AN ONGOING GIGGLE

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Audiences don't leave the production "Frogs, Lizards, Orbs and Slinkys" thinking about its significance.

Giggling is the predominant response at performances by the unusual theatrical troupe called Imago. An ongoing giggle.

"The experience is immediate, it's seldom intellectualized after the event," says Jerry Mouawad, co-founder of the Portland, Ore.-based Imago.

"You're entertained by the whimsy and humor involved."

What Imago does is employ illusion, masks and multimedia effects to make the audience look at the world in new ways. For instance, a character called the "Larvabatic" creates the illusion of a worm doing incredible acrobatic feats.

"Gymnasts say it's impossible. But it's an illusion," Mouawad says. "The mask is not worn where they think it is worn."

He compared Imago's work to that of M.C. Escher, a creator of painted illusions.

Imago is creating art but it's also related to the circus, Mouawad says, and to in some ways, and to a bygone age of entertainers. "We work like Charlie Chaplin or the Marx brothers worked," he says. "It's schtick. We're very much vaudevillians in nature."

Mouawad and co-director Carol Triffle both trained with Jacque Lecoq, a Frenchman whose theatrical method strips away the conventions of scenery and props to reveal its essence. "Which is movement to Mr. Lecoq," Mouawad says.

Movement becomes a link between the animals, objects and phenomena in our universe. The Larvabatic is not quite human, not quite animal. "Lecoq's work is an examination of connections," Mouawad says.

"Frogs..." contains many sounds but very little speaking. "Not words but closer to a gibberish that has meaning," Mouawad said.

Imago performances are meant to appeal both to adults and children.

"It's work put together in a sense of play. It's not different from the play you do as children," Mouawad says.

"We're adults now but we're trying to return to that sense of play."

The giddiness comes from taking a fun-filled journey into another world that is very near the world we think we know so well," Mouawad says.

"It's like if you're watching PBS and you're seeing animals you've not seen before. If they're doing unusual things, you just start to laugh."

IMAGO

Where: Shryock Auditorium, Carbondale, Ill.

When: 3 p.m. Sunday