Experimental performance group to hold auditions

Senior honor project provides opportunity for creativity

Willing to "risk temporary physical, emotional, and/or social damage for the sake of art and personal exploration"? Interested in guerilla art, guerilla theatre and performance art? Maybe you took a second look at the KIOSK message with the preceding information. Or maybe you're just a experimental performance artist at heart. Listen up: senior Max Truax has found you a niche.

As an honors project for his double major in Dance and Art, Truax developed the temporarily unnamed performing group to develop the more obscure end of artistic performance. "We're trying for a group of people who are willing to risk anything for performance," Truax said. He plans to weed-out potential members of the group through a series of auditions beginning this evening, hoping for a solid group of 10 or 15.

Truax has roughly outlined a schedule for performances - initially improvs and brief sketches - to run every two or three weeks. As time progresses, he hopes to expand the group's involvement with various genres of performance art ranging from music to sculpture to multi-media events. "Maybe we can collaborate with sculptors, or composition majors on setting some of the pieces to music," Truax said.

Truax will play the role of choreographer for most pieces, and will also collaborate as a co-director with senior Tommy Kriegsmann, a theater major with an emphasis in directing. However, Truax did not want the performances to be focused solely on choreography. "Most choreography is structured improvisation and very rigid," he said. "Rather than set movements, the right way [to choreograph] is working from the base of creative images and ideas." Truax used the example of telling someone to "imagine that your body is filled with flowers" as a creative improv for performers to work with. "We'll give the person a starting point and an ending point, and the things in between are up to them."

"We want to experiment with different sites, resources, ideas and different artistic methods," he said. Unintimidated by the unknown, Truax plans to hold each performance in a different creative space in attempts to match the right mood to the right piece. Possible sites include back-yards, attics, basements, the arb, and even Missler's was brought up, though Truax noted, "It may be tough to get permission with that one."

In addition to finding the right setting for the pieces, the chemistry between the performer and the space in which they are working is stressed. Some works will involve the whole group while others may consist of monologues or small clusters of performers. "All members will be 'company members,' but not necessarily all in each piece," Truax said.

It's a wonder such a group has previously been unheard of at Oberlin. However, given its ambition and creative-base, Truax's honor project could be the beginning of a much larger tradition in experimental performance. "We're interested in things that are more real and at the cores of humanity and the mind, and are also ritual," he said. "The general idea is to try things that are not necessarily illegal, but are not usually encouraged." His only instructions for auditionees: Dress to move.