The Confusion of ‘Dr. Chi!’

Cineastes and cynics may well be intrigued by “Dr. Chi!,” concluding its premiere engagement this weekend at Highways Performance Space. Students of performance art should consider it educational, both as periodic display table of the form’s elements and textbook example of its liabilities.

Interdisciplinary artist Michael Sakamoto wears even more hats than usual: writer, director, choreographer, performer, visual artist, and so on. These multiple chapeaus tilt toward simultaneous homage and deconstruction, focusing on the title archvillain.

This Expressionistic antihero transcends era. From Weimar to early U.S. talkies, taking in the Berlin Wall and the French New Wave, Dr. Chi’s blend of golem and Dr. Mabuse just keeps regenerating. That both the icon and his history are fabricated in this blend of butoh, B-movie parody, sociology and neurasthenia suggests why the program notes are more coherent than the onstage proceedings.

These transpire in a stark black-box setting dominated by a center stage projection screen/entrance, initially displaying German titles of an imagined Chi excursion, “Architect of Fear.” Then, frieze-framed in lighting designer Jeff Cain’s evocative effects, evil henchpeople appear: butch femme fatale Helga (the valiantly mimetic Jill Miller), whip-wielding Meister Ming (Sakamoto), and Brunhilde (the extravagant Franc Baliton), an ambisexual morph of Peter Lorre and Gale Sondergaard.

The arrival of Dr. Chi (the expertly stylized Michael Morrissey) moves things from bizarre to Bizarro, with a Fritz Lang-issue mayor (the game Robert Berg) and a scent-spritzing scientist (Rochelle Fabb, appealingly inane) completing the ensemble. Relying heavily on pidgin-German and the real thing, the bewildering trajectory culminates with a gonzo brain-transferal sequence.

More ersatz credits segue into a ‘60s Cold War goof dubbed “The Forsaken.” Sakamoto is now the resurrected Chi, and everyone shifts archetypes accordingly. Here faux-Gallic dialogue and oblique plotting generate some laughs and still more perplexity.

The final installment finds Sakamoto, now resembling a Haight-Ashbury record store clerk, in a pas de deux with Miller, and the rest of the cast joining in a symbolist tableau vivant. This kinetically arresting, thematically baffling sequence attempts to pull the strands together around the Liebestod from “Tristan and Isolde.”

The work never jells, plagued by severe discrepancies of tempo and articulation, with far too much foreign language text. Unquestionably respectable in intent, ultimately “Dr. Chi!” is a mosaic comprising too many ambitious pieces and not enough epoxy.

*

“Dr. Chi!,” Highways Performance Space, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica. Saturday-Sunday, 8:30 p.m. Ends Sunday. $13-$15. (310) 315-1459. Running time: 1 hour, 10 minutes.