WHAT: Performance & Time Arts WHEN: Friday & Saturday, March 7-8, 8 p.m. WHERE: Contemporary Dance Theater College Hill Town Hall 1805 Larch Ave. (off Hamilton Ave. in College Hill) 45224 COST: $12 general admission, $8 students and seniors, ETA/Start The March 2008 Performance & Time Arts concert remains true to producer F. Keith Wahle's vision of a performance arts series that favors experimentation, collaboration and media mixing. Several of the area's most accomplished composers, poets and performers come together to present some of their best work. Outrageous performance artist Shirley Maul enlists the aid of a gang of "internationally famous neuro-scientists," including Bill Donnelly, Beth Franks, Steve Kreimer and Steve Schuckman, to take us on a merry romp through subterranean cavities of secrets, lies and confabulations, asking the question, "Who are we anyway?" Internationally known percussionist Allen Otte performs "The End of the Empire," composed for him by Frederic Rzewski, one of the most important composers in current avant-garde music. Otte plays a percussion ensemble that includes pod rattle, bass drum, radio, vibraphone, glockenspiel, chimes, car parts, recycling objects and ocean drum, interspersed with passages of text. Japanese composer Kazuaki Shiota will perform his work "Internal Rhythm," in which the composer tap dances, plays electronic music, and recites text, all more or less simultaneously. Dancer Karen Wissel joins him for a collaborative work entitled "Convoluted Minds." In his easy-going, conversational and good humored style, poet Gerry Roscoe takes on the theme "The Birds and the Bees." Roscoe’s poems have been read on Garison Keillor’s "Writer’s Almanac." His most recent book, published last spring, is entitled "The Unexamined Life." A screaming success of PTA is the partnerships it fosters between artists and art forms. Such triumph of collaboration is most evident in Judith Mikita and F. Keith Wahle's dance and poetry collaboration "Happy Town Suite," which describes the arc of a single life from early childhood to a time just before death. They make the commonplace witty and even the tragic mirthful, as Wahle's verbal images circle and dive, while Mikita's dancing shifts implication and temper. The Performance & Time Arts eries has a 13-year history of presenting adventurous and experimental performance art, giving a venue to talented and creative artists working in time-based media. The roster of artists for the March 2008 concert includes university faculty and graduate students with long resumes alongside Cincinnati favorites. PTA can be surprising, challenging, thought-provoking or (fill in the blank), but it always leaves the mainstream behind.