Clocking Life’s Passages in ‘Timepiece’

It’s about time.

The Rachel Rosenthal Company’s “Timepiece,” which opened Cal State L.A.’s “Fall Ahead” festival over the weekend at the State Playhouse, was the best work I’ve seen from the veteran performance artist. The piece explored both cosmic and quotidian time in sharp, compelling imagery--visual and spoken--accompanied by a percussive score by Amy Knoles.

Rosenthal’s new company is remarkable. Her last major piece seen in L.A., “Zone,” appeared bloated by its cast of 55. By contrast, there were only seven young people onstage with Rosenthal in “Timepiece” (they also collaborated in creating the work with her). Each displayed striking stage presence, inherent talent in several performance disciplines, and professional polish.

Also onstage were two reclining dogs--and the show opened with a video segment of the dogs fetching a ball in a park. Meanwhile, on the stage, dancer Michael Sakamoto slowly moved toward the video image, blended into it, then moved on. Near the end of the show, the video was played in reverse, while Sakamoto moved in the other direction--a visualization of Rosenthal’s theory that time can run backward as well as forward.

Rosenthal’s musings on time were triggered by the imminence of her 70th birthday. Where did all that time go? But she’s concerned with more than her own time. The Milky Way is in its death throes, she reported, “its last light trapped in its unfathomable intestines. . . . The buzz is that time lies down and dies. Is that all there is?”

She surveyed a group of fashionably dressed poseurs on the subject of time. Later a row of dancers shouted out words about time as if they were workers on a time-clocked assembly line. Two men pondered the unbearable lightness of being HIV-negative while so many others die. Men appeared as 1,000-year-old redwoods finally turned into timber.

But it was some of the solos that will linger longest in memory from “Timepiece.” Rochelle Fabb entered in a wheelchair, looking like old Miss Havisham at her most decrepit, but she gradually peeled away layers of clothing to reveal a bespangled stripper’s young body--and she did it without plastic surgery. Franc Baliton did a hilarious drag number, posing as a call girl who sells office services because “time is money.”

C. Derrick Jones, wearing angel wings on his bare back, discussed the hopelessness of working with juvenile delinquents and the hollowness of the phrase “change takes time”--while dancing with a door frame through which he could easily go in opposite directions, like Rosenthal’s notion of time.

Rosenthal’s autobiographical material was at the heart of “Timepiece.” She showed slides of herself as a cosseted, strawberry-blond Jewish girl in France and recalled her fabulous 12th birthday party. Only later did she learn it was the same day in 1938 as Kristallnacht--when the Nazis vented their hatred on so many Jews. Many members of her family perished in the Holocaust--she showed their images--but she escaped.

She felt she was somehow robbed of her grief. So she shaved her head in solidarity with the many Jews whose hair was used to stuff mattresses, she said.

This powerful material built to a plea to “hot-wire time”--to transform the march of time away from eventual annihilation. It’s an ambitious goal for a performance artist, or for anyone, but as Rosenthal and her company ended “Timepiece” with a champagne toast, we couldn’t help but wish them well.