Liminal devised The Theory of Love.
STILL FEELINGS IN STILL TIMES
Thanks to all of you who attended and supported The Theory of Love. Both the Portland run and our tour to On The Boards in Seattle were met with great success and enthusiasm, and all of us at Liminal are pleasantly exhausted from the effort. As soon as we’ve recovered we’ll get some video and sound up for you.
Second, we are thrilled to announce our appearance this Saturday at the Portland Armory for PCS’s 2007 JAW Festival.
“STILL FEELINGS IN STILL TIMES”
A performance for JAW by Liminal in the Armory Lobby
128 NW Eleventh at Davis, 2-4 pm
Between public spectacle and private meditation resides Liminal’s still act for JAW 2007. This performance merges the format of a work by artist Roman Ondak with essential accessories of the stage and an ensemble of mannerist performers and musicians.
On-the-ground coordination was provided by John Berendzen. Alex Reagan provided sung text in Portland. From New York, Bryan Markovitz directed the concept, Ryan Dohoney composed music, and Amanda Boekelheide provided written conceptual choreography, exploring movement and language as an act of translation in collaboration with artists around the globe.
The work was performed by more than 25 Portland artists and musicians. To them, Liminal offers its sincere thanks and gratitude.
PS - Amanda’s choreography translations, contributor credit and a call for an around-the-world making of still life performances is available at her website.
[July 20, 2007, at 04:51 PM]
CLASS IS IN SESSION.
The Theory of Love opens today and you should make your reservations now!
Reports from preview audiences are strong and this may be some of the best new music heard in Portland in a while. I hear that the lecturers and their visual aids are also excellent. Hopefully, all that LOVE will radiate across the country and melt the snow on my lawn here in Chicago.
Break a leg to everyone and have a wonderful opening weekend!
Oh, and if you haven’t read the previews yet, here they are from Willamette Week and the Portland Tribune.
- Bryan
[April 12, 2007, at 09:47 PM]
Make LOVE with us.
The Theory of Love is coming and it is making our hearts flutter with excitement!
Soon you will be able to see Liminal’s newest work, which promises to be quite a stimulant of mind and senses. However, the Portland team, led by Liminal’s sound designer and composer John Berendzen, has a few more weeks of work before their lecture is finished and the visual aids come back from the lab.
In the meantime, we hope you’ll read more about the Theory of Love here.
Also, Liminal needs your support! Please help us match a generous grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council by making a gift of any size at our new Liminal online giving page.
Personally, I can’t wait for LOVE to open, because I’m hoping that it’s radiance will extend many thousand miles and melt the three feet of snow outside my Chicago window.
Yours truly,
Bryan
[February 14, 2007, at 07:03 AM]
Boring Mr. Feingold
I found more evidence of popular critical (dis)interest in the theatre of boredom recently. This time, it is Michael Feingold mourning the loss of “thrills, meaning, laughs, music and dance, and glamour and excitement” on the contemporary stage. His histrionics alone deserve an Obie. Feingold is in full nostalgia mode for some long-gone era of theatre that he makes no effort to identify, but merely alludes to:
“Yearly it gets less and less like the real life of which I know the theater to be capable, and more and more like a weirdly empty replica. On many nights, sitting through some numbingly vacuous event, I have begun to worry that perhaps the fabulous invalid is indeed deceased, that what we are seeing instead of a living theater, far too often, is a reconstituted zombie version of it. Mistaking this simulacrum for the real thing is easy enough.”
I’d love to get my hands on this “real thing.” I bet it smells like roses and cuddles like a cute puppy. Sometimes it might also make me a little sad, or make me think about how crazy life is.
Feingold’s desire for “real-life” holds theatre prisoner to sensibilities and methods used to achieve modernist truth and transcendance that is at least a century old. Worse are those of us in the avant-garde who earnestly re-enact subversive tactics that keep theatre moored to these and other modernist concerns. Then there are theatre’s false friends, who serve up the most brutal doses of boredom and abject reality that Feingold hates. None of this seems worthy of debate anymore. We’re all stuck in a schizophrenic endgame of halfhearted poses, earnest nostalgia and semiotic exercises in futility. Hardly a revelation.
On the upside, theatricality has never been more present in society. Seduction (political, consumptive, violent, erotic and aesthetic), spectacle, reflexivity and ephemeral operations are everywhere. Ironically, most theatre artists seem to be the least imaginative users of theatricality today. The best users are probably politicians and terrorists.
Theatre is a distinct technology that has the power to interrogate notions of artifice, time, liveness and representation. It also has the power to bring together site and body in a social sphere of incredible detail. Theatre is pure analog with infinite degrees of ambiguity. What it has the power to achieve might be something far more interesting than the coterie theatre Feingold longs for.
What might this theatre be? Theatre’s success might depend on its involvement in larger aesthetic operations that blend public and private interactions with shifting modes of attention and reciprocal engagements. Theatrical operations that take place in sites beyond the theatre or the art gallery. What I am not referring to is a festival or an art fair. The experience would require your suspension of disbelief, contain an epic unity and a directed vision.
- Bryan
[October 27, 2006, at 11:57 AM]
What is the Theory of Love?
While yours truly completes my final year of studies in Chicago, Liminal’s sound designer, John Berendzen, is leading the company in a new project called The Theory of Love.
Love is a kind of sung lecture for vocalists and musical accompaniment that investigates the nature, history and meaning of Love. It examines the cultural biases and assumptions made in our modern Western view of Love and offers insight about why we desire Love, what Love does to us and where Love might take us in the future.
This fall, Liminal will start rehearsing music, designing visual media and orchestrating the live performance. As with much of Berendzen’s music, the innovative electro-acoustic score will create a maximum sensual effect from a minimum of musical information. For this is how John is, do you see.
If you want to know more about Love, just send us an e-mail.
Ever,
Bryan
[September 5, 2006, at 04:02 PM]