PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : Nancy Harris’ Heart Is Still in Oklahoma : Stage: The artist/poet’s autobiographical ‘Runnin’ Barefoot’ at Highways finds her stranded creatively in Los Angeles.

California, it’s said, is the place where people come from somewhere else. This suggests renewal, but for many artists from somewhere else, it’s not always the best environment for their art.

The overwhelming impression performance artist/poet Nancy Harris leaves at Highways, where she is staging “Nancy Harris Runnin’ Barefoot,” is of a woman who left behind a place that stirred her creative juices. Her destination--Los Angeles--seems to have run those juices dry.

Which is exactly what Harris has against the city: an urban mess broiling over with cop busts, party poseurs , prowling consumers and creeping decay. If you can spin verse on dreaming about riding wild ponies--as Harris can--the Los Angeles landscape isn’t the most compatible.

The work is roughly autobiographical, tracking Harris’ youth in Oklahoma, her misadventures with men and politics in the ‘60s and her wanderings in Los Angeles since then. On paper, at least, just the right sort of cross-country trek of the mind for Highways, which has positioned itself as an intersection for post-modern, nomadic performers from all directions.

And on several levels, Harris’ work reveals a performance art reaching maturity. Much of the interplay between her verse and slide-projections of paintings, photos and sculptures by various artists is just that, rather than the visuals being mere decoration for the language. Harris, as well, is a warm raconteuse , deeply Midwestern in her sincerity, who doesn’t demand our embrace and knows nothing about nastiness.

But because her journey in performance seldom requires many theatrical gestures (an exception is an abstract piece, “Chapter Four,” with Tom Dennison’s cubistic lights), the energy has to come from the poetry and the sense of change in the journey. The last poem that contains this is her ‘60s reverie, “I Wore a Fringe Jacket,” and it comes only one-third of the way into the show.

After that, triteness takes over. Her political pieces are bland preachments to the converted, and the California portraits in other pieces are drab and familiar (her yuppie social butterfly character in “Angel on the Town” already has the dated residue of ‘70s disco dancers).

Fatally, Harris’ trip is a creative downhill slide, with the surprises all used up at a point in the evening when we should be getting worked up. Her true home seems to be the ghost-ridden Indian burial grounds off the Oklahoma highways, not La Brea. It would be interesting if Harris went back home again.

At 1651 18th St., Santa Monica, on Saturdays and Sundays, 8:30 p.m., through Jan. 21. Tickets: $10; (213) 453-1755.