‘PALISADE’: EXPLORING LOVE AS A HIGH ART FORM

What do you get when you fall in love? According to director/producer Jacki Apple, you get one heck of a dizzying “drop” that makes you think twice before approaching the unstable heights of romance again.

But Apple is trying all the same. She and colleagues in the L.A. performance-art world are meeting on a cliff by the ocean to “explore relationships, sex, love and intimacy” in “Palisade: A Cliffhanger in Five Acts.” This free, site-specific performance will be presented Saturday and Sunday at 7 p.m. in Palisades Park, Santa Monica.

Apple says the site was chosen because “it fit into what we were thinking about love: the space between fantasy and actuality, the gap between what you hope for and what you get.

“Nature and culture just about meet at these rocks,” she jests, speaking of the park at the Rose Garden Trellis House, “just as the vocal body and the disembodied voice flirt over a telephone wire, but never touch.”

But “Palisade” isn’t just about bad relationships. While Apple describes how dancers pose “in woeful gestures of reaching out” and talks about men who carry blocks of ice and women who slam against immovable statues, she also points to “the beautiful dance of an elderly couple--a hint of what togetherness might offer.”

Trying to bring people together --the theme of “Palisade”--is Apple’s forte, at least in the public realm. A producer and host of her own radio show, “Soundings” on KPFK, she has also been a critic, performer, teacher and screenwriter, plus a founder of alternative spaces in New York in the early ‘70s. Consequently she believes she knows the tricks of the collaborative trade.

“It was give-and-take the whole time,” she says, speaking of the latitude given to the co-creators of “Palisade.” “We developed very trusting relationships.

“New York choreographer Jeff McMahon, a gifted performer, also wrote part of the text of the sound track with me. David Moss composed the hauntingly sad, sometimes abrasive music and John White constructed the visuals to gel with everyone else’s vision. And choreographer Deborah Oliver crafted her own beautiful movement under my direction.

“And I felt a little like Fellini,” she says, referring to the “circus-like feel” of modern and ballet dancers, sculptors, senior citizens and actors coming together “as if on a film back lot” to make this outdoor spectacle.

Discussing her satisfactions in the project, Apple refers to a statment made by Hugo Ball about the Cabaret Voltaire back in 1916 in Zurich: “For him, production was as much a form of love, as much an art form, as getting up in front of the stage.”

Her point: to repudiate the egoism of the slick ‘80s, “to create a situation where a lot of artists would be able to make a work-in-progress without worrying how this spectacle was going to look on a resume.”

Is it possible that a public joining of forces to explore love can act as a remedy for the disappointment of a private life that has proven less than ideal? Perhaps. Apple hopes that dealing with the emotionally charged concerns of what she called “an emotionally and sexually repressive time” will draw her performers together, and even offer relief from whatever “fear of falling” they have felt in their own lives.

But right now she would rather discuss her love of directing than love per se. Perhaps the subject brings Apple too close to her own emotional cliff--a cliff, Apple says, that “the women have an easier time negotiating in the piece than the men do. The men seem to end up sad and alone.

“Even though I made the piece with two men, I feel this is a work that could only have been made by a woman, the woman who always asks questions, perhaps too many questions for some.

“But you know, I think women are going to like ‘Palisade’ a lot but it’s going to make some men very uncomfortable.”

A smile of uncertainty. “Like as if they were asked to jump off a cliff or something. They might recoil from it. But I hope not.”