THE SCOTSMAN (Edinburgh)
Friday, 11th August 2000
El Dorado
reviewed by Chloë Veltman
Rating: [five stars]
THE sublime and the ridiculous collide, dance a tango, fall over and spit in each other’s faces in the UMO Ensemble’s mesmerising fantasy, El Dorado, a retelling of the Spanish conquistadors’
quest for the fabled kingdom of gold in the Americas.
Five grotesque creatures explode from the shadows, ricocheting around the stage to eerie
percussive music played by a loincloth-wearing gimp. Dressed in otherworldly, shape-changing costumes, these warthog-like lords of misrule preen their scales, pat their prosthetic bellies and grin in lunatic delight, making hysteria out of history.
Drawing upon the teachings of French mime impresario Jacques LeCoq, director and performer Janet McAlpin combines clowning, physical theatre and the absurd to build a bombastically funny and thought-provoking experience. Because the conquistadors’ rampant quest for gold seemed pure "craziness" to McAlpin, the story of their endeavour is recreated by a troupe of buffoons, medieval monsters cast out from society.
Brilliantly embodied by the ensemble, these zany characters have as much fun impersonating the Spanish plunderers and their indigenous victims as they do fiddling with their costumes or trying to suck each other’s nipples. At times infantile, at others wildly aggressive, the performers deploy expressive faces and evocative gestures that bring to mind commedia dell’arte, Theatre of the Absurd and even The Muppets.
While the overriding tone is one of joyous, unpremeditated lunacy, the production has a lucid seriousness at its core. Striking visual metaphors abound: as the lights change hue, a simple silk sphere becomes the legendary, treasure-lined Inca lake, then golden cloth, before a stark white light dissolves the mirage into valueless fabric. And when the Inca king is borne across the stage on a bamboo throne, the sticks morph into weapons before becoming the bars of the defeated king’s gaol. El Dorado is a feast for the eyes, mind and spirit; a journey into a different time and place with its flippered feet in the present. You would be a buffoon to miss it.
Until 28 August
THE VILLAGE VOICE
Dec. 17, 1996
UMO ENSEMBLE
By Deborah Jowitt
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
By Michael D. Reid and Adrian Chambelain
EL DORADO: We said it last year and we'll say it again: Go see El Dorado.
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 El Dorado 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. El Dorado's creatures caper, spit and gabble like a Hieronymous 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.
