Miami University – Leonard Theater – Oxford, Ohio – 2.28.06
I emailed the following call to some of the poets, performers, and video-artists in Oxford and Cincinnati:
I have scheduled Tuesday February 28th as a night of interventions in Leonard Theatre. I invite your productions of collaborative ambiences, outbursts, videos, traps, and contributions towards setting up a series of objects of desire for those who might wish to spectate and/or intervene w/ them as they choose. Of special interest is work that asks for or seems to demand audience reciprocity or counter-intervention. Interdisciplinary work is encouraged, though "readings" might also be engaged.
I was looking for a diversity of engagements with the complex opacities of a faced and facing (if not faceless) audience. It seems clear now that the audience, no less and no more opaque to us than ever, consistently passive before this spectacle like most others, can be "moved" easily enough – for a moment at least, by voice or image or both, by silence as also by noise as these cross in modes of irony and excess. But this is not a startling discovery. Reciprocity remains a kind of Astrodome ceiling.
Participants included William R. Howe, cris cheek, Keith Tuma, Rachel Smith, Rachel Chase, Paul Morrow, Kevin R. Hollo, Aaren Yandrich, Dave Rothfuss, Peter Castaldo, Brian Marina Brown, Steven Paul Lansky, Leigh Waltz, Sarah Mann, and myself. The evening was filmed and edited for the web by Aaren Yandrich. Special thanks to LA Howe for her technical assistance that evening.
jUStin!katKOMay 2006