U.S., Mexican Artists Draw Connections in ‘Danger Zone’ : Theater: Mexico’s influential Felipe Ehrenberg will be part of a lineup of experimental artists from the two countries.

Faced with the thorny realities of a new internationalism, the United States has recently been trying to retool its relationship with Mexico. But there are some spheres that are beyond the pale of NAFTA.

“Terreno Peligroso/Danger Zone,” a Mexico-U.S. Latino Performance Exchange involving experimental artists from the two countries, is a case in point. Produced by Los Angeles’ Josephine Ramirez and Mexico City’s Lorena Wolffer, the project is curated by Ramirez, Wolffer and Guillermo Gomez-Pena.

Funded primarily by the U.S./Mexico Fund for Culture, the exchange has so far included a residency and an artist-audience dialogue at Plaza de la Raza. It continues Thursday through Sunday with performances in the World Arts and Culture/Dance Building on the UCLA campus, after which the artists will travel to perform at the X-TeReSa, Arte Alternativo/Center for Alternative Art in Mexico City.

The L.A.-based participants include Gomez-Pena, Luis Alfaro, Elia Arce, Nao Bustamante and Ruben Martinez and their Mexican counterparts Wolffer, Felipe Ehrenberg, Eugenia Vargas, Elvira Santamaria and Cesar Martinez.

Among the most notable of the visitors is Ehrenberg, 52, who performs his solo “No Man’s Land” on Thursday night only. One of Mexico’s preeminent interdisciplinary artists, he has been an influential figure in the international avant-garde since the late 1960s.

As such, he’s enthusiastic about the potential of such summits. “If art is a metaphor, and the metaphor can contain optimism, then that underlies all the conversations between the two groups (of artists) that are now together,” says Ehrenberg, seated in the living room of a longtime friend’s Silver Lake home.

“Both countries are so scared of each other right now,” Ehrenberg says. “The desire is explicit to establish communication channels.”

Although he has never before performed in the United States, Ehrenberg has long taught, exhibited and otherwise participated in the American art world. “I’ve been in touch with the United States in many different ways for many years, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen the absolute urgency to establish real communicative links that aren’t just touristy or job dependency links,” he says.

Moreover, performance, says Ehrenberg, may be just the medium through which to make those connections. “Performance is the middle field when the other arts are insufficient or when you’re too inhibited by the rules of straight painting, theater or dance,” he says. “When I’d like to add a dimension of creativity, I perform.

“I’ve never thought that performance was an alternative to something else,” continues Ehrenberg, who is also recognized for his work in visual, media and installation art. “It’s an added possibility in creating art. Culture is a cumulative thing.”

An unorthodox essayist and innovator, Ehrenberg was originally trained as a printer, graphic and visual artist. He was a key figure in the development of book art and co-founded the Beau Geste Press while living in Europe during the early 1970s.

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Yet Ehrenberg is most closely associated with the emergence, during the mid-1970s, of the Group Movement, an anti-Establishment school that influenced art making throughout Latin America.

Even today, Ehrenberg--and Mexican performance art in general--blends the populist with the avant-garde. For despite the common misperception of Latin American art as primarily mythic, it’s equally indebted to such anti-elitist European and North American movements as Dada and Fluxus.

Ehrenberg’s “No Man’s Land,” for instance, will demonstrate an array of eclectic influences. “It’s a non-verbal performance (using) medieval, Sephardic, Irish and city music,” he says. “I’ll be shaving--an intimate act that a male does every day.”

Yet Ehrenberg also draws on his indigenous culture. “My main reference is Xipetotec, an Aztec god of renovation (who) changes skins and wears somebody else’s,” he says. “I’m going to cut myself in half and suggest the possibility of taking my skin off and changing skins.”

The performance will be a kind of symbolic rite, but Ehrenberg doesn’t share the yearning for structure that he senses in American performance. “I’ve been reading a lot of these little flyers (for L.A. performances) and the word ritual appears all over the place, underlined,” he says. “(Mexican artists) are not underlining that word at all, yet there’s a pervasive ritualistic rhythm in much of the performance.”

When artists grow up surrounded by such activity, Ehrenberg suggests, they don’t have the same needs. “We have a strong performative tradition,” he says. “Saying Mass is a performance. The street vendors are (giving) performances. There’s a lot of ritual behavior amongst people socially that could well be called performances.”

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Mexico’s artists are also inspired by traditions of traveling political theater and the circus-like carpa , as well as such contemporary phenomena as the highly theatrical organized wrestling.

But the single most important influence remains Ehrenberg’s generation of artists, born during the 1940s and early 1950s. “The younger generation is doing performances and that makes an older generation such as mine once again in demand,” says the artist who is currently a Fellow in Mexico’s National System for Creators.

There are even signs of a renaissance in the medium. “Performances are beginning to take place anywhere: basements, private homes, cafes, small theaters, outside public spaces,” says Ehrenberg.

“There’s a lot going on, but performance is so ephemeral,” he continues. “Every generation has to discover it for themselves.”

* “Terreno Peligroso/Danger Zone,” UCLA World Arts and Culture/Dance Building 200, UCLA (Westwood entrance), Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 and 7 p.m. (different casts each show), $8-$10. (parking $5), (310) 825-2101.