Matt Lavoie, a 23-year-old student at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, was dressed in a red plaid jacket and an enormous fuzzy hat. He faced a crowd of people on the ice at Somes Pond in Somesville who were gathered on a cold Sunday evening to watch the proceedings. Behind him, Venus rose into the darkening sky, and in the distance to his left a small bonfire glittered.

He instructed the spectators not to worry about the solidity of the ice (“It’s, like, 2 feet thick, so it’s totally fine”). He then lifted a curled metal pipe to his lips and blew a thin, mournful tone, arcing downward in pitch. About 100 feet away, several torches lit up, and a group of individuals began to move together toward the crowd.

As the torches moved closer, it became clear that they were affixed to a wooden sledge, drawn by four people in black coats and tall white hats, like strange warriors from a distant civilization. It passed the crowd, who remained silent except for the ever-present crunch of snow underfoot. They just watched, and when Lavoie and the two other guides gestured, they followed.

No, it wasn’t some sort of pagan ritual. It was the first act in what artist and COA professor Dru Colbert called a “kinetic sculptural installation” that she has been preparing for nearly two years, which she dubbed “Graupel” (a term referring to frozen fog that collects on snow crystals).

“Winter is hard. We need to celebrate it in some way,” Colbert explained. “In the past, people had ceremonies in the wild to celebrate the passing of the seasons. There were more ritualistic things. This is like that – it’s about activating the landscape around us, and celebrating it. Connecting to it in some way.”

The final vision involved more than 30 people, who made costumes and props, shoveled snow and slush off the ice, and participated in the two performances, held Saturday and Sunday, March 3-4.

“When I moved here eight years ago, I knew I wanted to do a piece that involved the community and responded to the environment here,” said Colbert, who studied and taught installation art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before coming to Maine. “It’s ended up involving so many people. It’s nearly impossible to have time to make art during a term, so to do this and then to get the local folks to take some

time out from their very busy lives to be a part of it is just amazing.”

Many of the performers were COA students, while a number of the behind-the-scenes folks were community members from the island. And the crowd consisted mainly of people from town, curious about what on earth was going on down at Somes Pond. On Saturday, nearly 100 people attended, while Sunday had a more modest crowd of about 50.

The basic outline of “Graupel” is this: Spectators are drawn along by three docents, dressed as Maine guides, to five different scenes spaced apart on the ice. The scenes are facilitated and loosely explained by the docents and are performed by two groups: the seven black-coated, white-hatted skaters, and two creatures, or entities, dressed in pale-blue jumpsuits.

“We don’t represent anything in particular,” said Tyler Gordon, another COA student who acted as one of the entities. “In one of the scenes I perform a science experiment about how digger wasps memorize the landscape around them so they can always find their way back to their burrows. We just help move the action along. It’s very interpretive.”

There’s no real plot – Colbert said the idea is to interpret the actions for yourself.

“It’s not a narrative, but it has narrative elements,” she said. “It’s exploring themes, like the larger themes of discovery and of how we as human beings relate to the natural world. And it’s about winter.”

Many different elements were used in the performance. In the second scene, audience members come across a strange skeleton frozen in the ice and an arrangement of small blue wax objects that look like popsicles, both sculptural pieces created by Colbert.

“There are sculptural objects that are kind of mysterious. They’re like tools of some sort that could be used for some purpose,” said Colbert. “And they’re frozen in ice, as if they’ve been excavated on an archaeological dig. The audience has to figure out what exactly is it.”

Later, the skaters approach the audience while carrying metal bird puppets, and the docents shine lights on them, casting shadows of the puppets against the trees. Toward the end of the performance, three of the skaters don large tissue-paper lanterns that fit over their entire bodies and light the inside with small flashlights, meandering and weaving through the crowd and across the ice, until they fade out of view.

Though it was a large crowd and took up a large space, the whole event felt very intimate. In fact, the audience was as much a part of the piece as were the performers – if a group of 50 people standing in the middle of a frozen pond watching two guys dressed in blue jumpsuits isn’t art, what is?

The performance took about 45 minutes and, like the rapidly melting snow on the pond, was only temporary. After the two performances over the weekend, “Graupel” was over for good.

“The ephemeral nature of the performance is part of the whole experience,” said Colbert. “I’ll burn the paper lanterns at the end of it.”

Colbert hopes to engage both the environment and the community in another large-scale performance piece again.

“I’d like to try this again someday,” she said. “Maybe in a different season.”