Collage

Once upon a time, there was an odd old gas station in Long Beach, designed to look as if it had been built in the days of the Mission Fathers. A few years back, with the pumps disconnected, it became a neat, comfortable, rather odd restaurant called the Filling Station (cute name, if you didn't think about it too long). I once had a "Mexican blintz" there, which was cream cheese and jalapenos wrapped in a flour tortilla. After a while, the restaurant was simply known as the Station.

That staple of the California beach bar scene--the wet bikini contest "wall of fame"--has prompted a boycott by South Bay feminists against a popular Redondo Beach nightspot. Moose McGillycuddy's, a King Harbor bar and restaurant, became the target of a petition drive and letter-writing campaign this week after its general manager refused a female patron's request to remove a wall-sized collage made up of snapshots of contestants in the Wednesday night bikini contest it held last summer.

With their emphasis on spoken and graphic images that link her personal life to the mythic subtexts of American advertising, Heidi Duckler's site-specific performance events for Collage Dance Theatre increasingly belong to the art world far more than the realm of dance. Performed Thursday in and around an empty swimming pool at the Sherman Oaks/Van Nuys Recreation Center, Duckler's new "Life in the Lap Lane" uses dance merely as a garnish.

The music was derivative and gimmicky. The stage show recapitulated familiar pop antics. But Zapp's concert Saturday at the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim was an exhilarating, romping success. The nuts and bolts of the show mattered far less than the spirit in which the Ohio-based funk group and its leader, Roger Troutman, nailed them together.

High production values and simplistic satire characterized Heidi Duckler and Bonnie Lavin's "Chaos: Something Normally Present," offered Saturday by Collage Dance Theater at the Downtown Dance Studio. Employing slinky costumes, wildly oversize props, colorful slide projections and some striking original music, this 50-minute dance drama traced the imposition of mechanical regimentation upon an original state of free-flowing, playful chaos.

Pianist Andrew Hill has always traveled through jazz on his own path, at his own speed, and in his own good time. From the release of his first albums in the '60s to the present, he has been a musical outsider, taking what he feels he can use from the jazz mainstream, employing it in a fashion that satisfies his own singular creative vision.

It's hard to shake the feeling that Heidi Duckler's new "Out of Circulation" ought to be funnier than it is. Or nastier than it is. After all, this local site-specific choreographer is known for satirizing Americans' love affair with cars and phones and limited women's roles and fashions and a few other restrictive obsessions.

Highly metaphorical and obsessively personal, Andrei Tarkovsky's "The Mirror" can be difficult for audiences raised on the mainstream movies of Hollywood. Tarkovsky's 1976 film (screening Friday night as part of UC Irvine's Through the Looking Glass series) is as anti-Hollywood as it gets. What there is of a plot shifts in space and time as if all the characters and events are moving in dreams. No tidy resolutions, no easy steps from here to there.

Collage was invented at the beginning of the century to bring a little bit of life's grittiness back into an art that was becoming so specialized that it seemed to be losing its connection to the rest of the world. Picasso and Braque inserted newspaper clippings and other odds and ends from the urban environment into their abstract pictures in order to revitalize their formal experiments.

Francesca Danieli, a late-blooming artist whose collages were described as "disturbing and seductive" and whose video and photographic projects challenged mortality and contemporary political rhetoric, died of breast cancer June 27 at a Baltimore hospice. She was 52. A nationally honored photo collagist, Danieli was more widely known for "One Nice Thing," a film she made with Julia Kim Smith.