ORONO – What’s a happening?

Probably not what you expect.

You can find out at 7 tonight during “Danger Music, Events and Happenings: an Evening of Dick Higgins’ Performances” at the University of Maine Museum of Art in Carnegie Hall. The evening is part of a series of events in conjunction with the museum’s current exhibit, “Betwixt and Between: The Life and Work of Fluxus artist Dick Higgins.”

An avant-garde American artist, who died in 1998, Higgins was one of the founders of Fluxus, which started in the 1960s as a publishing venture to give avant-garde artists, authors and poets an outlet for their work. Fluxus turned into an international movement, which questioned the bounds of traditional artwork and aimed to break down the barriers between art and life. Higgins’ work focuses on “intermedia” – the connections between painting and music, theater and the written word.

“It’s a series of short works which cause us to rethink our concepts of music, poetry and theater – to look at both what is shared by those concepts and how we might think differently about them,” Owen Smith, an art history professor and Dick Higgins scholar, said Monday. “Can music be an action? Can poetry be a sound? Can theater exist without a plot?”

This evening’s performance will address those questions with performances by faculty and students, including Smith and student organizers Melissa Kearns and David Colagiovanni, among others.

“Fluxus performances are supposed to challenge our everyday life as we move through our day,” Kearns said during an interview Monday. “The things we do are very mundane and he incorporates this into his scores for his performances.”

David Antin, an avant-garde poet and friend of Higgins, is in town for a Thursday reading and plans to take part in the evening’s events.

“It’s completely improvised,” Kearns said. “It’s not prescripted out. Nothing’s perfect, as you’d find in a play, where the dialogue is impeccable. … Because of the individual performers, the pieces are open to interpretation.”