Liminal Media Contact: Bryan Markovitz, 503 890 2993, bryan@liminalgroup.org
Seattle Fringe Media Contact: Wesley Middleton, 206 342 9172, wmiddleton@seattlefringe.org

Seattle Fringe Theatre Festival gets Interactive with Liminal’s Objects for the Emancipated Consumer

Seattle, Washington—On March 8, 9, 10, 11, 15 and 17, the 2001 Seattle Fringe Theatre Festival will feature a unique performance event from the Portland-based multimedia performance group Liminal. Objects for the Emancipated Consumer is Liminal’s new hi-tech film-noir spy drama that merges original text, theatre, movement and technology into a unique interactive event. The performance places you at the mediatized center of a story with six characters condemned by flight delays to wander the concourses of an airport city where they fall victim to passion, paranoia and defective memories.

Audiences are encouraged to interact with the performance by moving through the surreal performance space to manipulate sound and visual media. The result is a performance that amplifies the human struggle between the real and the virtual in our culture. Objects for the Emancipated Consumer fragments the image/identity codes of a media society and reacts to them through a continuous flow of tension and release, movement and stasis, chaos and control. “Fusing music, movement, text and technology,” writes Willamette Week Theatre Critic Steffen Silvis, “Liminal brings its audience to the hallucinatory threshold.”

Liminal is an ensemble of artists collaborating through live performance to discover new disciplines that merge theatre, the fine arts, and multimedia technologies. Our mission is to expand public interaction with performance and engage in critical dialogues about contemporary culture through an ongoing evolution of new work.

Objects for the Emancipated Consumer
An original work by Liminal
2001 Seattle Fringe Theatre Festival
Richard Hugo House, 1634 11th Avenue, Seattle, Washington
March 8—7:45 pm
March 9—6:00 pm
March 10—5:25 pm
March 11—6:55 pm
March 15—9:45 pm
March 17—2:00 pm
Tickets available from the Seattle Fringe Box Office, 206.366.2018, or at www.seattlefringe.org

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Objects for the Emancipated Consumer (2001)

In 2001, Liminal premiered Objects for the Emancipated Consumer at the Seattle Fringe Festival and performed in Portland and in Vancouver, BC, at the DYNAMO Gallery in conjunction with Vancouver’s LIVE Biennial of Performance Art.

Objects for the Emancipated Consumer was an original 360-degree media performance that told a nonlinear story of six characters as they searched for answers to an ambiguous series of crimes. The performance was set in a fictitious international airport terminal where scenes from the performance ran simultaneously as audience members walked through the open space. Audiences participated in the outcome of events by scanning bar-coded objects at the performance’s central “duty-free” shop that triggered interactions between sound and visual media and actors. The performance gave audiences many direct opportunities to choose how to experience the performance. While it is not unusual to break down the division between performers and audiences, Objects for the Emancipated Consumer heightened the impact of the interaction by giving participants access to media and technology that changed and informed their environment.

Objects for the Emancipated Consumer received a 2001 Portland Theatre Critic’s Drammy Award for Best Original Work. Bryan Markovitz directed. Alex Reagan wrote the script in collaboration with the ensemble. John Berendzen created the original sound design. Christoph Saxe programmed. Bryan Markovitz produced slide and video. Cast members included Amanda Boekelheide, Jeff Marchant, Rich Southwick, Jennifer Olson, Georgia Luce and Trent Moore.

©2012 Liminal Performance Group / P.O. Box 40353, Portland, Oregon 97240-0353 / Founded in 1997 / info [at] liminalgroup [dot] org / Join our mailing list.