Performance Art

Wandering downtown L.A. at night can often prove eventful, but director David Dratewka is taking no chances. For the "traveling performance event" he calls "Finding Space," two actors serve as tour guides, leading the audience from the reflecting pools of California Plaza to locations within a two-block radius where various site-specific pieces await them. Composer Nathan Birnbaum complements the fanciful plaza waterworks with four songs in different styles.

What is this thing called performance art? One good way to find out: Tune in "Art: Off the Wall," tonight's edition of KCET-TV's insightful "California Stories" series (7:30 p.m., Channel 28). Performance art--increasingly being called simply "performance"--is an umbrella term for several sorts of artistic expression.

"Legal Eagles" may not have been the best movie of 1986, but it did offer an intriguing scene with Daryl Hannah as a screwy performance artist. As co-star Robert Redford watched bemusedly, Hannah's character put on a show that featured sensual prancings, provocative slides, pyrotechnics and a startlingly personal monologue. The scene was pure Hollywood flash, but it probably reflected what most people think about performance art: It's wild, unpredictable and, more often than not, incoherent.

Lawrence Hyman is doomed to failure. Although he forbids laughter and demands that his audience generate "waves of indifference" toward his performance art fable, "Max, Rapunzel and the Night," this hyperkinetic storyteller ends up swamped in humor and empathy. There are worse fates. His narrative, presented Thursday at Highways, turns out to be a double quest.

Those who saw Yoshi Oida in Peter Brook's "The Mahabharata" at the 1987 Los Angeles Festival know he's a galvanic actor: visceral and vibrantly expressive with both words and movement. But those who see his "Interrogations"--a solo performance, with music by Dieter Trustedt--will get only a glimpse of these talents, the man without the fireworks.

"Summer Sushi/A Performance Series" begins at 8 o'clock tonight at the Del Mar Communications Center (Public Access Television, Channel 37), 240 10th St. here. Co-sponsored by downtown San Diego's Sushi gallery, the series features nationally prominent performance artists in their latest works.

With the increasing popularity of yoga in this city -- from power and Kundalini to Ashtanga flow and "urban" yoga -- it seemed inevitable that a kind of terpsichorean yoga would rear its posturing head. At least that's what dancer-yoga teacher-choreographer Laurah Klepinger attempted in a misguided evening of three solo works at Highways Performance Space on Thursday.

A while ago, a group of us were leaving an experimental theater show when someone grumbled, "These performance artists!They can never finish anything!" It was a legitimate complaint, especially since the condemned performer's work intended a beginning, middle and end. Sometimes that's not the intention--then it's the viewer's problem. As if listening to all these stirrings and rumblings, performer Jan Munroe has designed a work meant to put all this performance art stuff in some perspective.

It's hard to believe, but it seems that adults in this country are in better shape now than our kids. Isn't that something, since it's youth that we all are so enamored of? It certainly conjures up visions of kiddies slouching in front of the TV, doesn't it, watching somebody else do the action, wolfing down fistfuls of popcorn and chips, guzzling chock-full-of-sugar pop, can after can.