Yoshiko Chuma Brings Her Exotic Blend to La MaMa Yoshiko Chuma Coque Salcedo and Rebeca Medina at La MaMa in a multimedia production based on this artist's far-flung travels. Before each performance of Yoshiko Chuma's "π=3.14...Ramallah-Fukushima-Bogotá Endless Peripheral Border," at La MaMa's Galleria over the weekend, the Japanese artist Takashi Arai made a daguerreotype. That process from photography's beginnings, in which an image is produced on a silvered copper plate, is far from instant. The exposure takes many minutes, as do the chemical dipping and spraying, the holding over a flame, the drying and the framing. Some of the ideas Ms. Chuma is pursuing in this multidisciplinary performance have to do with the process of making art, the time it takes, the conversion of actuality into memento. The long title points to more: the far-flung places she's traveled to in recent years, interviewing people and finding local collaborators. Though not infinite like the digits of pi, a full list of her themes would extend quite a distance. The performance proper began with Ms. Chuma dancing violently in the light of a projected video. Beside her onstage, the Colombian musician Felipe Gómez Ossa played electric guitar. To the side and behind the audience, the violinist Aska Kaneko and the trombonist Christopher McIntyre added unsettling sounds. Ms. Chuma kept slamming into Mr. Gómez Ossa, grabbing his guitar and whacking the strings, violating personal boundaries. Less directly but just as forcefully, she conducted the other musicians. Although Ms. Chuma's works, with their profusion of methods and material, can seem like grab bags, she is a tightly controlling artist. The sections of futile action in this performance - the daguerreotype equipment laid out only to be put away again, the rope unspooled only to be spooled again, the restless posing for a daguerreotype that is never taken - were no doubt intentional, played against the urgent speed of Ms. Chuma and four other dancers. Purposely disconcerting but nonetheless ill conceived were excerpts from interviews with Palestinians: testimony about checkpoints, borders, incarceration and death, recited flatly by the dancer Mina Nishimura. By taking these stories out of context and mixing them in with everything else, Ms. Chuma suggested false equivalence. The dance elements were suggestive in less objectionable ways. Ms. Nishimura's solo struck a fascinating balance between disjointedness and delicacy, a beautiful brokenness. Rebeca Medina, looking over her shoulder and flopping around on the floor, was hauntingly loose, as was Coque Salcedo, falling to his knees and springing up. Their dances, repeating in loops as Mr. Gómez Ossa's guitar cut in and out, both related to one another and didn't. At other points, Ms. Medina and Mr. Salcedo danced salsa together in ballroom position, as Mr. Gómez Ossa played something danceable. At the end, the other musicians joined them onstage, and Ms. Chuma indicated that she wanted the audience to join them, too. It was part command, part vague invitation, and it took some time for people to respond - a final example of Ms. Chuma's trouble in getting her ideas across.