Portland Tribune, May 5, 2005

by Joseph Gallivan

Portland’s best performance art group, Liminal, returns with a show that has been 16 months in the making. “Resurrectory” is based on the story of William Burke and William Hare, two Edinburgh (via Ireland) grave robbers who killed 18 innocent people to supply corpses to medical science in 1827 and 1828.

The space is divided into three worlds—the collections, the inquest, and the jars of ashes and live researchers writing at ancient desks. Visitors are welcome to poke around as though they are in a real, fake museum. Then, three evenings a week, the Liminal hard bodies will act out eight of the 18 murders, using stylized movements and barked directions from the Controller (Madeleine Sanford). She also does phrenology examinations on audience members.

A sloping stage has been built for the six actors to bounce around on, and stunningly beautiful video images (by Jim Blashfield) are projected onto a plaster cast of a corpse. Amanda Boekelheide, Liminal’s movement director for eight years, helped choreograph such gestures as how to lift a corpse and how to drown someone in a washtub. Liminal’s two main influences are the highly physical theater of Corporeal Mime and the Gardzienice Theater.

“We’re interested in nonlinear storytelling,” says Liminal co-founder Bryan Markovitz, 31, “and also duration and simultaneity.” They’re phrases one would normally run a mile from, but in this group’s hands, the big ideas don’t smother the moments of beauty and horror. “Resurrectory” will be an ongoing process, trying to construct an identity for some of the anonymous victims.

Tours in the unattended “Resurrectory” space are noon to 6 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, free; tours during “Resurrectory” staff hours are 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. Thursday-Saturday; through June 18, $6-$10, 2045 S.E. Belmont St., 503-239-5481

Are ye not very ripe for the sermon of death?

The Resurrectory is a performance facility that investigates the nature of death and decomposition, and that conducts research about the illegal trafficking and sale of cadavers in Portland, Oregon, and Edinburgh, Scotland. When in operation, Resurrectory staff re-commit murders on a regular basis in order to learn more about the victims, their assailants and the medical schools that purchase the cadavers. During each performance, research about the crimes and their historic locations is presented by physical actors, recorded by research staff, interpreted for visitors by the Resurrectory docent and entered into public record. Simultaneously, a Resurrectory anatomist and four musicians present a musical lecture on the process of death and decomposition for students and visitors in the operating theater.

Visitors have described the Resurrectory as clinical yet grotesque, minimal yet gaudy, grave yet roguish. Is the Resurrectory a court? a hospital? a museum? No two visitors see it in quite the same light.

The Resurrectory was most recently available for viewing at the Portland Art Center from May 4–June 18, 2005.

For more information, contact us via e-mail or phone at 503 890 2993.

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