Graveyard casting call: ‘Spoon River Rochester’

‌

Slightly ghoulish perhaps, but here’s your chance to be part of the living dead.

RIT amateurs and superstars—students, faculty, staff, clubs, special interest groups, sign language interpreters, storytellers, alumni, friends and families—are invited to join a “live” casting call for “Spoon River Rochester” that ends July 16.

This ambitious community art performance created by Method Machine will be a highlight of the 2014 First Niagara Rochester Fringe Festival. The premiere will take place at 6:30 p.m. Sept. 26 and 27 in downtown Rochester.

Join hundreds of performers who will portray the characters of Edgar Lee Masters’ Anthology (1915) “Spoon River,” a fictional town in which everyone is dead. Fringe Festival audiences will roam the performance as if wandering through a graveyard.

Actors will be assigned a short poem and a character from the Spoon River anthology—and the full text must be performed as is. Memorization is not required, and artists can add their own forms of creative expression: Perform the poem in your native language, compose a song using words from the poem, choreograph a dance or use puppetry to create special effects.

Actors will be assigned poems, notified of performance location, and provided with video instruction for creating simple costumes.