PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : Akilah Nayo Oliver in a Work of Rage in Santa Monica

“Dissectations: Anatomy of Rage,” seen Thursday night at Highways in Santa Monica, is stuffed with incantations, confessions, grovelings, whimperings, confrontations, entreaties and the calm (if often graphically descriptive) voices of reason. The rage is about AIDS, incest, rape and racism, subjects that are mercilessly--and sometimes literally--shoved in the audience’s faces by an unremittingly intense seven-member cast.

Graceful, birdlike Akilah Nayo Oliver, author of the piece, glides around the stage calling out her message with uptilted head and embracing arms. Evoking a scene of childhood incest--in which the words of an Ella Fitzgerald song on the record player weave themselves into the story--she straddles a chair, putting a pair of white panties on her head while recounting the most intimate, unbearable moments.

Director Keith Antar Mason’s mode is aggressive and bullying, flailing with the arms of a basketball guard. Keith Coleman, speaking with eyes half-closed and a tensed body, painfully recalls sexual violation from a white stepfather. Kokuma Desira Rugley is a whimpering drug addict with the AIDS virus who hugs herself in near-immobility.

Houston Blue speaks directly to the audience with simple gestures evocative of entreaty and prayer. Dion Snider is the gadfly and smart aleck. Poet Michelle T. Clinton, who crafted the “healing ceremony” at the end, sternly upbraids black men for lack of sexual control.

The glue of the piece--which repeats tonight--is its repetition, in single and unison voices, of key phrases, and the fervid physicality of the performers. The rhythms of call-and-response borrowed from Pentecostal worship and the bodies curled in fetal and twisted postures on the floor, “feeling” the suffering of the speaker, make this difficult hour a compelling experience.

And yet there was a nagging problem. It is one thing to confront an audience, to beg and harangue, to throw condoms or flowers. But even the most ruthlessly demanding art cannot compel anyone to do anything. During the after-performance discussion, for which the entire audience stayed (it was somehow unthinkable to leave) some of the performers demanded to know what we were going to do .

To say that is to confuse the workings of art with those of a political rally. Art wraps a message in a fine, complex net of truth and illusion--and leaves us in peace to sort things out for ourselves.