Bradley University
Office of Public Relations
309 677-2242

For immediate release



Cross-disciplinary group exhibition by faculty members opens December 2

Peoria, IL (Nov. 20, 2009) Paged, Staged, and Engaged: Reimaging the Poem as Interactive Performance, a cross-disciplinary group exhibition by Bradley faculty members will open in the Hartmann Center gallery on December 2. 
 
An opening reception will be held on the 2nd from 5 to 7 p.m. in the gallery.
 
Using Illinois Poet Laureate Kevin Stein's poem "On Being a Nielsen Family," this collaborative project interrogates our culture's historical privileging of the printed page as sole site of poetic performance. Instead, this collaborative project proposes a cardinal notion of poetry:  that poems are events, not stories about events.  
 
Project collaborators have thus fashioned a collage of print, audio, video that challenges cultural assumptions about how poems are created and received.  In short, the project's artist-collaborators have aimed to re-imagine traditional print forms, welcome current technological innovations, and encourage reader/listener participation in the creative act.  
 
In the process, the poem's literal and figurative "space" has transitioned from the historically orderly confines of the printed page to a physical realm of interactive performance. Such fooling around evokes in both poet and reader the self-sufficient joy of reshuffling the perceptual deck of cards one has been handed by previous reading.

The artist/collaborators in the project are Gary Will and Robert Rowe of the Department of Art, George Brown, Theatre, Jim Ferolo, Chad Udell, Ed Lamoureaux, and Scott Cavanah, Interactive Media.

The show runs through  December 18.
________________________
Kath Conver
Senior Director of Public Relations
Bradley University
309 677-2242
mkc@bradley.edu
http://www.bradley.edu