Activist encourages students to "empower change

Performer and gay political activist Tim Miller worked with students enrolled in the Sagan course Political/Social Cabaret this week. The 14 students in the class attended workshops all week with Miller, culminating in a performance on Saturday night in the studio theatre. The performance was titled "Body Maps."

Miller came to OWU specifically to work with Dr. Ed Kahn's students in the new university theory-into-practice initiative associated with the Sagan Fellows program.

The new program seeks to incorporate theory into practice, having students participate in hands-on work outside of the classroom.

Kahn's course, Political/Social Cabaret, is one of the six new Sagan courses offered this spring. It aims to mesh performance with political and social activism.

Miller's work seeks to achieve similar goals. Since the beginning of his career in the early 1980s, his performance work has focused on finding his identity as a gay man in America.

In his performances, books and teaching methods, Miller explained the complexity of this plight:

"As a young gay kid, I began to write literally to save my life, so as to not disappear and become a statistic," he said. "There was no alternative for me. I think this is why we all feel the need to write about ourselves in an autobiographical sense. Feeling disempowered makes you disappear."

Political events intermixed with the social context of the time have highly influenced Miller's evolution as an artist.

Some events that Miller says greatly inspired his work include the San Francisco murder of the gay political figure Harvey Milk, as well as the defeat of Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election. Gore supported immigration rights for same-sex couples, a cause that Miller had been supporting for years.

Both Milk and Gore took firm stances on the increase of gay rights. The defeat of both political characters deeply affected Miller and led to significant performance work in his career.

Through the workshops this week, Miller sought to challenge students and bring to light the impassioned, often personal issues of each individual in the class.

Miller asked students to let their hair down, fake orgasm and pinpoint those telling, transformative moments in their lives that almost everyone experiences.

"As much as this sort of work makes people vulnerable, it also opens up a new sense of readiness," Miller said.

Students drew on each other with spurts of washable markers and created abstract maps of their bodies.

Miller described the task of knowing your body as the first step in beginning to know yourself.

"Being in our bodies can bring very powerful images, events and memories out that we carry every day in our flesh and blood," he said.

This exercise evolved into the title of Saturday's performance, "Body Maps."

Junior Gloria Clark, a student in Kahn's class, said that she felt a newly formed bond between her classmates after their work with Miller this week.

"Tim has the gift of giving people the courage to talk about what they feel strongly about," she said. "I know that both members of our class and people in the audience were inspired to change, themselves and society, after Saturday's performance."

Freshman Sam Irvine, who attended "Body Maps", said that the performance was very relatable and moving.

"People really opened up, which you don't see too much in many performances here," he said.

The performance space differed from shows regularly produced by Ohio Wesleyan Department of Theatre & Dance.

Performers brought in audience members two at a time into the dimly lit space, personally showing them their "body maps," large drawings made earlier in the week that were taped to the back wall of the studio theatre.

"The way the show was introduced with each person's body drawing was very effective and informative," Irvine said.

Acoustic music by Bjork played in the background as audience members were encouraged to sit on the floor of the theatre to make their experience more intimate.

"Body Maps" sought to transcend performer-audience boundaries. Questions were posed to the audience throughout the performance; the crowd was not afraid to speak up.

Audience members were also asked to get up and separate themselves by sex into two separate areas of the theatre.

This participatory game was an introduction for freshman Andrea Kraus' piece, which talked about her desire as a female to grow a beard.

In Saturday's "Body Maps," each student performed a three-minute piece that they developed during their workshop time with Miller.

The individual pieces ranged from personal stories about family dynamics to pointedly political works about the relationship between Islam and terrorism.

The pieces worked together to form a cohesive, passionate performance geared towards sparking stimulation amongst audience members and, in the words of Miller, "ruffling some feathers."

In his book "1001 Beds," Miller's work is described as a means "to use the space of performance both to raise awareness and to empower change."

He certainly infuses this sense of activism into his workshops.

Miller's work with the class challenged students to truly pinpoint their area of focus for Saturday's performance.

"What is the piece that you need to make?" he asked students. "Grab the most charged creative and human space and dare to fling it beyond our reach so we have to follow."

Miller remained a dynamic and vibrant force throughout the ten hours of workshop time that the students in Kahn's class had with Miller toprepare for Saturday's performance.