How does a small woman wearing glasses and moving mostly in silence on a bare stage keep an audience riveted for nearly an hour? In her Temporary Action Theory, recently performed at the Southern Theater, Laurie Van Wieren showed exactly how 40 years of experience and a whole lot of theatrical savvy add up to an evening of gutsy, sophisticated play. Sampling new vaudeville, postmodern gestural flurries, primeval howls, and Dada absurdism, Van Wieren improvised her way through events that included striding the catwalk above us while mumbling incoherent asides, pulling a rope out of a brick wall with her teeth, and shuffling off to Buffalo. At once bold, hesitant, bemused, and droll, she mined the sublime in the ridiculous. Far more than an accomplished performer, Van Wieren is an entrepreneur who for decades has brought innovative dance and performance work by herself and others to public spaces and alternative venues. Over the years, she has taken deep dives into spectacle and performance art. In the 1980s and ’90s, she formed and led a company called the B-Specifics, and produced a wide range of work, including a cabaret-style homage to the German Dada and feminist artist Hannah Höch at Walker Art Center and a site-specific piece on Lake of the Isles that incorporated fireworks, gold medal skaters, and a hockey team.For several years, she has spearheaded inventive formats that allow artists to get a critical response to their work. As curator and director of programming at the Ritz Theater, she created Monday Live Arts, a monthly series where artists of all stripes could come and experiment within a 15-by-15-foot square, surrounded by an engaged and ready-for-anything audience. Her ongoing monthly 9x22 Dance/Lab at the Bryant-Lake Bowl gives audiences a peek at works-in-progress, as Van Wieren fields critical responses with witty aplomb. This year, she co-curated Radical Recess, part of a public arts project sponsored by the Hennepin Theater Trust, which put lunchtime dance breaks in downtown public spaces like the Mayo Clinic Square and City Center Atrium. A retrospective in 2010 proved that Van Wieren’s expansive, experimental, and highly entertaining oeuvre was well worth a look back. Her recent performance heralds an era as subversive and unpredictable as this remarkably resilient artist.