MUSIC AND DANCE REVIEWS : GAM, KRAUS AT LACE

The one-woman show can be the stuff of any performance artist’s dream--those at least who delight in autobiographic scripts and portraying themselves through dance and word.

Kaja Gam and Lisa Kraus, who shared a weekend bill at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, are two such. Both take the stage with brash confidence and, as good narcissists, almost manage to persuade an audience that no subject is worthier than the self.

Some skeptics might question Gam’s “Joy of Cooking,” a collage that crams half-intelligible monologue and slide-show material together like so much laundry in a dryer. Because this Nora Ephron of performance art is content with a technically crude product, however, she diminishes its impact and her own resourcefulness.

Still, a flickering wit emerges occasionally as well as a keen sense of irony. The closing scene poses Gam’s alter ego, a Middle Eastern peasant woman (Julie Landau), as a shadowy, angular Kaethe Kollwitz figure while the recorded Patsy Cline croons a ballad.

Kraus, on the other hand, takes possession through economy of means. She suffers a nearly ruinous drawback, though, in both “Grand Tour” and “Free Speech”: compulsive exhibitionism. The one-liner laugh afforded by her Indian dancer (who turns out to be a stewardess) outwears its welcome; ditto, her desert-island agonies.

But Kraus is a smart lady and once she rids herself of the idea that audiences are as interested as she is in exploring the terrain of her creative ambivalence, something important may happen.