Festival ’90 : PERFORMANCE ART : L.A. FESTIVAL : Rosenthal’s ‘Dreams’ at Santa Monica

While the L.A. Festival billed a coming together of the world’s culture, Rachel Rosenthal concerned herself with continental drift: a process that began 250 million years ago when all land was a single mass named Pangaea.

But since the mere exploration of eco-geography would not satisfy a performance artist of such solipsistic bent, Rosenthal used the above as a metaphor for her own disintegration Friday at the Santa Monica Museum.

Indeed, what gears and goads Rosenthal in most of her compelling, hyper-stimulated work, and especially in this latest epic, “Pangaean Dreams,” is a need to plant herself in the cosmos and divulge the findings--through sociopolitical commentary and fearlessly funny self-psychoanalysis (“I’m a gay man locked in a woman’s body; feminists are women who resent not being men”).

No scale is too grand to encompass. On a “shamanistic journey” she wafts through drugless but demonic altered states. Autosuggestion brings this daughter of Wotan to an encounter with Gaia, the Earth Goddess “who gives birth to and devours herself.”

And all of it is ingeniously realized through Rosenthal’s great craft and virtuosity. Taking both parts of a dialogue between Pain and its Victim, she personifies the ferocious beast with a grizzled realism.

But it is humor--a hip, sardonic, tough-guy type--that ultimately keeps “Dreams” from lapsing into unrelieved melodrama, as well as Leslie Lashinsky’s superb musical collaboration and Dain Olsen’s videos.