Taymor exhibit opens Wexner's 10th season this fall

Julie Taymor, the artistic force behind Broadway's production of The Lion King, will roar into the Wexner Center this fall, with an exhibition documenting 25 years of her theatrical experience and a production of one of her shows, Juan Darien: A Carnival Mass.

The exhibition, Julie Taymor: Playing with Fire, opens the Wexner Center's 10th season and will run Sept. 18 to Jan. 2, 2000. It will occupy all four galleries.

Although Taymor may be best known for her Tony Award-winning work as director and designer of masks, puppets and costumes for Disney's The Lion King, she has been involved with numerous productions on Broadway, off-Broadway and regional theaters, as well as extensive experience with theaters in Europe, Indonesia and Japan. She is skilled in multiple areas, with her credits including writing, directing and choreographing, and designing sets, costumes, masks and puppets.

by Ken Van Sickle

Julie Taymor made her mark as a mask designer of Disney's The Lion King. Her exhibition opens Sept. 18 at the Wexner Center.

The exhibition will feature large-scale installations from key productions of Taymor's career, with scenic elements, puppets, masks and costumes designed by the artist and her collaborators. Video clips, set designs, special effects, theatrical lighting, preparatory drawings, photographic documentation and music from her productions will be included.

Juan Darien: A Carnival Mass, will be performed in Mershon Auditorium Nov. 4-7. The show, which is based on a short story by Horacio Quiroga, utilizes puppets, oversized masks, song, dance and mime to tell an Uruguayan legend about a jaguar that turns into a boy. The production's cultural influences include theatrical conventions from Mexico, Indonesia, Bali and Japan.

The musical score also is diverse. The instrumentation includes violin, trumpet, tuba, marimba, pre-Columbian clay flute, jaw harp, conch shell and didgeridoo. The vocals will be sung by an ensemble of women, a baritone and a boy soprano.

Juan Darien, which premiered in New York's St. Clement's Church in 1988, received five Tony nominations, including best musical and best direction, and won two Obie Awards. Stephen Sondheim, long-time Broadway lyricist and composer, has described the work as "one of the best theater pieces I've ever seen."

In conjunction with the exhibit, the Wexner Center's Film/Video Theater will screen Taymor's Fool's Fire and Oedipus Rex on a regular schedule during the run of the exhibition. Fool's Fire (1992) is based on the short story Hop-Frog by Edgar Allan Poe and was directed and written by Taymor.

Oedipus Rex (1993) is a live opera production and film with music by Igor Stravinsky. Taymor directed the film, as well as designed the masks and puppets.

Ford Motor Co. and Central Ohio Ford Dealers are supporting the exhibition with a $350,000 gift.

Thompson's one-woman show traces life's long journey

Jeanine Thompson is speaking about her next performance.

She talks of finding her voice while using the one she has, which is soft and thoughtful, yet definite in its tones, with an undercurrent of conviction. Her hands speak too, darting in measured, but natural, movements. She is not on stage, yet her eyes open wide and eyebrows arch upward to express a thought or a desire.

She is a mime, a dancer, an actress, a teacher, and now, a writer.

Thompson, assistant professor of theatre, will present the premiere of a one-woman show she created, Breaking the Current, April 14-17 in the Drake Union's Stadium II Theatre.

She's trying something new with Breaking the Current, a show which follows the wild life of a woman called Sarah Toad as she comes of age. Although Thompson has performed solo creations in her signature style -- which combines mime and modern dance -- and has acted with words lifted from a script, this is the first time she will speak words she has written as a part of her own production.

"It's intimidating and scary to find my voice with my work. I am so used to expressing characters with my body, but to talk -- speaking is a vulnerable position," Thompson says.

Because she can use her own words, Thompson, 41, says there is much of herself in the character of Sarah, although the play is not completely autobiographical. Her own sense of being silenced at times in her life is exhibited through Sarah.

"I have brought that to the forefront of this piece --feeling silenced. There's a repetitive gestureÉ" She stops and demonstrates, quickly pulling her hand up to her lips and pushing it down again, "É of going to speak but not."

She hopes Sarah's story will touch a common nerve in audiences.

"It's a story, a life journey, of the good times and hard times we all face and how we survive trials we sometimes stumble on. It's about coming to terms of acceptance and serenity. I think that's part of survival. Where do you find the buoyancy to go on?"

Thompson is working with a collaborative team of writers and designers who have assisted her with the script and the production. She also is working with a director, Associate Professor of Theatre Sue Ott Rowlands, for the first time in a solo performance.

Thompson began dancing at the age of 4 in Virginia Tanner's Children's Dance Theatre in Salt Lake City, Utah. "There wasn't a dance studio mentality. It wasn't about steps but learning how to express nature, a poem, the sensibility of a flower," she says.

She became interested in acting in junior high and high school and studied theater and dance as an undergraduate at the University of Utah, but completed her degree at Ohio State. She also holds a Master's of Fine Arts in dance from Ohio State.

In the early 1980s, Thompson had a revelation that would greatly change the direction of her career.

"I saw Marcel Marceau performing and realized that with the style of work he does, that was the crystallization of what I'd been trying to do, of bringing dance and theater together," she says. "Mime is working toward finding the essence of thought and emotion through gesture."

She met Marceau in 1985 through Gregg Goldston, a performer who runs a mime school taught at Kenyon College where Thompson also was an artist-in-residence.

