STAGE REVIEW : A Young Pro Who Knows His Technology

Too much performance art falls short as performance craft . That was not a problem with Robert Longo’s “Dream Jumbo: Working the Absolutes,” performed over the weekend at Royce Hall, UCLA.

Like his paintings and 3-D triptychs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Longo’s stage pieces have the certainty of composition that one associates with commercial art. The viewer knows where he is supposed to look, and the artist knows how much information he wants to give out. Every image is clearly framed and nothing goes on too long.

There was no Bang! Pow! or Zowie! about “Dream Jumbo.” Longo saves that for his rock videos, also on view at the museum. The flow of images and music was so smooth at Royce Hall that it wasn’t always clear where one piece had ended (five were seen) and another had begun.

Soothing is not quite the word. But if this is a “disturbing” artist, a word that seems to be in vogue about Longo, the disturbance is conceptual and after the fact. In the moment, we are in the hands, if not of a master, of a young pro who knows the technology.

His tableaux might remind us of Robert Wilson’s. (The man on stilts in the last tableau specifically reminds us of Robert Wilson.) But the attitude toward time is different. Longo doesn’t try to slow down our heartbeat, to take us to the gate of boredom, beyond which lie the fields of contemplation.

Not too much happened in these pieces, but enough happened. Sometimes there was even a little story, such as the vignette about the big bald head on the screen trying to reconnect with its body, which had somehow got loose into the real world and was running around the stage.

Once reconnected, the little body (Sean Curran) read Puck’s curtain speech from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the one where Puck asks the audience to “give me your hands.” Two hands on the screen then dealt him a mosquito’s fate. A Tom & Jerry gag that got a nice laugh, and also made a nice little point about the clout of the screen image these days.

One gathers that this is a major theme with Longo--the way we are manipulated by images streaming from the skyscrapers of power and privilege. It is odd to see AT&T; sponsoring such a subversive artist, but this may be because the subversion is so subtle that it’s quite easy to overlook.

The “Marble Fog” sequence, for instance, did a lot with the screen image of the skyscraper. But it was presented with such appreciation for the mass and line of the buildings being seen that the sequence could be interpreted as a celebration of the skyscraper, the cathedral of the 20th Century. Rather than being oppressed by these images, your reviewer found them quite as handsome as those of the fields of flowers seen just before. This is not an art that is going to change the man in the street’s opinion of the culture he lives in--of Johnny Carson as the ultimate talking head, for instance. Longo’s art is too much of a piece with the visual codes of that culture for anyone but an expert to make out the difference.

But it is well done. “Matrix Mutants,” for example, was a fetching sci-fi diorama set on a nameless planet inhabited by wiggly, squiggly silhouettes. This was not exactly a Beckett landscape, but there are more ways than one of conceiving apocalypse. Perhaps we will all turn into Toys by Mattel.

“Red Room” was a beautiful, formal dance piece for Bill T. Jones, working before a huge swatched red curtain that kept moving in an ocean-like manner, bellied out by air from backstage. What it meant was up to you, and it didn’t have to mean anything at all.

Another pleasing piece was the opener, “Sound Distance of a Good Man.” This had, from left to right: (A) two shirtless men in a slow-motion wrestling contest (Jones and Robert Allen); (B) a big black-and-white photograph of a man looking up into the sun, while a stone lion in the background looked the other way; (C) a soprano in an evening gown (Peggy Atkinson) singing an aria with much emphasis on the word “Ave.”

A beautiful, living triptych, each frame interesting in itself, and pleasingly contrasted against the other frames. Two struggling males (struggling to gain knowledge of each other, you felt, like D. H. Lawrence figures) versus a female serenely singing the praises of someone else.

The mind could easily play with that for 16 minutes, or could wonder about the stone lion, or could simply enjoy the spectacle. I don’t know how deep Longo goes as an artist (the closer he comes to having a message, the more it turns out to be a message you’ve already heard), but he knows how to space figures on a stage.

DREAM JUMBO

Robert Longo’s theater work, at Royce Hall, UCLA. Producer Victoria Hamburg and Pressure Pictures. Choreographer Bill T. Jones. Additional choreography Arnia Zane, Arthur Aviles. Music Stuart Argabright, Joseph Hannan, Robert Longo. Scenic design Stephen Brownless. Multi-image projections Douglas Sloan, Icon Communications. Lighting Robert Wierzel. Costumes C. Jane Epperson. Stage manager George Boyd. Texts Eric Bogosian, Robert Longo, William Gibson. Live music coordinator Joseph Hannan. Sound track and effects producer Stuart Argabright. Additional sound mixes Stephen Breck, Mike Gormaley, Audio of the Americas. Special audio effects Chuck Hammer, Fred Szymanski, Jun Mizumachi.