COVER STORY : Inside the Rosenthal Zone : As she watches the world falling down, Rachel Rosenthal has become much more interested in the plight of people. She’s not abandoning her global thinking, it’s just that the New Chaos can get to be so personal

It’s Super Bowl Sunday and UCLA’s Royce Hall is quiet. A maze of freshly installed whitewall corridors blocks the entrances to the landmark building’s theater, which is closed until the damage from the recent temblor can be fixed. The few usable classrooms and offices are temporarily empty.

Around the back of the otherwise dormant building, however, an after-lunch crowd of people in sweats and kneepads gathers near a loading dock, while six large mutts loll contentedly in the afternoon sun.

The dogs are the tip-off.

When on the trail of Rachel Rosenthal, all you have to do is look for the omnipresent canines. And sure enough, the artist’s famous shaved head is soon visible, bending over to smooch a pooch, as a bevy of performers hovers nearby.

Yet no sooner does Rosenthal turn to a discussion of the scenes to be covered in this afternoon’s rehearsal than an assistant breaks in to tell her that Dojo has arrived.

“I rescued a dog,” Rosenthal explains, as she excuses herself to attend to the more pressing affairs of a black-and-tan shepherd mix. “Mehmet Sander is thinking about adopting him and they’re going to be meeting each other, so I have to go,” she says, referring to the choreographer and Rosenthal collaborator.

A company member standing just out of earshot says what many think. “She’s more interested in animals than people,” he quips affectionately. And Rosenthal might not dispute the charge.

Lately though, she’s changing. “My usual work is centered on a very anti-anthropocentric view of things,” says Rosenthal, 67, who’s at Royce to rehearse “Zone,” an interdisciplinary performance with a 50-member cast.

“And in this piece, because of what’s happening in Los Angeles and the world--and maybe also because of my age and mellowing a bit--I’ve become very interested in people, much more than ever before.”

Rosenthal is concerned not just with Los Angeles’ riots and natural disasters, but also the ways in which L.A.’s evolution into a Third World city is part of a global sea change. She is out to show society the errors of its destructive and divisive ways, and her medium is a grand multimedia theater that incorporates text, dance, music and large-scale visual set pieces.

The sheer force of her on- and offstage personality, though, also helps get the message across. And while she has been criticized for failing to tread carefully on such volatile topics as race, she’s also been hailed for the passion of her beliefs.

“All of the elements of her work are held together by the strength of her human spirit, a sense of humanity,” says producer Jedediah Wheeler, who presented Rosenthal in New York in 1991.

Her topics are as personal as autobiography and as grandiose as the annals of planet Earth. In fact, a characteristic Rosenthal work would overlap two such disparate histories in order to show connections between the two. Nearly always, though, Rosenthal’s essential subject is man’s inhumanity to man and the environment.

“What I’m saying in different ways is that unless we can learn to see ourselves cosmically as a species, and not reduce ourselves to groups racially, nationally or however, we are probably going to become extinct. We can’t go on destroying ourselves.”

With “Zone,” her message seems even more urgent, and this time the scale and ambition of the work far outstrip the artist’s many previous efforts, threatening to make this one of the most important works of her 40-year career. Co-commissioned by the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts and the Rachel Rosenthal Company, “Zone” plays the Wadsworth Theater in West L.A. on Friday and Saturday.

Rosenthal’s topic is the approaching millennium, as seen through a dramatic and choreographic collage of text, movement and music in which the artist and an ensemble of five play the family of Nicholas II, Russia’s last czar, pitted against more than 40 other performers, labeled collectively “the throngs.”

Brewing since 1992, “Zone” is Rosenthal’s first full work to appear on an L.A. stage since she premiered “Pangaean Dreams” at the 1990 Los Angeles Festival. And the new work is generating a national buzz, thanks to Rosenthal’s singular stature in the experimental performing arts world.

As an artist who helped create and define not only the feminist art movement, but also that ever-expanding open-ended genre known as performance art, she has been influential through her art, her teaching and her outspokenness in the media. Rosenthal is, after all, one of the enduring larger-than-life figures of the American avant-garde.

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Inside Royce’s basement rehearsal room, the pooch-cuddler has been replaced by the commandant.

“We have two weeks, that’s it,” Rosenthal reminds the polymorphous crowd spread throughout the room, chastising latecomers with a glance. “So, come .” They all line up and listen. Pronto.

Standing about 5-foot-6 without the black platforms she sometimes wears, Rosenthal still seems a giant. She’s dressed simply today, in a baggy green cotton outfit and black tennies. The only vestiges of hipness are the exotic dangling earrings that hang from the multiple-piercings in her ears, her chic eyeglasses . . . and of course the trademark bald pate.

First shorn onstage in a 1981 performance called “Leave Her in Naxos,” Rosenthal has kept the Kojak look ever since. “It felt comfortable and it throws people,” she says with her usual blend of didacticism and down-to-earthness. “It goes against gender roles. And it’s easy to take care of.”

