One thing we can say for sure about Of:NOW Goes Graphic, the latest presentation from the New Orchestra Workshop Society, is that audience members are going to be left in the dark. But there’s no reason to worry: they’ll have flashlights.

The event features NOW’s A-team improvisers stretching out on three graphic scores, in which visual imagery stands in for written notes. This isn’t a new thing for the group: British composer Barry Guy’s NOW-commissioned Witch Gong Game is included in Notations 21, the definitive anthology of graphic notation. But the event is also a chance to introduce NOW’s new managing artistic director Lisa Cay Miller, who’ll contribute a piece to the evening along with one from her saxophone-playing predecessor, Coat Cooke. 

The big surprise of the night, however, will come when it’s time for the Of:NOW ensemble to premiere local percussionist and illustrator Gary Wildeman’s Onomatopoeia. That’s when the houselights will be cut and the loaner flashlights will flicker on, so that listeners can follow Wildeman’s 48-page comic book as it leads players and listeners through a gentle, but not unchallenging, wilderness adventure.

“It’s about these two little cube-shaped characters,” Wildeman explains in a telephone interview from his Vancouver home, adding that his aim was to create figures anyone could identify with. “They meet on a hiking trail, and then they just go through the woods and different things happen to them. Different exciting things, although there’s a couple of spots where it calms down and they’re just kind of hanging out in the forest, reacting to that.”

It’s the musicians’ job to bring those images to life, and to that end Miller has assigned different onomatopoeic cues to the players.

“When Coat starts doing the honking, that means the geese are flying overhead, so you can figure it out,” Wildeman explains. “And then all of a sudden JP [trumpeter JP Carter] starts buzzing, and the bees are coming in.”

There’s more to this madness than just an extremely unusual concert experience, however, as Miller explains in a separate phone interview.

“My son is 10, and he loves graphic novels,” the pianist says. “And then Gary made this comic book, and I saw it and thought, ‘This would be a great way to reach young people.’ ”

So part of her new job is to broaden NOW’s educational mandate—the society already offers Monday-night workshops in improvisation at the Western Front—by taking Onomatopoeia into the school system, starting with a planned Squamish residency in the spring of 2014.

“Kids can relate to comics really well, and to weird sounds, so this will open them up to the fact that weird sounds are music as well,” Wildeman says. “It doesn’t always have to be all consonance; you can have dissonance and abstract sounds, and they’re still as musical as any sweet melody.”

Some darker resonances colour the other two pieces on Friday’s program. Miller’s own wise as serpents, co-created for NOW and Belgium’s Flat Earth Society ensemble, is a slithering journey through the belly of a snake. It’s inspired in part by a quote from Jean Cocteau about the “Black Snake” of opium, but also by drawing sessions with her son. And Cooke’s Hhaumm references the Continuum Movement Therapy he’s been exploring since being seriously injured in a car crash last June—an event that didn’t necessitate NOW’s search for a new director, which was already under way, but certainly added urgency to the process.

“It’s turning out to be even better than I thought,” says Cooke of Miller’s arrival and his gradual relinquishment of NOW’s reins. “Lisa’s got a love of new music and a love of different electronic and world musics, so she brings that kind of adventurousness to the job—and, just as importantly, she really respects what NOW has done over the past 36 years.”

So far, Miller is treading cautiously: she’s rebranded NOW’s flagship Orkestra Futura as Of:NOW; enlisted students to liaise with the SFU, VCC, and Cap music departments; and revamped the organization’s website. Given her track record as an innovative composer, performer, and programmer, though, bigger changes are surely in store.