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What does America's space program have in common with a soprano saxophone? Quite a lot, when the instrument is played by Jane Ira Bloom, 35, a jazz virtuoso who was the first musician commissioned to create a work for NASA's art program. Witnessing a Discovery shuttle launch close up inspired her to compose a four-part suite entitled Rediscovery, which premiered at Cape Canaveral last fall. Long fascinated by the links between music and motion, Bloom has also composed scores for the famed Pilobolus Dance Theater and the repertory theater at Yale, where she earned a master's in sax in 1977. She uses a synthesizer, controlled by foot pedals, to amplify her ethereal solos into swirls of sound that evoke the Doppler effect, the drop in pitch that occurs when a train rushes by with its horn blaring. Bloom has six times been cited in Down Beat's annual critics' poll as a talent deserving wider recognition. As to why she first took up the notoriously cranky instrument, she has a winning answer: "It looked so shiny."
Martha Clarke
Choreographer
With three major highly touted theatrical productions to her credit, Martha Clarke, 46, is indisputably at the top of her profession. The problem is that no one, including the Manhattan-based choreographer-directo r herself, can easily describe what that profession is. "If I knew what I was doing, I wouldn't do it," says the avant-garde artist, paraphrasing her idol Samuel Beckett. Her productions are always an evocative blend of dance, music, words and light, but to her latest piece, Endangered Species, she brings something + entirely new: live animals, including Flora, a baby elephant, and Clarke's own horse, Mr. Grey. She maintains that they're being used as "sentient creatures" rather than beasts of burden or embarrassed icons. Finishing the work, which focuses on mankind's domination of nature, has given the former modern dancer little chance to use the $285,000 MacArthur fellowship that she won in July. Says Clarke: "When the call came, I was so busy I had my assistant take a message." While getting the money was nice, in her business the real reward doesn't come until opening night.
Wilma Mankiller
Indian Chief
Perhaps it was the name that gave them the willies, but male voters seem to have got over their squeamishness about Wilma Mankiller. She is the first female chief of the 108,000-member Cherokee nation, the second largest U.S. tribe after the Navajos. But it took the men a while to come around after her 1987 election. "I've run into more discrimination as a woman than as an Indian," says Mankiller, 44, whose unusual last name was inherited from an 18th century warrior ancestor. She has likened her job to "running a small country, a medium-size corporation, and being a social worker." With an annual budget of $52 million, the Oklahoma-based tribe operates industries, health clinics and cultural programs employing about 1,700 people. In July, while recovering from a kidney transplant, Mankiller signed an unprecedented agreement with the U.S. government that gives the tribe direct control of $6.1 million in federal funding. Mankiller, who attended college in California before returning to Oklahoma 14 years ago, is more optimistic than ever about her fundamental goal: seeing Indians solve their own economic problems.