THE ‘RARE AREA’ OF EXPERIMENTAL THEATER

“This feels more like an initiation into some weird club than a rehearsal,” observed soprano Kathy Knight as she scribbled notes in the margin of her score.

Her confusion was easy to understand: Nearby, Japanese mime Hitomi Ikuma, outfitted in a flying harness attached to a thick elastic cord, was bounding all over the stage like a human cricket determined to defy gravity. Tenor John Duykers was explaining to tenor White Eagle some of the finer points of singing upside down.

For the George Coates Performance Works, it was a fairly straightforward rehearsal. The process of preparing the group’s most recent work, “Rare Area,” for its first extended Los Angeles run (at the James A. Doolittle Theatre in Hollywood beginning Tuesday) is one of remounting, enlarging and fine-tuning a piece that is already an established success.

As what Coates insists is the “fourth part” of his “How Trilogy” (“The Way of How,” “are are” and “Seehear”), “Rare Area” received rave reviews at its premiere at the Kaai Festival in Brussels in May, 1985, and at subsequent performances in Berkeley and, last October, UCLA’s Royce Hall.

That was just the stripped-down touring version. “Rare Area” didn’t reach its full fruition until late last November when it opened a three-month sold-out run in San Francisco, setting new records for experimental music theater with a total audience of 23,000.

For that run, Coates replaced the taped sound with a “live floating band”: a harpist, guitarist, two keyboardists and a saxophone player.

The musicians appear and disappear, seeming to hover above the other four performers: the tenor and soprano, dressed as a ruling couple; the actor (Sean Kilcoyne) as assassin in a story more implied than told, and the mime, representing, Coates says, the spirit of imagination. These four in turn seem to float above the stage, lifted by composer Marc Ream’s eclectic, lyrical score and inhabiting Jerome Sirlin’s rich, almost holographic projected environments.

Rushing about this huge rehearsal hall--the former cafeteria of a now-closed Berkeley public school--the sandy-haired, boyishly enthusiastic Coates pointed out that his usual rehearsal process is more a matter of creating than staging a work.

“Creating performance events through interactive discovery with a group of peer artists--that’s what excites me about this work,” Coates said. “It’s a discovery as opposed to a development process. But that phase is over. This piece is finished, the dream complete. Now it’s a pragmatic issue of how we can do eight a week at the Doolittle.”

Those eight performances--on Wednesday and Thursday evenings and two shows on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays--Coates said would place intolerable demands on the voices of Duykers and Kathryn Neale, who originated the roles and will repeat them in Los Angeles.

The vocal parts are difficult enough with their inventive and sometimes deceptive rhythmical patterns drawing on a wide variety of Western, Asian and African sources--and even in one case, as White Eagle, a member of the Lakota tribe, observed, a traditional Native American folk song (composer Ream seemed as pleased as he was surprised by the observation).

Consequently, more singers have had to be added. Duykers and Neale will alternate with White Eagle, making his Los Angeles debut, and with “Fabienne”--the nom de chanson for an operatic soprano, well known in Europe, who explains that she fell in love with “Rare Area” in San Francisco, but her agent had qualms about her appearing in anything quite so experimental. Knight and Craig Knudsen are understudying the roles and will stand in for the principals at regular intervals.

Taking a different pair of singers each evening, Coates and associate director Melissa Weaver walk them through their parts, with Ikuma and Duykers assisting and Ream manning the tape deck.

Each of the performers must do much more than sing, and everything has to be mastered at once. There are elastic cords to deal with, enormous balloons to be manipulated, strange and difficult movement patterns to master and unfamiliar gestures that must be made to appear natural.

The unseen backstage choreography is as intricate as that on the stage, with quick costume changes, invisible handling of visible props and a choice of five staircases leading to different parts of the stage with only one choice being the right one for each entrance.

“The whole show operates on a binary kind of black-white, on-off system,” said Coates, pointing out that any part of the performer not in a thin shaft of light will be swallowed up in the projected slide environment.

Over and over, Coates moved back to the rear of the house to view an effect, then rushed back on stage with short, quick steps to adjust a performer’s head, repeat a movement pattern or make a slight but telling change in the placement of a prop. “The problem with this show,” Coates remarked at one point, “is that everything has to be perfect every time.”

Only during a break in the rehearsal, back in the company office adjacent to the rehearsal hall, did Coates let slip the cheerful optimism that characterizes his every word and gesture when working with the performers.

“I’ve got a butterfly in my stomach with a 90-foot wingspan,” he admitted, glancing at a blackboard filled with columns of expenses for the Doolittle engagement. (As it was in San Francisco, the George Coates Performance Works will be its own producer in Los Angeles--a major gamble, but Coates thinks its worth the risk.)

“If we succeed, it’ll mean that groups like ourselves don’t have to wait on the high priests--the festival directors and the people who run the major houses,” Coates said. “We can do our work when we’re ready to do it instead of when they are.”

Back in the rehearsal hall, Duykers, Ikuma and Kilcoyne were going through their paces.

Fabienne and White Eagle had thrown themselves enthusiastically into the challenge of their roles.

Knudsen, who had been with the San Francisco Mime Troupe before he undertook his tenor career, was taking things pretty much in stride.

Only Knight, a seasoned opera and operetta performer, seemed unconvinced that half the things she had to do were humanly possible. “I have never done anything like this--ever,” she exclaimed. “Neither has anybody else.”

“If it weren’t impossible ,” said Coates, “it wouldn’t be half so effective.”