THE ARTISTS ARE RESTLESS : Performers Need Their Space

Terry Wolverton had spent much of her life on the stage. First there was performing-arts high school, then college, where she specialized in experimental theater, then a decade-long career as a performance artist.

But two years ago, despite half a lifetime’s investment, Wolverton, 34, gave up performing. Not because she had lost interest but because of a problem that has caused many Los Angeles performance artists, dancers and choreographers to worry about their survival here: in a word, access.

“There weren’t really places I could present my work,” said Wolverton, now executive director of the Woman’s Building interdisciplinary art center. “There’s much less performance art going on than there was 10 years ago. I’d say 85% of the reason is access to space.”

The 1980s have brought worldwide attention to the Los Angeles art scene, cameras trained on highly publicized art festivals and multimillion-dollar museum expansions. But for the less well-known individuals or smaller companies who must often rent theaters to use them and pay other performance costs, times haven’t been so terrific.

Up till now, several key alternative venues for dance and performance art have closed, and many performers say that getting into remaining sites can difficult, if not impossible: One such site will not rent its performance space at all; nearly all venues that do allow renters use a curatorial selection process, and many venues charge prohibitively high rents.

When you consider that most performance art or dance is produced by artists who barely survive on shoestring budgets, even the rent of $200 a night can seem exorbitant.

“There’s a dearth of cost-effective rental space” in Los Angeles, said dancer-choreographer Sara Elgart. “It’s getting harder and harder to produce your own work.”

Closed because of skyrocketing real estate prices, management woes and other reasons, the once-active, now defunct venues include the Pilot Theater, Theatre Vanguard and the Los Angeles Institution of Contemporary Art. The Woman’s Building has to lease two of its three floors to pay the rent, severely curtailing its performance-art program.

January’s closing of Hollywood’s Lhasa Club, viewed by many performers as an essential laboratory-type venue for unfinished “works in progress,” drew a collective sigh of regret. A new Lhasaland club, on Vine Street in Hollywood, operates infrequently.

And 1986 brought the dissolution of The House, a UCLA-run, 95-seat Santa Monica site that presented curated programs by any artist who could afford a fee of $150 per performance plus technicians’ fees.

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), the city’s most prominent alternative arts organization, has recently come under attack by some local artists for its performance space policies.

The downtown institution rents out its 100-seat performance space at $8 per hour for rehearsals or workshops--but not for performances--even when LACE isn’t using the space for its own programs.

Recently Peter Rose and Lin Osterhage, two performance artists who live in one of two apartments reserved for artists at LACE, staged “An L.A. Dialogue” and addressed what they see as a misuse of LACE’s performance space and other concerns.

“On the average, six out of seven nights a week, (LACE) is dark,” Rose said in the presentation. “No rehearsals, no performances, no workshops, no dance classes, no readings, no open movement, no co-productions or self-production of movement.”

In an interview, Osterhage said that until this June, when rehearsals for a LACE dance and performance art series began, the space was indeed dark six nights out of seven during the two years she has lived at LACE.

LACE Director Joy Silverman said that Osterhage and Rose “do not have the facts. . . . Every night we have something going on here and every day we have something going on, but we are not just a performance space, and LACE’s resources must be divided among the various disciplines it serves” including visual arts and film.

A recent daily schedule of the LACE performance space shows that during a 95-day period, the space was dark only eight days. Otherwise, it was being used either during the day or evening for rehearsals, performances, workshops or preparation before or clean up after performances.

Asked why LACE does not rent out its space for performance, Silverman stood behind the LACE mandate of handpicking all its performers: “We are not a rental house; we’re a presenting organization.”

Silverman said LACE “wouldn’t be able to rent out the space anyway because of turnaround time,” the hours of preparation needed for performances.

Administrators of the Japan America Theatre also select their performers, but the downtown facility is rented out for performances. However, performance rental fees--starting at $900 for eight hours--are prohibitive, say some artists who lust after the intimate, 841-seat theater with good sight lines.

Bill Bushnell, artistic producing director of the downtown Los Angeles Theatre Center, said that that organization would let a dancer or performance artist use the LATC rent free and would cover other performance expenses--if someone else pays performers’ fees.

“But so far I’ve found no takers prepared to front the money for the dancers. And I’ve had no dance company come and say, ‘I’d like to perform there,’ ” Bushnell said.

The Museum of Contemporary Art on Grand Avenue downtown, which is the only museum in the metropolitan area that has mounted a major contemporary dance and performance series, will rent out its performance space, said curator of media and performing arts Julie Lazar. However, MOCA charges nonprofit groups about $3,000 a night to rent the 162-seat auditorium and any proposal to use it “must go through a curatorial committee,” she said.

Raiford Rogers, co-director of the Los Angeles Chamber Ballet, said the $3,000-a-night fee “would be too much money to put out for a very small, small performing space like that.”

The proposed Dance Gallery is a venue for dance that could ease the space squeeze, observers say. Conceived by choreographer Bella Lewitzky, the $18-million facility is to open on Bunker Hill in 1991 with a 1,000-seat proscenium theater and two smaller performance spaces.

Among other developments, Cal State L.A. recently announced that beginning in July, it will recreate Dance Kaleidoscope, a summer festival for Los Angeles County-based dancers that waives their fees.

Also, performance artist Tim Miller and Linda Frye Burnham, founder of High Performance magazine, plan to start a performance art space in Santa Monica in January.

The motto of the planned “Performance Project” is “to try not to say no” to performance artists who want in, Burnham said, adding that most presentations will be co-produced by the project’s organizers and performance artists.

“We would rent out the space only if it was standing empty for some reason--and I’m quite sure it won’t be,” she said. “Our goal is to have it busy 24 hours a day.”