Watts Students Speak Avant-Garde ‘Language’

With all the talk these days about the new Los Angeles, it makes sense that avant-garde artists would be among the first to make hay out of the multicultural mix.

And so they now have. In a multidiscipline environmental performance as eclectic as this city, three artists have joined forces in a unique collaboration with a group of students from the Scheenway School and Community Center in Watts.

Incorporating everything from rap to shadow puppets to abstract sculpture, “No One Language” will take place as part of the Sited Works juried competition at Barnsdall Art Park, today and Sunday.

The question the work asks, says project director Deborah Oliver, is “how communication can happen” in a polyglot city like L.A. where dozens of languages may be spoken at a single high school.

The answer, as you’d expect, is complex.

In what choreographer Oliver describes as a “filmic, visual landscape,” a narrative centered around a movable cement block sculpture takes shape.

That sculpture, by Brazilian-born Chu-hsien Chang, has cubes and ropes that suggest, as Oliver puts it, “luggage carried by Ellis Island immigrants, the freeway system or territorial boundaries. What does it mean to have barriers, or to carry something around with you, and how does that get in the way?”

Two “dream sequences” in “No One Language” feature live gamelan music and Balinese shadow puppetry by Maria Bodmann, leader of the Shadow Art Ensemble of Los Angeles, a group that will be performing at the L.A. County Museum next month.

And added to all this is rap music performed live by eight students, ages 12 to 16, from Watts.

The way in which all these diverse elements came together is a model for the issues the piece addresses, according to Oliver. “We had a major conflict about how to incorporate the children,” she admits. “(Bodmann and Chang) thought the rap was out of context, and I said, ‘That’s the whole idea.’ ”

Just as Bodmann’s task in the project was to figure out “How to take something that’s Balinese and make it fit Los Angeles,” the group had to negotiate a way to work together.

For Oliver especially, it was a rocky road. “It was a real challenge for me to take myself out of my peer group,” she says. “It was not easy for me to go down to Scheenway because I thought they wouldn’t understand.

“Do I ask (the students) to act like modern (performance artists)? Or do I say, ‘What do you have to contribute to the piece?’ ” asks Oliver. “The students were totally into telling me what they thought would work. Part of me wanted to tell them, but then I realized that’s the whole idea: I have to be informed by them.”

“Collaboration is the way art is going to survive,” she ventures. “It’s a sign of the times that walls are breaking down and you have to deal with the person next door to you. I can’t just sit in my studio alone and make work anymore.”