PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : Premiere of Elgart and Glassman’s ‘Zoo’

To passers-by on Main Street who stopped for a few minutes to watch, it must have seemed like a mini-spectacle or a curiosity. To an audience seated in the courtyard of the Santa Monica Art Museum it was a performance art pageant, merging elements of Renaissance entertainment with Kabuki.

But for creators Sara Elgart and Stephan Glassman, who Thursday offered the premiere of “Zoo,” the hourlong work was meant as “a meditation on the geography of power and the politics of control.”

Only in the loosest sense could one be so persuaded, however, for the points, inchoate when not simplistic, got lost in the staging effort.

To Elgart’s credit, the dance elements boasted a certain concise strength. They ranged from a series of gesture-semaphores, a la Pina Bausch, to more elaborate turns, high leg kicks and full-body extensions--all performed in unison by a 17-member dancing chorus, representing a global assortment of society (urbanites, peasants, hipsters).

Unfortunately, the troops or chorus had little to apostrophize. Their highly charged episodes came in response to the long, dull stretches carried out by three helmeted men on stilts.

First, these antagonists menaced each other to the industrial drone of Ed Tomney’s sound score. Then they hoisted themselves to their respective wood-frame apparatuses--eagle, bear, snake--and lumbered about. Not much of a statement on power politics.

It must be that the process, not the message, is the thing. Whichever, the finale brought the troops back in grand Hollywood style: the jaunty spirit of their coded maneuvers gave way to sentimentality by way of triumphant music.

That it ended had to be indisputable triumph for some.