It’s the same mix of wit, confession and globally conscious commentary that has marks Rosenthal’s performance pieces. In “L.O.W. in Gaia” (1986), for instance, she posed as a city-dweller out on a trek in the desert, where she met the dying goddess Gaia. By the boil of a Sterno campfire and to the music of Erik Satie, Rosenthal offered a jocular litany of her daily ablutions on the trek. And she displayed the endless caravan of tissue-stuffed plastic bags she’s got in tow to prove it.

In “Pangaean Dreams,” Rosenthal entered in a wheelchair, railing at the destruction of the environment, then went on to juxtapose the image of the breakup of the mythical supercontinent Pangaea with tales of the disintegration of her own body. When the piece played New York in 1991, the New York Times’ Stephen Holden wrote: “Rosenthal can be growlingly ominous. . . . She can also be very funny.”

Rosenthal’s performances, combining text and movement with a multimedia collage of sights and sounds, have included solos and larger-cast spectacles. “Zone,” however, will be not only the largest work she’s ever made, but also the first to integrate her character into an ensemble instead of singling herself out as a featured performer.

“There’s a style which involves incredible verve, polish and range, like a singer who can sing from a high soprano to a bass,” says Moira Roth, Trefethen Chair of Art History at Mills College in Oakland. “Her self-mockery allows her to get away with (things). I think of her as a wonderful intellect in ecological and cultural history.”

Especially in larger works such as “Zone,” the theatrical montage evokes traditions ranging from Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty to the political theater of Erwin Piscator, with its combination of visceral emotion and panoramic drama. It also shares qualities with the contemporary spectacle theater of Robert Longo, Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman and others that first flourished during the 1970s.

Yet Rosenthal also belongs in the company of her fellow diva- auteurs --women who create swirling, high-voltage spectacles around their own central roles. She’s broken ground with a performing persona in much the same way as the late choreographer Martha Graham or the younger vocalist-composers Diamanda Galas and Laurie Anderson. But then, the world sorely needs its arts Amazons.

In Greek mythology, the goddess Gaea (or Gaia) is the Earth. Born out of chaos, she goes on to become the mother of all things.

Rachel Rosenthal can relate.

It’s not just that she’s invoked Gaea in works, from “L.O.W. in Gaia” to “Pangaean Dreams.” Nor only that she’s also an imposing figure that The Times’ Martin Bernheimer has called “a monument, and a marvel . . . a force of nature . . . (who) defies the observer not to be magnetized.”

It’s that Rosenthal knows what it means to come up out of chaos and go on to create.

The daughter of well-off Russian parents, she was born in Paris in 1926. Her family fled the Nazis when she was 13 years old, leaving their wealth behind in a series of close-call escapes. After stays in Spain, Portugal and Brazil, in 1941 they landed in New York, where she attended the High School of Music and Art.

After the war, she continued her studies in New York and Europe with some of the most famous names of modern art, dance and theater, including Piscator, Hans Hofmann, Merce Cunningham and Jean-Louis Barrault.

She moved to Los Angeles in 1955 and shortly thereafter launched the Instant Theatre, an experimental theater group that she directed for a decade. As she remembers the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, her group stood out in a very conventional L.A. art scene:

“There was nothing. It was a cultural desert. The only thing besides me was the Ferus Gallery, the home of California art, and all these people who were there--the men with their girlfriends, because, of course, there were no women artists--were my first audience. They came every weekend to see my Instant Theatre.”

During the 1970s, Rosenthal was one of the key figures, along with Judy Chicago, Sheila deBretteville and Arlene Raven, associated with the feminist art movement centered in Los Angeles, which emphasized the previously hidden lives of women. It was during this period that Rosenthal and performance art found each other.

At the time, experimental performance was largely conceptual rather than theatrical--the Happenings of Allan Kaprow as an example--based on an art-school/anti-art aesthetic that often focused on the human body as canvas. Feminist artists, however, saw the chance to have a genre of their own. And their typically autobiographical solos gave shape to the feminist slogan “the personal is political.”

Rosenthal saw an affinity with her own work--”I realized I had been doing things like (performance art), just calling it something else”-- and she brought her extensive background in theater and dance to bear on the form, pushing it in a new, more theatrical direction.

In the 1970s, Rosenthal made a number of works about her childhood, her family, her body and her love-hate relationship with food--archetypal feminist topics.

“She has always had a wonderfully grand sense of autobiography, with a mythic undercurrent to it,” says Mills College’s Roth.

Then, around 1981, the year L.A.’s Feminist Studio Workshop shut down and feminism in general began to suffer body blows, Rosenthal began to de-emphasize autobiography and gravitate toward global concerns. That was the “symbolic moment,” as Roth puts it, and the beginning of the Rosenthal most people know today.

Even people who know nothing, or maybe only one thing, about the avant-garde often know of Rosenthal. So when NBC needed someone to play a performance artist on the series “Frasier,” for example, Rosenthal was the natural choice.

And Rosenthal has dabbled elsewhere in the popular media too, including a part in the upcoming Michael Tolkin film “The New Age” and one appearance as a panelist on PBS’ “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.”