Marceau invited Goldston to participate in a three-week summer seminar he was leading in Ann Arbor, Mich., and invited Thompson to come and observe. She did, and the next year was invited back as a participant.

In the years since, Marceau has become her mentor and good friend. Marceau, who at 76 still performs and teaches worldwide, recently named Thompson to the Marcel Marceau Foundation Committee. Other members include Pierre Cardin, Placido Domingo, and Dustin Hoffman.

"I'm committed to preserving his legacy and to making his physical language survive," Thompson says. "I am one of the few people in the world that teaches his technique. That's a priority of mine."

Thompson does not believe she has lost her own creative impulses by embracing and promoting Marceau's work. She has had to forge her own technique, taking what she has learned from Marceau and other teachers and building on it to create her own distinctive style.

Marceau encourages that individuality, she says. "He would have me demonstrate in a class: 'My walk of old age, now your walk of old age.' He'd say, 'She does her own work and found her own voice.'"

Being female has had an effect on her career, she says. "There are so few women in this field," she says. "I was hard to market."

She found the demands of touring particularly tough on female performers: "It's hard being out on the road as a woman. It's dangerous and lonely," she says. "On the touring circuit, it was hard for people to take me seriously as a solo artist and as a woman. It was very hard before 30. I started saying when I was 27 or 28 that I was 30."

Despite the difficulties, she has traveled extensively with solo shows, including a performance last summer at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland.

Thompson already is looking ahead to her next undertaking, a restaging of her master's project on the sculptors Rodin and Camille Claudel. She is planning on a 16-member ensemble performing the piece sometime in the academic year 2000-2001 at Ohio State.

For now, she is consumed by putting the finishing touches on Breaking the Current. She is grateful for the help of her collaborators and feels the show has been enhanced by their expertise.

But in the end, she knows the final decisions will be hers.

"I have many voices contributing to this project," she says. "I need to start listening to my own."

Thompson performs her one-woman show, Breaking the Current, April 14-17 in the Drake Union's Stadium II Theatre. Show times vary. Call 292-2295 for tickets, which are $12 general public; $9 for faculty, staff, alumni and senior citizens; and $6.50 for students.

Block lecturer examines future of cancer research

What's new in cancer research? "The pretty remarkable fact that we can now talk about cancer and get remarkably little argument," said Richard Klausner, director of the National Cancer Institute.

This welcome circumstance follows decades of confusion about what cancer is and how it happens.

The confusion ended when scientists identified DNA, the central molecule of life, as "the crucible of cancer," Klausner said. "All cancer arises due to the accumulation of genetic changes in DNA."

That "very simple statement ... now profoundly drives and shapes the central goal of cancer biology," said Klausner. That goal is to understand, read and interpret the pattern of those genetic changes and their consequences.

Klausner was in Columbus in March as the recipient of the seventh Herbert J. Block Memorial Lectureship for Distinguished Achievement in Cancer for his research and leadership of the National Cancer Institute. He presented a lecture titled "Hereditary Cancer Syndromes: Kidney Cancer as a Case Study."

The Block Award is awarded annually by the Ohio State University cancer program to recognize an individual of international stature for excellence in cancer research, treatment or education.

Klausner predicted that the field of cancer genetics will yield the greatest advances in cancer research in the near future.

"The real power of cancer genetics will be in understanding gene-gene and gene-environment interactions," he said.

To unleash that power, researchers must tease out the essential genetic changes that underlie the myriad of mutations that are present in every chromosome of every cancer cell.

Inherited cancer syndromes have already shown that some genetic changes are more important to cancer than others, he said.

Women who inherit mutations in genes known as BRCA1 or BRCA2, for example, start life with a much higher probability of developing breast or ovarian cancer during their lifetime.

Klausner's own research has revealed how changes in just one gene, the von Hippel-Lindau (VHL) gene, can influence many aspects of cancer development.

Mutations in VHL can run in families, causing von Hippel-Lindau syndrome. People with the syndrome often develop kidney cancer, but VHL mutations can produce a variety of cancers in different families, including a tumor that often leads to deafness.

Klausner's work has shown, though, that the presence and nature of cancer in these families greatly depends on the pattern of mutations in the VHL gene.

In fact, VHL mutations can influence many aspects of cancer development: cell division, invasion of other tissues, and the development of new blood vessels.

But understanding such genes isn't enough. "Overwhelmingly, cancer is an environmental disease," influenced by diet, hormones and other factors in the environment, he said

"All of these phenomena are filtered through the complex variations that distinguish one individual from another. Cancer genetics will need to turn to understanding these filters," he said.

This understanding should enable medical research to move beyond, for example, the dietary studies commonly done today that simply make associations between cancer and some component of the diet. These often confusing and contradictory associations have made the public "skeptical and cynical about the constant barrage of 'this is good for you, this isn't good for you,'" he said.

Klausner said that many of the new initiatives at the National Cancer Institute are designed to make the growing body of genetics information about cancer cells more available to researchers.

The Herbert J. Block Memorial Lectureship award was established in memory of Block, a Columbus businessman, by his family and friends in conjunction with the Ohio State Comprehensive Cancer Center-Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute. It is funded by proceeds from the annual Herbert J. Block Memorial Golf Tournament.

Awardees are selected through an international search.

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