Procession of the "human spine" (Jessica Dallas/Neon Tommy)

More than 200 red-robed volunteers chanted while careening down hundreds of stairs at the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook in Culver City on Sunday afternoon in a piece of performance art meant to connect humans to one another and to the earth.

The work is the brainchild of Lita Albuquerque, an internationally celebrated installation and environmental artist based in Santa Monica. Albuquerque mounted the performance as part of LA’s ongoing Pacific Standard Time, a celebration of a crucial period in the development of the city’s art scene from 1945 to 1980.

Albuquerque intended the hourlong performance as an extension of “Spine of the Earth”, an ephemeral collection of intertwining geometric shapes she created in 1980 by shaking cups of pigmented earth onto a vast white expanse of dry lakebed in the Mojave Desert

The original “Spine of the Earth” was a lonely exercise in the middle of the desert. Sunday’s re-interpretation was a lively production involving hundreds of people in one of the largest cities in the world.

“It has become a social sculpture,” Albuquerque said. “It has shifted from something abstract to something both physical and social.”

The performance was a family affair. Albuquerque’s two daughters, Isabelle and Jasmine, coordinated and organized the event with their mother.

The performance kicked off with a red-clad skydiver landing at the top of the hill where the procession of volunteers in the “human spine” began. The piece was intended to explain the relationship between people and the planets, Christine Tatomer, one of the volunteer performers, said.

“This piece is all about community and bringing people together,” Tatomer said.

The task of finding 225 volunteers to construct the human spine that snakes down hundreds of steps on the steep hill was aided by a call on social media websites like Facebook, Albuquerque said.

Albuquerque initially envisioned 500 robed participants, but that proved a bit daunting, said Kristen Leahy, one of the performance’s choreographers. “It was challenging enough to coordinate 225 people,” she said. “It’s a lot of repeating information and trying to get everyone to do the same thing.”

Each volunteer had to be dressed the same red garb and shown how to walk and chant in unison to create a living, moving embodiment of the human spine.

During the performance, the volunteers placed their hands on the shoulders of the person directly in front of them and repeatedly chanted the words, “one one-thousand, two one-thousand,” while slowly descending the steps.

“I loved the journey of being here and I’m looking forward to see what I’ll feel like afterwards,” Tatomer said after an early morning rehearsal that preceded the performance. “I think that it will re-trigger me in a positive way.”

“It was really intense, but in the best possible sense,” Kilah Willingham, one of the volunteer performers, said. “You don’t get opportunities to do this everyday. It’s like becoming a part of history.”

Reach reporter Jessica Dallas here.