Launching Macalester's 2002-2003 theater season both boldly and playfully, last weekend's A Show of Hands set the bar at a great height for subsequent performance arts events. Although minimally advertised and unfairly referred to in passing as a drama "workshop" (and not a genuine performance piece), Hands challenged the conventions of its medium in surprising ways, resulting in one of the most provocative theatrical experiences I've had in ages.

The performance was constructed with seemingly basic parameters: It was divided into eighteen short sketches, each one demonstrating ways in which human beings create individual or social identity with their hands, all of them doing so in a fashion that incorporated all nine performers. Some of these sketches were accompanied by an excerpt, read aloud, from a book by neurologist Frank R. Wilson; others had no narration, allowing the actions to speak for themselves. Almost none contained props or typical narrative.

The actions displayed were also fairly simple in that they were immediately recognizable. In "Lost With/out Language," the performers simultaneously presented three scenes of tourists receiving directions from someone who didn't speak their language, communicating instead with hand gestures. In "When Asked to Catch a Ball," the performers pantomimed a crowd attending a baseball game. Culminating on a note of child-like silliness, Show of Hand's penultimate moment was the performers doing a hand jive in chorus line formation.

So why did this add up to a fascinating, even profound, thirty minutes of theater? Both the format and content of Hands sounds so simple, one may argue, that anybody could have devised it. Yet this factor, rather than diminishing the piece, in fact explains much of its elemental power.

True, the theatrical conceits of pairing a dry scientific passage about child development with silly actions ("Life Gets Good") or the build-up of a complex rhythm made only by clapping, knee-slapping and breast-beating ("Talking Hands I: The Beat") seem only fairly diverting. By ordering these ideas one after another, however, the audience is challenged to make connections between the displays and think about how they apply to their own development.

The very interactive nature of Hands (for me, the source of its profundity) stems all the way to the development of the show itself. While director (and Dramtatic Arts department chair) Beth Cleary introduced the format of the piece and the Wilson text, the actual content of the show developed over four weeks of rehearsals in which the performers consistently experimented with actions and concepts.

Cleary then gradually stepped out of the picture, retaining only the claim to minimal blocking choices and veto power over entire sketches. Her main form of participation came through suggesting theoretical approaches, such as to act out a gesture of "someone very close to you." The prompts, vague yet evocative, were given at almost every rehearsal and continued throughout the nights of the performances.

The resulting show was by no means esoteric, given the introspective nature of the instruction. As I've said, the content addressed nothing but universal movements (and semi-universal musings about them), a strategy that ultimately conveyed a message about human development that was practically utopian in its inclusiveness. Everybody discovers how to clap and flip the bird and fidget; the opportunity to reflect on all of these sorts of actions within Hand's short running time provokes some dense insights into the simultaneous immediacy and impenetrable complexity uman bodies and minds. In other words, immediacy and impenetrable complexity of human bodies and minds. In other words, the performance addressed both everybody and nobody in particular, and I can't think of a more far-reaching artistic pursuit.

In his review of filmmaker Jacques Tati's masterpiece Playtime, Jonathan Rosenbaum raved about what he called the film's sense of "democracy," its rejection of conventional notions about subject and background. "In Playtime," he wrote, "where every character has the status of an extra … and the surrounding décor is continually relevant to the action, the subject of a typical shot is that everything appears on the screen … If we let our eyes roam, wander, and gambol, we'll discover multiple relationships between people, people and objects, live moments and dead moments."

The nine performers of Show of Hands (in alphabetical order: Lizzy Davis, Ariel Dumas, Vanessa Ganz, Hilary Lewis, Zachary Nelson, Kendra Ortner, Dara Showers, Elli Stephanede, and Jessica Zamora) were always doing something, always conscious of it, and always doing it in aesthetically-compelling ways that incorporated the entire stage without ever calling attention to one performer at the expense of the others suggests that they may have discovered in one month what Tati developed over an entire career.

I don't want to make the hyperbolic assertion that Macalester currently houses the next Jacques Tati; I do, however, want to honor a remarkable work where honor is due. I wish that I saw more theater of this depth – student "workshops" or professional plays – in my future experiences.