PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : Enigmatic Program by Derevo

“We are not confident of anything, but something makes us live our lives together,” says a statement in the printed program of the Soviet performance group Derevo, seen Friday night at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. In “Five Characters,” they evoke a similar mixture of nihilistic gloom, awkward coexistence and glimmers of hope.

At first, the infantile gibbering, the partial nudity, the spastic stumbling and the water sloshing made the work look like a throwback to the ‘60s. Despite the extraordinary intensity of the performers--whose names are not listed in the program and who took the most fleeting and furtive of bows at the end--this nonverbal piece appears to hark back to the heyday of the Living Theater and Peter Brook’s “Marat/Sade.”

But the work also seems expressive of a particularly Russian outlook, with an array of characters fleetingly embodying pure states of goodness, evil and madness, as well as the bumbling “superfluous man” of 19th-Century novels. The performers’ movements also seem to have a distinctively Russian range, encompassing contortionist buffoonery, suave clowning and fastidiously controlled postures of hollow-eyed anomie.

At one point, a character stands utterly still, with his shoulders hunched and his face hardened into a look of slow-witted evil. His foil is a bald man with empty blue eyes who slowly, painfully, orbits a woman in white.

The musical effects--mostly sparse knockings and crashes produced on percussion instruments and a fluting plainsong sustained for awhile by the two women--discreetly underlined to the proceedings.