PERFORMANCE ART : ‘Treasure House’ at Highways

With anger hot and cool, but with only a few hints of reconciliation, “Fire in the Treasure House,” a 10-week series of events that purport to help heal the rift between the African-American and Asian-American communities of the city, opened Thursday with the insular, amateurish three-part “Flashpoints at Ground Zero” at Highways in Santa Monica.

Lynel Gardner is very angry at his father in “Internal Warfare,” and the history he presents--a childhood of neglect, abuse from others and even being set up by his dad to take the fall in a drug deal--justifies virtually all of his rage.

Much of this emerges as art as therapy, with Gardner permitting sequences of uncontrolled tone. Still, at the end he expresses some forgiveness and reconciliation because his father, now a parolee, is trying to change.

In “Tokyo Rose,” presented as a work in progress, a coolly angry Rika Ohara attempts to rehabilitate the reputation of Iva Toguri d’Aquino, the woman accused of broadcasting enemy propaganda for the Japanese during World War II (and pardoned by President Gerald Ford in 1977).

Ohara and composer John Payne, through the latter’s electronic deconstruction of the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, also make some kind of statement about New Year’s Eve performances of Beethoven’s music that commemorate Japanese student soldiers of that period. But what is unclear.

With her inwardly focused intensity, Ohara elicits sympathy for the accused, even as she disco dances and lip-syncs to excerpts presumably based on original broadcasts. But it takes more than a few slides of 1945 newspaper headlines and transcripts of the charges against the woman to make Ohara’s point understandable, much less persuasive.

Long Nguyen’s “Improvisation With Video Camera” solo appears to be two linked pieces, the second effectively canceling out the first. He starts by challenging the nature of the images of himself he projects onto a video monitor. He raises important issues but on the fly, amid lots of insignificant material, almost as if he’s afraid to stand behind his quite admirable ideas.

His hope for a new social order--based on “generosity . . . not on the I (eye)”--which he articulates at the close of this part is betrayed by the long la-di-da movement sequence, including swimming fish imitations, in the second half.