‘MONKEY WOMAN’ GOES APE AT UCLA’S SCHOENBERG HALL

Performance art is a term meaning different things to different people, so it would be best to use a more specific description for Johanna Went’s theater piece, “Monkey Woman’s Inferno,” offered Friday night at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall.

Though something like hooey might be a good start, the thought that kept coming to mind during the show was the old concept about sound and fury signifying nothing.

For 40 minutes, Went cavorted with demons, squawked unintelligibly, wore a succession of grotesque masks and engaged in such edifying pursuits as smearing her face with green slime pulled from the eyes of a silver figure that was adorned with a halo bearing the legend “be nice”--all this to the constant cacophony provided by drummer Danielle Elliot, saxophonist Greg Burke and (on tape) synthesist Mark Wheaton.

The piece--the final installment of Went’s “monkey Woman” trilogy--is no doubt meant to force the audience into some sort of dramatic response--revulsion, disgust or whatever. Yet the more likely response at the end is simply, “So what?”

Two more restrained--but not much more engaging--acts were also featured on the bill. Linda Albertano, a statuesque blonde, started things off with 12 spoken-word-cum-dramatic pieces that generally took casually amusing observations and tried to make them seem somehow profound.

This was followed by the team of poet Ivan E. Roth and electronic musician Jill Fraser, with Roth’s lengthy litany of what’s wrong with the world mostly serving to obscure Fraser’s entrancingly pulsating and cascading soundscapes.