Her time-telling devices: movement, costume, light

Time is of the essence for dancer-choreographer Elizabeth Hoefner. So much so that for one of her solos, she is festooned with nearly 100 wristwatches and constantly turning her head to look at them. In fact, the subject is a near-obsession in her 38-minute, five-movement suite “Time, Identity and the Body.”

The title also serves for an evening of new dances that begins a three-night run tonight at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica. Sharing the bill with Hoefner is fellow interdisciplinary artist Nina Kaufman, whose portion includes two dances and the screening of a short video. Together, the pair embrace a number of disciplines, including live music, lighting design, art installation and body sculpture, to help make the abstract more concrete.

Take the notion of time. In addition to Hoefner’s wristwatch costume in the solo “Time Unfolding,” she outfits some of her nine dancers with headphones that churn out rhythms in the section “Keeping Time.” Because of the number of varying rhythms, the section requires original music, which is performed live by local composer Yorgos Adamis. In the “Time Travel” section, the dancers provide theatrical lighting by wearing costumes made of 80 LED lights powered by battery packs.

“We use our bodies as tools for expressing ourselves,” Hoefner says. “I’ve also been influenced by technology, and in what we could do with the body, which led me to thinking about what you can say with the clothes you wear.”

Hoefner says that by wearing watches on her body, she literally feels time. “I’m also saying that each part of the body is going to expire at separate times -- the heart, the liver, the joints -- either from disease or death.”

Hoefner’s work is a good fit with Kaufman’s, whose premiere “What Remains” completes the program. A commentary on war, the piece integrates dance (Cheryl Asbury, Jean Copeland and Kaufman, who also sings) with an installation made of wooden frames and shards from 200 smashed flowerpots strewn over the floor.

“Even though Liz’s work is different in the movement vocabulary she uses, our approach to movement is similar,” says Kaufman, 36, a native Angeleno and classically trained flutist who received a master’s in dance from UCLA in 1998. “It isn’t just the dance and something supporting the dance.”

Hoefner adds: “Rather than telling a story through movement, we’re concerned with the whole picture -- scenery, light design, costumes.”

Both artists shed new light on universal themes: Hoefner’s work ends with dancers moving around illuminated plastic Arrowhead bottles filled with colored water to symbolize eternity. Kaufman, in her live performance, assaults the viewer with a tableau of cracked flowerpots that symbolize the grief of war; the message, Kaufman says, is “about how women are left to pick up the pieces.”

Each has honed her craft separately. New York-born Hoefner, 30, moved to Los Angeles in 1999, earning a master’s degree in choreography from California Institute of the Arts two years later. Since then, the dynamic performer has been a fixture on the local scene, dancing with Arianne MacBean’s the Big Show Company and with Cid Pearlman’s Nesting Dolls, two contemporary troupes known for serious, quirky and often multimedia works.

Hoefner has choreographed 20 pieces in the last five years and teaches modern dance at Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy in La Canada Flintridge and at Rio Hondo Community College in Whittier. In 2002, she earned a Lester Horton Award nomination for choreography for the solo “Grace Lives Here.”

Kaufman, on the flip side, is less fond of performing live, and lately she’s been drawn to making site-specific dance for videotape.

Her seven-minute film “burning girl,” which will screen at Highways, is a collaboration with Kate Johnson and Michael Masucci of EZTV, a 25-year-old avant-garde video production company and digital art center in Santa Monica. The film cost Kaufman $4,000 to make and was shot over the course of a year in various locations, including upstate New York.

The surrealistic trek features Kaufman shaving her head before subjecting herself to a series of physical tests: She not only dances barefoot through a cemetery but also rolls around in piles of leaves, on concrete and in snow, and treads upon scalding ground.

“Nina has made an extreme dance video,” Masucci says. “In it she’s asking, ‘What is the true world? Is it forests? Is it architecture? And where do we fit in?’ ”

Kaufman, who teaches yoga and Pilates, says the film is also about transformation: “She’s forced to confront this animal connection to what it is to be human. At the end she self-combusts.”

Though neither woman plans to go up in smoke anytime soon, their commitment to the art form remains full-throttle.

“As soon as I realized you could make a dance piece that was a full-evening work of art that could tell a story or not tell a story,” Hoefner recalls, “I threw myself into dance.”

Says Kaufman: “No matter the risk, it’s a blessing to make work like this.”

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‘Time, Identity and the Body’

Where: Highways Performance Space, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica

When: 8:30 p.m. today through Saturday

Price: $12 to $15

Contact: (310) 315-1459