In the middle of summer, when most of us like to take, at the very least, a mental vacation, Pearlann Porter and The Pillow Project stir up their creative juices to begin a seasonal run of Second Saturdays. An offshoot of Penn Avenue's First Fridays, this collaborative group event embraces movement, music, multimedia art forms and a hefty dose of camaraderie.

Pillow Project performances have the flavor of a '60s happening where the passion flows freely, and a unitary urbanism where the art can't be separated from the environment. Everything takes place in The Space Upstairs, a large, welcoming 4,000-square-foot blank canvas of a room above Construction Junction, and the events are never separated from the Point Breeze warehouse's main tenant.

Over the course of the summer, productions included the blues-inspired "Dirty, Hot and Blue" (July), improvisational "On the Moment" (August), memory-laded "Time Capture" (September) and recycled "Sophisticated Junk" (October).

Porter's movement has taken an inward spiral where dancers move in their own casual world that is laid-back in approach, slouchy in appearance and heavily grounded in floor work. Music, under the direction of PJ Roduta, played an increasingly important part, featuring blues man Will E. Tri, xylophonist Jeff Berman, eight-string Warr guitarist Bill Burke and percussionist Charles Hall. Video artist Jesse Sedon, with her reverberating light patterns and interactive movement concepts, has emerged as her own artistic force.

But it was the total impact, with juicy new details to be discovered each time, that engaged the viewer. The audience was movable -- to the side, circling around the band, scattered in pockets -- and had to be ready to interact with the performers at any given moment. No formal ask-the-artist sessions here. There were also chair massages, a suburban housewife with a dress deftly crafted of newspaper, special drinks like The Godmother, a tree wrapped in computer cords, the ever-present television screens, and a wealth of visual art.

Call it The Pillow Experience.

The wrap-up session last weekend was called "Single Serving Saturday." As Porter put it, "Four different rooms. Four different stories. All at the same time."

Visitors (it's hard to call them audience members) came upon Richard Parsakian's large 1969 tribute at the top of the stairs. Packed with personal mementos such as period newspapers trumpeting the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Kent State and the Apollo mission, slide projections, vintage jackets and vests (representing Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison behind a set of glass-paned "Doors") and heavy plastic fringe printed with the word "peace" in every global language, it spawned a trio of dancers in camouflage. He called it "19," for the average age of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam.

Sedon produced a series of videos, "Synesthesia," that wafted over a white room where Beth Ratas, also in white, was softly altering the light patterns with her insinuating dance. In the third room, a quartet of artists, including Porter, dabbled in paint -- walls, floor and each other. (But where were the full-blown Jackson Pollock paint-spattering techniques?) The fourth produced "Close Encounters of a Cluttered Mind," led by Roduta, where he and some dance "siblings" cavorted with and over a jungle gym of furniture.

The unifying feature was an oddly calming loop of songs, mostly retro, that produced different reactions in each of the rooms. But there was another unifying effect. Perhaps more than any other performance, the final Saturday blurred the distinction between performer and viewer, as a child lovingly played with Parsakian's plastic fringe, a man was inspired to dance with Ratas, and, as everyone moved between the rooms, sometimes awkwardly, they became an indelible part of the Experience.

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