Rosenthal: Harmony From Diversity : Performance art: The L.A. Cultural Affairs Department has awarded the artist $20,000 to bring together young talent from various backgrounds to see what they can create.

Celebrated performance artist Rachel Rosenthal sat with legs spread assertively in her Los Angeles studio, wearing black from neck to toe and assorted ear dangles, sporting a bit of stubble on her usually shaved head. She was talking about her idea to bring young artists from various ethnic backgrounds together to see what they create, and she liked it.

The city’s Cultural Affairs Department did too, and recently awarded her $20,000 to bring it to life. The grant means that 15 young artists ages 17-29 will have a chance to study for free with Rosenthal, withstand her penetrating stare and absorb her philosophies on everything from dance and sound to eco-feminism and animal rights. Results of their collaboration will be presented publicly in December.

“What is interesting, to me anyway, is how to take people whose background presupposes certain attitudes and certain styles,” Rosenthal says, “and somehow working a piece that is harmonious with all of these differences. This is what the whole point is, through art, to harmonize these diversities.”

She expects African-American artists from the inner city to have an “interesting approach to language,” Latinos to bring “flashiness,” Asian-Americans to bring “brashness” as well as “tremendous subtlety.”

“This sounds like stereotypes, but . . . these are the flavors I’ve experienced in my previous classes,” Rosenthal says.

What shape the performance will take is anybody’s guess. “I take what comes from them. I never try to impose my own thing,” she says. “My job is really as coordinator and director to make the whole thing work smoothly and to make the whole thing appear as one instead of little pieces of diverse things.”

Upcoming auditions could attract dancers, rappers and poetry readers, not necessarily just performance artists. “There are lots of people who would be wonderful and may not even know what performance art is,” she says.

Performance art is a nebulous term referring to a hodgepodge of sound, words, music, visuals and dance. Rosenthal says it can be “non-realistic, non-linear, abstract, surreal.” She described a previous collaborative work by some of the thousands of students she’s had as a “fluid suite of smaller pieces which were all somehow related in a loose way by one thread,” which was the idea of distorting one’s self in order to fit in.

Her own work frequently uses an environmental theme. In “Pangaean Dreams,” a work she performed at New York’s Alice Tully Hall in late July, she juxtaposes thoughts about the breaking up of a super-continent with thoughts about the disintegration of her 64-year-old body. She allows that this strong environmental undercurrent probably will affect the as-yet-uncomposed work.

“I always nudge people who work with me towards a realization of our place in the bioecology of the planet,” she says. “What I will be pushing for is to communicate the fact that all other issues stem from that one. So that might possibly be the thread that will hold the whole thing together.”

Rosenthal also is interested in artists whose outlook is compatible with hers. “I certainly would not want to work with people whose political beliefs are obnoxious to me. I don’t want to work with white supremacists, for instance. But that’s my prerogative as producer and director,” she says. “I’m a very liberal person. I am not a conservative person. I am not interested in people who have fascistic and totalitarian views.”

Performance art can and does exist apart from political messages. “But I’m not interested in that kind of art,” Rosenthal says. “Issues are of primordial importance in a world that’s falling apart.”

Auditions will be Sept. 21. Appointments: (213) 839-0661.