To an Urban Animal, Life Is an Asphalt Jungle : Performance Art: Choreographer’s works are about survival in an city environment.

Dance-performance art maker Charles Dennis thinks it’s still a jungle out there.

Like Charlie Chaplin, Robert Longo and fellow choreographer Rudy Perez, Dennis chronicles the urban animal, from the Everyman on the street to the working stiff who keeps the city gears grinding.

Dennis, born and bred in the New York jungle, makes his first L.A. appearance with his “2 X 2 X 4” and “cityanimal” at Highways Wednesday through Friday. The works are about “the individual’s response to how to survive in the urban environment,” Dennis says, and the contradictions that arise because “so-called civilized man has savage instincts: lust for power, food, sex, shelter and physical violence.”

The 40-year-old choreographer-performer, who has been presenting solos throughout the United States, Canada and Europe since 1974, is a co-founder of New York’s PS 122. Dennis was also featured in Robert Wilson’s theater spectacles for five years, including the original staging of “Einstein on the Beach.”

His “2 X 2 X 4,” a dance for one man and 14 2-by-4 boards with guitar music by David Fulton, and “cityanimal,” a movement solo with text by Dennis and music by Bob Telson, both capture the vicissitudes of today’s concrete-and-asphalt jungle.

It’s a hostile, defensive world peopled by edgy characters in volatile situations “both real and fantasized,” based in part on Dennis’ own experiences.

“I feel (the hostility and alienation of the city) acutely,” he says, “because an artist is a bit more on the edge--financially, spiritually and emotionally.”

But Dennis’ “cityanimal” character isn’t all starving artist. His fictional persona, seen in a variety of moods and predicaments, also “has certain yuppie attributes.” Those characteristics are stripped away, though, when the raw behaviors and base instincts of man-the-brute take precedence.

That raw, visceral side of man is seen most directly in Dennis’ athletic, aggressive dancing. Here, street moves and gestures combine with poses influenced by Dennis’ background in high school and college athletics before he turned to dance.

In “cityanimal,” these high-energy moves are played against a backdrop (by Dennis and set designer Howard Ires) that features an abstract painting of a black net with converging lines and shadowy shapes that look like skyscrapers.

The image suggests a spider’s web or power lines, in keeping with the wild-versus-civilized motif that runs throughout Dennis’ vigorous dance.

Dennis says: “ ‘cityanimal’ juxtaposes savage animal instincts with witty, civilized talk and emotionally vulnerability, which gives you the portrait of an urban man, struggling to survive in the new ‘Wild Kingdom.’ ”

His “2 X 2 X 4,” performed for the first time in 1989, also portrays the animal instincts of city humans. It uses the 2x4’s as building blocks, musical instruments and sports equipment in order to “expose man’s desire to create and construct personal shelters as well as his self-destructive urges to destroy his own and other men’s shelters.”

It was partly inspired, Dennis says, by homeless people building shelters in New York. “I didn’t set out to make a piece about homelessness,” he says. “But as I was creating this piece, I was passing a lot of homeless, and the image crept into the work.”

“The conflict of needing to find shelter and security and (then) finding ways to destroy it is a metaphor for the human condition today.”

There is, however, an even more personal dimension to Dennis’ work. “I made ‘cityanimal’ in 1986 when I was single and looking for a relationship with a woman,” he says. “It was a response to a period of time in my life when I was really on the edge both financially and emotionally.”

“I got myself into a raw emotional place. And when one feels pushed or threatened, one can respond with survival instincts.”

But now the happy hearth appears to have mellowed him. “My more recent pieces are not so intense in that raw way,” Dennis says. “There’s more self-deprecating humor and casual witticism.”

In his latest work, for example, the audience is invited into the artist’s living room. “My wife appears to talk to me about how the apartment’s not clean enough: It’s the domestic life of an artist.”

Yet lighthearted as his newer dances and performances may be, Dennis keeps performing the harsher, earlier solos because “the work from that period is some of my best.”

“I wish it weren’t so,” he says. “But when you’re going through pain and forced to come up with something out of that pain, you can come up with really good work.”