PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : ‘Border Brujo’: From Aztec to High Tech : Performance Art: Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s twisted border travelogue offers live and video versions of life through the eyes of a shaman.

In Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s “Border Brujo II,” the brujo, or shaman, labels the border region the ultimate casa de cambio-- a full-service house of exchange where “anything can change into anything.”

Dollars can be changed into pesos and the brujo can change “from Aztec to high tech without missing a beat.”

That is precisely what happens, and rather stunningly, in Gomez-Pena’s new, multimedia version of his twisted border travelogue, which incorporates a video by Isaac Artenstein.

For the first half of the show (closing tonight at 8 at Sushi Performance Gallery), Gomez-Pena performs live, seated at a table adorned with candles, a few props and the radio that provides the musical and commercial prompts for brujo incarnations. In the second half, Gomez-Pena lies prone before the audience while Artenstein’s video--which simply depicts the brujo on a slightly more elaborate set--is projected onto a screen, with the electronic brujo continuing Gomez-Pena’s multi-persona litany of sometimes angry, sometimes funny observations about life on the border.

The purist may ask: “Why a video? I paid to see a live performance, not watch television.” (The video is, in fact, part of a work-in-progress--a feature-length film a la performance artist Spaulding Gray’s “Swimming to Cambodia.” Do they dare call it “Swimming to America”?)

The decision to add a high-tech element to Gomez-Pena’s decidedly low-tech stage show was wise. On a physical level, it allows the audience to see, through Artenstein’s selection of camera angles and deft editing, the brujo up close and personal. Gomez-Pena is a compelling live performer, and his electronic counterpart--with searing eyes and sneering visage--is no less powerful.

On a psychic level, the multimedia approach provides another realm, another dimension for the brujo to enter. When Gomez-Pena is performing live, seated and speaking into a microphone, he seems like a disc jockey broadcasting on a border radio station with an otherworldly wattage. Video makes the border brujo a mystical media mogul. The live brujo can rest while his electronic alter ego dramatizes the “tormented privilege” of living in California. Imagine turning on the TV, flipping through the cable channels and coming across a guy in a wrestling mask, sitting at his throne on the shrine of border culture, and speaking in tongues.

He also speaks Indian dialects, Spanish and English, and their bastardizations: “Spanglish” and “Inglenol.” Many of Gomez-Pena’s clever word plays require at least some bilingual ability on the part of audience. Some are further obscured by his often rapid-fire delivery and, at Thursday’s opening performance, by the nuances of amplification and Sushi’s murky acoustics.

But toward the end, as the live brujo rises and performs with the video brujo , a gripping visual scene unfolds with the dual images. It is slightly impaired by the presence of the video projector, which is necessarily in close proximity. If the creators continue this multimedia approach, the effect would be enhanced by a rear screen projector.

Now that the brujo also has an electronic life, perhaps the live brujo can leave the confines of the theater and return to the streets, where confrontational performance art is most effective and where Gomez-Pena has often exhibited his political poetics. There’s an intersection in rural Carlsbad begging for a command performance.