***Diana Greene’s column will return in September. Meanwhile, you can enjoy the July Artist in Residence column:

Talking with performance artist Lynn Book, she uses two words within seconds of each other: performative and lala. Performative is how she describes her lectures, and lala—well, lala is how she defines opera. Book is a thinker, an art theoretician, but mostly she’s a maker, an avant-garde performer who moves and sings, gestures, and swings with nary a concern about what is highbrow culture or what is low.

For her, everyday life is delicious low-hanging fruit, ripe for the picking. “I’m the fringe of the fringe,” she says. “I want to facilitate people from the ordinary to the extraordinary. I want full-on collaboration.”

To watch Book perform is to witness the new. She sings and speaks, squeals and whispers, questions and declares, prods and plays in a performance style that’s wholly original. Even big city reviewers are wowed, calling her work captivating, outrageous, and—holy smoke—dangerous.

This summer, Book performed her newest work called FROTH at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater in New York City. The eight-minute piece is inserted into an adaptation of French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau’s 1733 opera Hippolyte et Aricie. FROTH is a work-in-progress that clearly delights Book, who moved to Winston-Salem five years ago as a visiting faculty member at Wake Forest University. She has taught and performed nationally and internationally for decades. Her list of grants and awards is long.

“Opera is elitist,” she says without disdain. “My duty is to puncture this package and deconstruct it, rearrange it, bring new ideas to it.”

That goal is realized the moment Book enters the stage with an antique wooden horse. Behind her podium, a video montage rolls out images of forests, bicycles, words and letters and buzzing bees, and Marie Antoinette eating cake. Book proclaims that opera is “a Chimera, part boat, part horse, part city…”

Her consideration of opera as a whole, and Rameau’s in particular, is woven throughout the clever text that taps into profundity with the left hand and, with the right, perversity. She trills and whispers, “interacting” with the art form rooted in Europe’s court society.

Dive into the video archive of Book’s “transmedia” performances and you enter a sea of creativity. Her titles are evocative openings to the indescribable. Notes on Desire, RE:garding the Next, Threading. Her live performance exudes theatricality, fluid unpredictability, and a palpable understanding of language. Words don’t just come out of her mouth, they emerge from her body; the entirety of her being is akin to a sound mixing board. “I don’t love straight-up narrative,” she says. “I like words a lot, but I like them more abstract.”

In Notes on Desire, for example, the word shimmer leads Book to riff and roll for nearly three minutes. It’s rhapsodic and riveting. With sinuous seduction and wizardly musical accompaniment by Kevin Norton, Book traverses from titillation to tempestuousness, generating meaning unbound by the limits of fixed definitions.

“I love voices that bring their bodies with them,” says Book, who also teaches at Transart Institute in Austria. “There’s a word in German that means total artwork, gesamputkunstverk. I am into total artwork. I’m putting together a little bit of this and that into my structured improvisation. I love turning people on…it’s one of the greatest thrills.”

When did you realize you would live a creative life?
That’s an unusual thing to pinpoint. I was always involved in some kind of creative exploration. Drawing in kindergarten or singing in the chorus or entering the declamation contest with Nancy Hanks. I understood innately that I’m a creative person. As children, you do these things, and then in college I could search the place or circumstance to find my creative potential.

What inspires you?
Everything. Not just as an artist, but as a human being. I can be inspired to write my congressman about the BP oil spill. As an artist, what inspires me is contingent on circumstance—my next breath, the sound of the screen door, a piece of lint on my clothing and the grandiloquent idea.

What do you do to overcome creative blocks?
I don’t really have them. It might have something to do with my process being so deeply conjoined to liberating life in all forms and through a host of different avenues, that I never feel I’m coming up “empty handed.”

What do you think of failure?
It’s a term that feels kind of alien to me. It’s used in the entrepreneurial path. You launch a business, you fail. For me, it’s all process—engaged process.

What qualities do you admire in other artists?
A depth of engagement and commitment. I really appreciate the wildly exploratory. I appreciate artists that can weave together important thinking, intellectual rigor, with a highly sensory responsive intuitive aesthetic convention. I like artists who write and who make robust art.

Which artists do you admire?
Those who cross boundaries and take on ideas and practices and taboos. Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson—they were seeking the best, most powerful tools, methods…to communicate their ideas regardless of whether it fits neatly into a particular genre or discipline. I love Madeline Gins. Ann Carson, a poet who’s been mining the classics forever. Performance artist Marina Abramovic´.

What would surprise people about you?
I really love solitude. I really love quiet.

To read more about Lynn Book’s past and current projects, including when you can catch a performance, visit lynnbook.com