PERFORMANCE ART : A Self-Indulgent ‘Borderama’ at Taper

The glossary in the program for Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s “Borderama” was funnier and more concise than the performance itself. A list of mostly made-up Spanglish words and definitions that offer wry commentary on current issues, the glossary will surely travel with “Borderama,” a work in progress, to Washington, where the show will receive its official premiere in June.

Seen only over the weekend as part of the Mark Taper Forum’s “Virtual Theatre” series at Taper, Too, the rest of “Borderama” offered some of the glossary’s wit and commentary in a more flamboyant, self-indulgent package.

A bizarre onstage spectacle greeted the audience. Red light slashed through smoke effects. A skeleton and ready-to-stuff chickens hung from the ceiling. A cellist with a towering bouffant played through the smoke, her music competing with a rap beat. A woman in a topless outfit and a man in a bottomless outfit mopped the floor. Another man (Gomez-Pena’s collaborator Roberto Sifuentes) patrolled the stage with a spray gun, occasionally shooting spurts of some unidentified vapor at us or up toward the chickens.

Gradually we made out Gomez-Pena in the center of it all, wearing a massive sombrero, boots, striped underpants. In the first part of “Borderama,” he came forward to confess his sin of being tainted by north-of-the-border culture, while interlocutor Sifuentes, standing at a lectern, prodded him to seek the indio within himself.

The show moved on to less coherent fantasies involving Gomez-Pena as President Supervato in 1999, Sifuentes as a hypnotist waving a chicken at Gomez-Pena and, later, as a French anthropologist showing satirical slides of such topics as the ancient creature Tacosaurus. Throughout, there were sly digs at NAFTA, both sides of border culture, and the artists themselves.

But the most vivid image was of Sifuentes taking one of the hanging chickens, draining its blood while muttering “define yourself,” and then pummeling el pollo vigorously with a police baton for at least five minutes. Although this symbolized methods used on Mexican migrant workers (sometimes called pollos ), that point may have seemed secondary to those of us in the first few rows, who found ourselves dodging a shower of bloody chicken pieces.