Los Angeles Festival : ROSENTHAL DELIVERS ECOLOGICAL WARNING

Rachel Rosenthal lounges in her West Los Angeles home/studio, petting her 17-year-old blind poodle Zatoichi. She’s in no mood to be too pleased with herself for being one of the three Los Angeles-based dance and performance artists to be represented in the upcoming Los Angeles Festival.

“It’s a great validation of my work,” she says. “I loved the Olympic Arts Festival and intend to see every work in this one.”

But this enthusiasm co-exists with despair for both the deteriorating natural world and what she calls the “world of dummies paralyzed by TV, asleep to the fact that human negligence is destroying our planet.”

Rosenthal believes that her multimedia performance, “Rachel’s Brain,” to be presented Sept. 5 and 6 at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, will challenge “the superiority of culture over nature” in a culturally prestigious setting. And that gives her some comfort.

With her shaved head, warm smile, irreverent stare, part-demonic, part-New Age priestess persona, she seeks to communicate a message: “The brain has wrought much damage to the world, but we can use this same brain to repair the harm.”

“When I say ‘Rachel’s Brain,’ I mean all our brains,” she says. “The big mystery is: How did this organ come about? It developed capacities which went way beyond what was necessary at the time. We are just now catching up by using a small fraction of it.”

With slides of the brain, the natural world, and of weaponry, plus live music by Stephen Nachmanovitch, Rosenthal offers possible answers in a solo performance that tries to transcend artistic, personal and social boundaries.

Last year, Rosenthal evoked Chernobyl in her performance piece, “Was Black.” In white-face and black evening gown, she chanted in Russian and had salt poured over her head as if her mind were responsible for the failure of the SALT arms talks.

“But I am responsible,” she says. “For me, art has no choice but to try to change the world.”

In her 60 years, Rosenthal has seen more than her share of what she calls “humanity’s debacles.” A life of privilege in Paris evaporated when the Nazis invaded and the Rosenthal family fled eventually to New York. There the teen-ager rejected her bourgeoise upbringing, discovering that “life was not just about being a polite, self-effacing woman.”

After working with Hans Hoffman, Merce Cunningham and Erwin Piscator, Rosenthal arrived in Los Angeles in 1955 to create her Instant Theater. It evolved into her popular “Doing by Doing” workshops, an amalgam of collective ritual, dance and autobiographical examination.

“I have tried to live my beliefs all this time,” the artist says. “But I’m guilty as all hell. I use my car, I water my garden. I plunder. I oppress. Just by being alive, I am implicated.”

But what can mankind do? Rosenthal reacts to the man in mankind with controlled fury: “The fact that you need to say man is really repulsive. Enough of the crap with man being in charge! In fact, enough of ‘precious humanity’ having to be so ‘in charge.’ ”

Has history not always been written in blood? “Absolutely not. Once the feminine was not effaced. The human was only a part of the chain of nature, profoundly aware that any movement in the chain would irrevocably alter the whole; deeply embedded in the matrix and therefore, peace-loving and egalitarian.”

Rosenthal says she’s no humanist. “Humanism allows people to act like gods with impunity toward the Earth. My allegiance is to the Earth first, people second. The problem is with what humans have wrought. And how much time is there to fix it.

Apparently, convincing people to side with Earth over man is not so much her mission as “just waking people up to the unthinkable--the end of all life.

“We will have to pay for the way we are treating the Earth through mass epidemics, coastal flooding and hunger. Which is OK, since we have to cut down on population anyway.

“AIDS is only one of many epidemics we’ll be seeing, only the first. This is the natural order of things. I don’t consider myself exempt from the sacrifice.”

In reference to a quote from Antonin Artaud, that “theater is like a plague,” because both “upset collectivities (and) extends them into the most extreme gestures,” she would like to see “theater come before the devastation.”

She says it’s presumptuous to see theater as capable of initiating change as an epidemic. “Sure, both are cleansing. But theater is in our control, catastrophe isn’t.”

What to do, then? Rosenthal refers to words from another of her pieces, “Gaia, Mon Amour”: “to observe Nature is the same as introspection. To revere her works is the same as self-respect.”

“We are already connected to the matrix,” she says with a smile. “You see, in a way, we are her. It’s just a question of waking up to that reality, something that doesn’t come automatically in this culture.”