She has also been known to speak out on issues of the day. In 1990, for instance, Rosenthal rejected her badly needed $11,250 National Endowment for the Arts grant in a gesture of solidarity with the artists known as the NEA 4 and to protest the endowment’s enforcement of a so-called obscenity clause.

Still, she’s best known for her stage work. Rosenthal has performed at prestigious festivals around the world, including the 1987 and 1990 Los Angeles Festivals, Documenta 8 in Kassel, West Germany, in 1987, and Festival Internacional de Teatro in Granada, Spain, in 1988.

In 1991, Jed Wheeler brought Rosenthal’s “Pangaean Dreams” to Lincoln Center’s Serious Fun! Festival. (The annual festival, produced from its inception by Wheeler’s International Production Associates, was widely considered a premier showcase for progressive and avant-garde work. Wheeler’s ties with the series ended last summer after Jane Moss, Lincoln Center’s new director of programming, took over the festival.)

“Zone” was first conceived in July, 1992, when Wheeler invited Rosenthal to create a new work for 1993’s Serious Fun! Four months later, however, Moss vetoed the Rosenthal project without public comment. Meanwhile, Rosenthal had already arranged to present the work in Los Angeles through UCLA’s Center for the Performing Arts. UCLA picked up the ball and co-commissioned the project with Rosenthal’s own company. The work includes choreography by Mehmet Sander and an original score written and performed by Amy Knowles.

On a broad level, the piece reflects Rosenthal’s interest in chaos theory, a field that has blossomed with computer technology.

“Chaos dynamics show that every system and every aspect of our world contain the seeds of chaos within order and the seeds of order within chaotic systems,” she says. “The ‘zone’ is that fine line, the bifurcation (where) you can go either way; the point at which free will comes into consciousness in human beings. All of Western science until this century, because we didn’t have the capacity to accurately measure turbulent systems, simply ignored them. And of course most of nature is made up of turbulence.”

That’s one whopping metaphor for human wrongheadedness, from Rosenthal’s point of view. But it’s not the only image of biped folly that appears in “Zone.”

Rosenthal and an ensemble of five white performers in whiteface (Angie Bray, Harvey Perr, Carol Katz, Joan Spitler, Kirk Wilson) portray the family of Nicholas II. They share the stage with 40 or so mostly nonwhite women and men, “the throngs,” who move about the stage in Sander’s electrically athletic choreography.

“I use the metaphor of the family of the last czar of Russia because they really (expletive) up at the beginning of the century and we’re (expletive) up at the end of the century,” Rosenthal says. “I wanted to use them as the epitome of a certain class of privileged people who go on with certain totally erroneous assumptions about the world. And of course they get murdered.”

“The throngs” are the contrast.

“We have these people onstage who are multiethnic and whose presence, pressure and activities are continually felt by this small island of white Western patriarchal civilization,” Rosenthal says.

Her methods of assembling “the throngs,” however, have already ruffled feathers. To find the unpaid volunteers who appear onstage, Rosenthal sent out faxes and letters to artists of color and others, looking for people who might want to participate.

A number of people who received these inquiries were insulted by the suggestion that they should work for free, and by what they saw as the racial specificity of her request. But then, Rosenthal has taken heat for alleged insensitivity before.

In 1991, she was awarded a $20,000 grant from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs to support her work with a group of young artists of various ethnic backgrounds. In August of that year, an interview about the grant appeared in The Times.

At least one artist, performer-writer Keith Antar Mason of the Hittite Empire, was angered by Rosenthal’s comments that she expected African American artists from the inner city to have an “interesting approach to language,” Latinos to have “flashiness,” Asian Americans to have “brashness” as well as “tremendous subtlety.”

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

Later that year, Mason wrote and performed two works locally taking Rosenthal to task: “Rachel Ain’t Got No Brain,” Parts I and II (a play on the title of Rosenthal’s 1987 work “Rachel’s Brain”).

The issue, Mason says, was that what Rosenthal said in The Times “reeks of superiority, like she could come in and understand every nuance of someone else’s culture. That’s what 19th-Century anthropologists were saying.”

Rosenthal, of course, knows that her subjects of race and oppression touch on deep sensitivities: “Absolutely I’m pushing people’s buttons. I’m sure that a lot of people will misunderstand.”

It’s not her way to mince words, though, especially given what she sees as an urgent planetary state of affairs.

“If people come (to Los Angeles) and they are totally different from the dominant culture and their numbers grow, which is what’s happening, then things are going to be turned around, whether there’s bloodshed or not,” she says. “It’s going to be as big a historical event as some of the great migrations and invasions of Europe, simply from the bulk of the population involved.”

And Rosenthal, for one, is not about to let the changing world go by without comment.

“I’m eager to create pieces that both expose what’s happening and are healing,” she says. “My only problem is that I’m at the age where you can sort of expect to die in a limited amount of time. It’s a pain, frankly, because I am so curious to see what happens next.”

* “Zone,” UCLA Wadsworth Theater, grounds of the West Los Angeles Veterans Administration Center, (310) 825-2101. Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m. $19-$23.