PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : Contraband Exhumes Trappings of ‘60s

Everyone thinks the age of the flower child has come and gone. Wrong. Contraband is here.

But it’s been a few years since Sara Shelton Mann, founder of the San Francisco-based company that visited Highways Thursday, could legitimately qualify for that label.

At 46, the one-time protegee of Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis has taken on a wry, smiling countenance, and when Mann appears, mostly in a black derby hat that suggests the film-version femme fatale of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” we know the flowers have been traded for a kind of weathered allure.

However, the creator of “Mira, Cycle 1”--an expanded, 90-minute treatment of a previously seen work--doesn’t let age interfere with her essential impulses. The signs of the ‘60s are throughout this grab-bag of self-revelation, mystic humming and frenzied dance.

Candles burn, free spirits soar, social hypocrisy is decried, peace and freedom are extolled. It’s deja vu all over again, very loosely organized around a few stanzas of poetry by a 16th-Century Indian, Mirabai.

To put it in Mann’s words: “Our work exists at the intersection of the abandoned child and the nuclear test site within the tangled web of misdirected resources and spiritual amnesia.”

All the pseudo-trappings of profundity are there as well. In thrift-shop chic, the barefoot performers--some sporting skull-design haircuts--sing and play improvised instruments while others go through their maneuvers, a kind of aerobic ritual with much lifting and rolling, flinging and tumbling.

Several ice cakes, punctured with blossom-bearing branches, hang high and create the sound of dripping water on a mound of dirt. At different intervals performers carry urns around, disrobe in a fit of ecstasy, hurl violent epithets, chant trance-like.

Deep thoughts are expounded, such as “The body is a robe stitched together with thought, desire and action.” The partisan Highways audience loved it madly.