When Inua Ellams introduced his one-man show Search Party in New York City last January, he informed the audience that its success depended on them. "If it is brilliant it is because of your word choices," he told the crowd at the experimental theater festival Under the Radar, according to the New York Times, "and if it is terrible it is your fault. Collective responsibility." He was only half joking. During the show, the Nigerian-born British writer and performer reads from his poems, plays, essays and art reviews. But there's a twist: What he reads depends on the crowd. Audience members take turns shouting out words, which Ellams types into the search bar on his iPad. He then reads a piece of his writing in which the word appears. This weekend, Hopkins Center for the Arts presents three performances of Search Party at Dartmouth College's Theater on Currier in Hanover, N.H. Ellams, visiting for a weeklong residency at the college, likens the hourlong production to having a conversation in his living room. "Just come expecting to be open and to have a chat," he told Seven Days. The venue, about a block from the Hopkins Center, is well suited for an intimate exchange. It's a temporary, 65-seat black-box theater the Hop is using while it undergoes renovations. Ellams created Search Party in 2020 in an effort to be more egalitarian when giving poetry readings. Rather than impose his choices on an audience — "which just meant that if I was in a bad mood, I ended up choosing poems that reflected my bad mood," he said — he invited them into the process. The call-and-response exercise has grown into a show that changes with each performance. He's now presented the show more than 30 times, though the Dartmouth performances mark only its third run in the U.S. Ellams, 40, has published one book of poetry and several short collections. The creator of "The Midnight Run," a cultural walking experience staged in cities around the world, he may be best known in the U.S. for his plays Barber Shop Chronicles and The Half-God of Rainfall. Last month, he won the 2024 Alfred Fagon Award, presented for the best new play by a Black British playwright, for Once Upon a Time in Sokoto. Based in London, Ellams says he is most comfortable when traveling because he becomes an outsider looking…