OnStage: Or, rather, not quite on stage

As Abby DeSanto emerged from the reflecting pool at Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis, audience members knew "Cityceased" would be no ordinary performance. Then again, they already were standing in front of the imposing mausoleum, surrounded by rolling hills, walls of crypts and acres of gravestones.

DeSanto had just arrived in the play's City of the Dead, where the deceased fret about being forgotten by the living. Shaking as much from the cold as from the sudden recognition that she was dead, DeSanto was greeted by a perky Amy Schweickhardt. But DeSanto recognized Kristopher Lencowski (also the play's director), and the two romped away up the hill.

Audience members, some carrying candles, traipsed along behind them. For the next 80 minutes, the audience walked in the dark, stopping to watch poignant vignettes about love and loss beneath the hanging tendrils of a willow, around a fire bowl or next to Lakewood's stately pond.

Lencowski's not the only director staging a performance in a nontraditional setting this month. Nor is he alone in seeking to involve the audience. The local on-site theater troupe Skewed Visions is staging the two-part "Strange Love: Device & Performance," inspired by the film "Dr. Strangelove," in the basement of the Casket Arts building in Minneapolis. And Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad, co-artistic directors of the BodyCartography Project, are restaging their Momentum Dance Series piece from last year, "Holiday House," in their home in south Minneapolis.

No disrespect

"Lakewood Cemetery is such a beautiful, peaceful place and an incredible landscape," said Lencowski, a freelance actor and director who's worked with the Jungle Theater and Theatre de la Jeune Lune.

After meeting with Ron Gjerde, the cemetery's president, and assuring him there would be no dancing on the graves, Lencowski and Gjerde established guidelines for the performance. Gjerde even provided the troupe with space to store props.

"The cemetery really inspired the show and became one of the players," Lencowski said. "It also inspired how we made the audience a large part of this piece."

The reanimators

Artist Sean Kelley-Pegg and performer Charles Campbell of Skewed Visions selected the basement of the Casket Arts building because of its rough rock walls, concrete floor, low wood ceiling "and the ideas of caskets, bodies, death and the possibilities of reanimation we sensed in this place," said Kelley-Pegg.

First the audience will navigate Kelley-Pegg's "device," which he described as "a carnival-type photo booth" complete with pictures of friends captured (with their permission) by a camera he installed in their house. "I'm interested in the culture of fear and surveillance that's come back around since the Cold War," he said. "Now people accept that they're being watched, are even videotaping themselves and putting it on YouTube for others to look at."

Once through the installation, the audience will sit around a large war table with Campbell's Dr. Strangelove. As the mad scientist seeks to come back to life, he'll run into interference from a different performer each night.

Come on over

Bieringa and Ramstad decided to reset "Holiday House" in their Powderhorn home because, after traveling the world, making and filming on-site dances, they "wanted to see what it was like to perform in a domestic place," Ramstad said.

The audience for each performance -- in which the dancers explore issues of family and daily life through movement, music and film -- will travel through the house and end up in the alley.

For audiences willing to engage in the unknown, the rewards include engaging in an evening of unforgettable performance. As "Cityceased" progressed, the drummer and accordionist stopped playing. The theatrical vignettes became briefer, less storylike. Instead, the performers darted across the road, or flitted from gravestone to tree like dissipating flickers of memory. Eventually, the roving audience found itself back at the starting point and the performance ceased.

"One problem with traditional theater is it doesn't have enough of an interactive element," Lencowski said. "Theaters sit where they are and hope people come to them. To me, you need to go out into the places people might be interested in and draw people to the plays."

Camille LeFevre is a Twin Cities arts journalist.