PERFORMANCE ART WORK FOCUSES ON EARTH’S PLIGHT

Performance artist Rachel Rosenthal often uses her work to address man’s mistreatment of earth, and a three-week solo sojourn through the Mojave Desert last year helped sharpen her awareness of the problem.

“I think it made me much sadder because I experienced firsthand the feeling of loss and guilt,” Rosenthal said in an interview this week. “No matter how much wilderness I tried to climb into, there was always garbage everywhere. Always signs of human detritus.”

Rosenthal, a seminal figure in the esoteric realm of performance art, channeled her sadness and anger into a work, “L.O.W. in Gaia,” that will be performed in Laguna Beach’s Forum Theatre at 8 p.m. today and Saturday. The solo performance is a “chronicle of, and a meditation on” her Mojave trip.

“It has to do with our relationship to the earth and how we are currently stuffing the earth full of garbage, some of which may be so poisonous that we may do her in, and, of course, us with it,” Rosenthal said.

“I usually try to incorporate some very positive material in my pieces. But this time I don’t think I did that. What I did was put in a light irony, so that some parts are funny. But I wasn’t able to find anything very positive to say.”

That doesn’t mean Rosenthal is without hope. “My next piece will deal with the fact that there is still a chance for a transformation, for a leap of faith or a leap of consciousness. And for the urgent necessity for this to happen.”

Born in Paris, Rosenthal lived in Portugal, Brazil and New York before moving to Los Angeles in 1955. There, she organized workshops and founded Instant Theatre, a troupe that was a pioneering force in performance art. The term performance art pertains to a a performer’s using the body as a means, or medium, for expressing visual art.

Rosenthal has continued teaching, and earlier this year conducted a workshop at UC Irvine that included 65 students in a variety of disciplines from throughout the University of California system. Her performances in recent years have addressed such topics as feminism, animal rights, the destruction of natural environments and war, in her 1981 “Soldier of Fortune.”

“I preach a lot to the converted,” she said, adding that she would like to widen her audience to include those who do not share her views. In “L.O.W. in Gaia,” which she has performed in New York, Milwaukee, Santa Fe, New Mexico and San Diego (but never before in Orange or Los Angeles counties), she aims to give her audience a warning about the misuse of the earth.

Rosenthal views earth as a goddess, Gaia, who is angry with her mistreatment. “She has ways of getting back at us in certain ways, and those ways can be pretty catastrophic,” she said. Her current piece “has to do with the sacredness of the earth, and particularly with that aspect of her which is the old woman, which is what I call the ‘Death Crone.’ And because I am getting up there myself (she’s 60), I have been dealing with problems of aging, particularly a woman aging.”

In performance, Rosenthal takes on the “Death Crone” as a persona. She also appears on stage as herself, and as the “40th-Century monster,” a being irradiated by the nuclear waste left behind by 20th-Century humans. Rosenthal is the only performer in the piece, which employs projected slides, recorded music and voices, props and minimal costuming.

Rosenthal, who sports a shaved head and whose performances have included her many pets (including a rat named Tatti Wattles), agrees that performance art has become more widely accepted in recent years. “Which is good and bad,” she said, explaining that she believes that some performers have given in to the temptations of commercial success. “Some of it has lost its edge. But then, some of it hasn’t.”

In the time since she first became involved in the discipline, Rosenthal says, performance art has grown closer in nature to experimental theater. “A lot of performance artists came from a visual arts background and in no way could have been conceived of as being theatrical,” she said. “So in the old days it was easy to tell performance art from theater, and now it’s becoming harder and harder because there’s a multidisciplinarian kind of movement. There are a lot of collaborations between artists and musicians and dancers.”

Rosenthal said she operates in a gray area where performance art and theater overlap. “I come from a mixed background of theater and visual arts, and so my performances have always been theatrical,” she said.