Common Creativity

Students overran Ritchie Coliseum last night, rapping about kittens, professing their love to strangers, building cardboard cars and playing leap frog - all amid reams of aluminum foil and piles of shredded paper in a performance art event called TASK.

Part improv theater, part art rave, part random cardboard sculpting, TASK differed from most other art forms. Its participants became the art in this unusual performance German artist Oliver Herring has conducted in cities around the world.

Herring tapped into the cumulative creativity of the more than 100 students who attended the event, which had three simple rules:

Draw a task from the box. Complete it. Replace it with another.

A chaotic mess of singing, skipping, building, tackling, shouting and anything else imaginable ensued.

A giant white table with the all-important box of tasks stood at the center of the room. People trudged through the room littered with confetti and streamers as several cardboard structures sprouted up around the room.

Shannon Simerly and three friends erected a two-story cardboard house, complete with a window, door, garage, mailbox and Christmas lights.

"We didn't know what to expect," said Simerly, a sophomore studio art major, adding that the extra credit she was receiving for her art class sweetened the deal. "It's a little crazy, but fun,"

At one point, junior interactive performance art major Hudson Taylor stepped up to the microphone to sing the TASK song, which he had used to promote the event.

"This is a chance you must not pass. So come out tonight and get off your ... TASK."

No one was safe from the tasks, not even art lecturer Rex Weil. A student ran up to him and threw confetti on his head.

Sarah Laing, the event's only casualty, slipped and split her chin open while running around the auditorium.

"I was being a fighter plane and it all went horribly wrong," she said.

Herring mainly walked around recording, but he found time to get into the act too, at one point engaging in a cup-and-string "phone" conversation with a student.

Later, a student came up to him and wrote her contact information on his hand.

"Her task was to talk to somebody really cute and write down her name and number," Herring said.

Herring's journey began a few years ago when he had a show of video compositions in London, he said. He decided to open his apartment to anyone who wanted to walk in and have them create art while he videotaped them.

As each stranger entered his home, he realized that people lacked creative outlets. He then added live people creating anything and everything on the spot to his gallery show and the live performance art, TASK was born.

"One of the best by-products is that there are a lot of people who felt this yearning to be creative and found like-minded people and became friends," Herring said. "We didn't just stimulate community building, we actually did it."

Junior art major Kyla Whitley, who helped plan the event, said this was a new way to experience art.

"The most important part is to have fun and interact with the material rather than just looking at it," Whitley said, while discussing a roof and exit for the cardboard maze she was building with a friend.

Freshman journalism major Justin Cousson even approached Herring before leaving to show his appreciation after a fun-filled evening of playing duck duck goose and drawing a picture of the universe on the floor.

"This has been the most beautiful experience of my life," Cousson said. "It's like being a kid again. It's simple, random fun."

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