshazzar 's Feast, like the painting itself, is a visual event which tells more than it shows, and what is seen sprawls in uneven fragments, a mixture of invention and inertness. John Howell THE SCHOOL FOR MOVEMENT RESEARCH The Museum of Modern Art Sculpture Garden (July-August). (selected reviews from the series'10 concerts) Yoshiko Chuma, Make More Room. Simone Forti and Petervan Riper, UmlAui Owe. There is a sense of anticipation in Chuma's work. The unexpected, leaping urgency which characterizes her movement has a volatile energy, a sense of burning, as though she were trying to shake herself loose from all the burdens of humanity, release the tension which humanity carries within itself. Her body is controlled tightly like a ball of eruptive release. Animalfinsect-like crawlings, an aerodynamic balance of the body lying in quiet motion is redeemed by the breath, the breath of space. The body expressive responds to the violence in history. Her body screams with erratic impulses reflecting the suffering of humanity. Her body energy responds to the inner mechanism of complete consciousness and reawakening to response. Her use of the grid created by the large concrete squares of the outdoor patio was symbolic of an extension of that confinement which she expresses so well. Before the movement ended, her long pole was dredging the waters of the fountain, and her body was being immersed into the cleansing moat, floating great and motionless, suspended in liquid motion. Forti made use of the waters of MOMA's seting to begin her piece, emerging like a wet seal, sleek and playful, sensitive and aware of the sounds around her. Her motion was not mimetic but rather a deliberate, thoughtful consciousness of the space she spread her limbs In to occupy. Her gentle placings were enhanced by Peter van Riper's music, cleverly rolled about on portable speakers, echoing seal sounds, bird whistles, all recorded percussively and mixed with his own real sounds of birds, animals, wind pipe, multicircular corrugated brass tubing and fog horn clarinet . Small wooden flutes and recorder were used to create those natural man-made sounds which van Riper creates so well. Forti slithers and gyrates in conscious mo- -3, 0 Cb Cb MAKE MORE ROOM 43 tions, not slick, very passive and emptied of emotional content. At intermittent points, as she rolls about on the concrete blocks, she picks up her cowbell for signal rings. Van Riper's face becomes art in itself as he moves in and around the piece, pulling metal speaker carts at random to redirect their sonar messages. Mary Overlie, The Figure. Mary Overlie's The Figure asserts a gift for making imagistic worlds out of odd spaces and a stripped down dancing vocabulary. The space itself helps to create metaphor, somein front of her torso, head horizontal to, but not touching, the ground. She presents the body as a sculptor would, in arrested motion. Two more such frozen-in-an-intermediateplace positions follow. The final one is a vertical seated position. At this point the other three dancers walk somnambulently forward toward the museum's glass wall. With one THE FIGURE UMI AUI OWE The piece becomes a concept of wonderment , all relevant and possible, and Forti's bluelgray clad body pulls the seal's energy with it. Van Riper reaches up to the darkness of the evening with his clarinet and his convoluted circular flute bellows like the Molimo of the African pygmy to which he likens the concept of the sound. Hollow bamboo pipes are played off the sides of his cheeks, parallel and rhythmically tapped. The small black bird whistle echoes the innate. Again the concrete grid is used for the propulsion of body movement...