by Dave Taber, Special to Midtown & Downtown Appeal

In mid-March, cast member hopefuls gathered in the dance studio at TheatreWorks to audition for The Our Own Voice Theatre Troupe's newest production, The Ergolytes.

Members took turns standing in front of a group of about 20 people, repeating a fragment of their names, adding repetitive motion in sync and waiting for other cast members to stand up and add another segment of the name along with their own repetitive motion until an enunciation of the original person's name machine was created.

Then they sat in a circle and discussed the impact of technology on their daily lives and interpersonal interactions. They also participated in movement exercises in which they slithered on the ground like oozing blobs and, at the instruction of choreographer Kimberly Baker, slowly morphed from blobs into robot-like characters.

As Alex Cooke, the play's writer and director said, "Our Own Voice is auditioning for you as much as you are auditioning for us; the purpose of these auditions is to give you a feel for how we operate so you can decide if this production is something you want to participate in."

The experimental community theater company's open-casting policy means that anyone who wants to participate and shows up for auditions and rehearsals is guaranteed a role in the play.

It turned out that those who chose to join the cast agreed to participate in two weeks of workshops in which cast members and interested members of the community used improvisational techniques to explore the themes Cooke was interested in presenting in the play.

Cooke describes the play as a futuristic piece about the ramifications of accelerating technological development on our society.

According to Jonathan Underwood, who plays Henry Nolls, the future's scientist in crisis, the workshop process was "really interesting. We got to put our own voice into the show, and it was great to see stuff we had done in workshops appear in the script."

"We had a discussion about what aspects of humanity could not be replaced by a machine and I said 'touch,' and it was really satisfying to see that appear in one of the scenes."

Our Own Voice was founded in 1991 as a project of the Memphis Mental Health Association. Initially the troupe existed exclusively to provide an opportunity for mental health consumers to explore the stigma of being diagnosed with a mental illness. Bill Baker, co-founder and current artistic director of OOV, explained: "After three or four years, troupe members started to write more interesting stuff that was not necessarily directly related to mental illness per se, but more about the world from their perspective."

Once the troupe moved away from strictly discussing mental health issues, the "off-the-wall, provocative theater coming from the perspectives of people diagnosed with mental illnesses didn't satisfy the needs of the MHA," Baker said.

In 1994 the troupe established residence at the newly opened TheatreWorks on Monroe, and moved to being a full-fledged community theater troupe.

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