STAGE REVIEW : ‘Warriors’: Images of Hope, Anger

The “Fire in the Treasure House” series at Highways continues this weekend, and the title does not refer to the recent burning of Windsor Castle. More like the unquenchable embers of racially torn Los Angeles.

The “treasure” refers to the artists’ mother lode: the fire in the belly, the smoldering in the psyche, the fury in the soul that all need reconciling. That reconciliation is being explored in this ongoing encounter of Asian-American and African-American performance and visual artists.

“The Warriors’ Council,” dealing with the artist as warrior in the many playing fields of racial strife and self-defense, is also the first such coming-together piece specifically commissioned by Highways.

Like many commissioned pieces, some of it works and some of it feels too reverential. When they mix, politics and art can be as toxic as they can be exhilarating. “Warriors’ Council” is clearly well-intentioned. But its means can be disarmingly literal.

Where words sometimes fail us or seem too calculated for the scope of the ideas, music rarely disappoints. The original music composed and performed by Trudy Archdale, Don Barrozo and Lee Harting is perhaps the most eloquent language of the evening. Armed with a variety of synthesizers and a few instruments, the Vibe Tribe, as Archdale, Barrozo and Harting call themselves, lends consistently intriguing support.

What it supports is primarily separate but equal snatches of performance by Keith Antar Mason, Dan Kwong, Michelle T. Clinton, Francisco Letelier and G. Colette Jackson (a late replacement for the previously announced Linda Burnham). Occasionally the pieces overlap. Occasionally they are effectively braided together, such as Kwong’s systematic slamming of baseballs into a net standing some 10 feet tall while two stories are simultaneously recited. Kwong never misses a ball.

Standing in a common room surrounded by small, smooth rocks hanging by threads, with projections hitting the back wall, perfectly still performers swing the rocks in circles to form an insulating space. A cage. A defining ring.

It’s an interesting war room. And there are as many ways of seeing this meshing of space, gesture and sound as there are stories to weave through it. Mason hitting an anvil as he angrily decries the ease with which black children die in this country is a formidable image--far more effective in its visual shorthand than the words he speaks:

“How much does mercy cost on the corner of Florence and Normandie?” The question hangs in the air like a bad odor. It is reprised later by Kwong in one of his many guises as a samurai for the arts affirming that “Rage . . . sure beats getting along.”

Jackson pantomiming martial arts while Mason speaks, however, is less forceful than the double negative: “So many warriors are already gone whose names we can’t not mention. . . .”

Of all the performers, Kwong is the leanest and clearest, introducing contradictory verbal images with the slicing dexterity of a karate chop.

Clinton, on the other hand, is far too transparent in her eagerness to impart some knowledge of her “warrior training and girl-hero techniques” to any willing woman in the audience--or in her earnest wish to pay homage to her teacher, present at the performance seen. Awash in so much sincerity, can political rectitude be far behind? And what is one to make of the term girl hero ? Far more resonant is Maya Angelou’s defiant call for “she-roes.”

It falls to Letelier to speak the most eloquent piece of the evening: the oft-repeated and, in his mouth, stirring account of the death of his father, Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier, killed by a car bomb in Washington in 1976. The moment encompasses not only the filial bereavement, but also the fierce attachment to “the mystery of the country I am from” and the chafing, confounding recollection of taking his father’s body home to its final resting place.

The ending is a parade of votive candles in a peace offering to the healing of divisions. Who would argue with that? By the same token, who would not have predicted it was coming? Along the path leading to this point some images and lines remain unalterably with us. But it’s hard to escape the sense that this “Council” is sitting under the volcano. Echoing through the effortful effort at conciliation are Kwong’s words: “This jihad rages in me.”

“The Warriors’ Council,” Highways, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica. Friday-Saturday, 8:30 p.m. Ends Saturday. $10; (213) 660-8587. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.