On the Cutting Edge With ‘Woodworks’

With a mixture of quasi- macho bravado and calm concern, choreographer Jan Munroe confides that the vision of Los Angeles as “potential art mecca” that he had when he first arrived here from San Francisco in 1978 is “sadly, just a dream.”

“L.A. doesn’t put out (support) to its artists,” he says. “It’s playing in the minor leagues because it doesn’t provide an environment for its culture to grow.”

He recalls a time in 1982 when a highway accident totalled his car and he was forced to “beat it out of the art scene” for a better-paying job as a carpenter.

Impressions culled from his five-year stint as a Hollywood set-builder--”what it’s like to be a macho pig, what it’s like to give up your art for money, what it’s like to work with wood”--form the basis of the dance-based piece “Woodworks,” set to premiere at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions on Friday for a six-performance, two-week run.

Munroe’s period of Hollywood hard labor ended two years ago when he received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation. At the same time he became involved with what he calls, “a floating repertory of geniuses,” a group of Los Angeles-based artists able to cross boundaries between the dance, theater and art worlds.

As a member of “this family of creative artists,” Munroe has played a bookish Grecian in “Plato’s Symposium,” a collaborative work about spirituality and sexuality in the age of AIDS. He has spoofed theatrical conventions with Tony Abatemarco and dancer Susan Falcon in a work he created, “Notes: On Performance.” (Both plays were directed by David Schweizer).

But it was Munroe’s “Alligator Tails,” a Faulkner-esque exploration of Southern and sexual themes, that established him as an autobiographical solo monologuist.

Now Munroe is entering what he calls “a whole new artistic ballpark” with his highly dancey “Woodworks,” a collaboration with sound artist Steven Moshier.

Trained by French mime master Etienne Decroux, Munroe speaks of wishing to “clip the wings off of modern and ballet dancers,” to acquire a very “grounded and spiritually human sense of the moving body.”

With dancers Frank J. Adams, Tina Gerstler, Ed Gierke, Cynthia Hord and Maura Sandoval, Munroe is using formalized gesture and semaphoric signals, with a spoken text about a “redneck foreman,” to “tap back into my formal training with Decroux and connect it with the things I’ve learned recently about acting.”

Munroe intends to build a large wooden structure in LACE’s black-box studio, which will then be destroyed at the end of the hour-long performance. In a recent rehearsal, dancers circled around large ladders and wooden planks with an ironic minimalism often reminiscent of Robert Wilson’s “Einstein on the Beach.”

Asked if this collapsible scaffolding is symbol for the structures of the L.A. art world, Munroe laughs. “That may be perhaps reading a little too much into it,” he says.

But Munroe says that an L.A. renaissance in the arts has been allowed to die from lack of support.

“I came to L.A. 10 years ago because of what I saw as a cultural boom. Mary Jane Eisenberg and Rudy Perez had just arrived, and Scott Kellman would soon set up the WallenBoyd. The Los Angeles Area Dance Alliance was happening and Bess Snyder kept the House (performance space in Santa Monica) going. Theater Vanguard in Beverly Hills was giving 100% of the box office to artists.”

But now most of these organizations are defunct, and Munroe says he is “worried about L.A.’s future.”

He says he’s been hearing the word potential bandied about for too many years about this place.

But if he’s so pessimistic about Los Angeles’ potential, why does he stay here?

“Potential,” he says, doubling over in laughter.

But Munroe grows serious as he discusses his predicament. “Between the cultural resources of jazzed-up creative people and the natural resources of the beach and the sun, L.A.’s ideal for artists. I just hope that the financial powers that be start seeing that, too--before it’s too late and we all split or just get tired.

“Hey look, if some of my (Los Angeles) colleagues were in New York, they’d be up for Guggenheims or be performing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music instead of waiting around for acting gigs on daytime TV slots.”