Willamette Week - June 14, 1999
by Steffen Silvis
As defined by the performance swcholar Victor Turner, “liminal” is a threshold state-the ambiguous state between reality and illusion where all theater resides. The Liminal performance group has become one of Portland’s most innovative and exciting companies and is deserving of its growing following. Fusing dance, mime, music and text, Liminal achieves what most theaters fail to: It brings its audience to the hallucinatory threshold along with it. Written and directed by Bryan Markovitz, The Evening with the Photograph begins and ends with a man’s entertainment of suicide. In between, all of existence is dragged in for scrutiny. The Liminal corps are exceptional performers: Rich Southwick, Jennifer Olson, Christoph Saxe, Amanda Boekelheide (those who saw the company’s production of Jowl Movements I-IX will especially delight in her performance) and Trent Moore, who would make a brilliant stand-up theoretician. John Berendzen’s sound design is a rich sonic stew. Like Ionesco, Liminal strives to make something that’s truer than reality by creating a heightened theatrical state.
Current News
Features
Resurrectory preview
Portland Tribune, May 5, 2005
Death, Drama, Deconstruction
Portland Mercury, May 4, 2005
Cult of the Liminal
Portland Mercury, April 17, 2003
Liminal Fills Its New Space With A Little Show
Willamette Week, Feb. 21, 2003
Liminal Puts a Modern Spin on Brecht/Weill
The Oregonian, August 23, 2002
The Seven Deadly Sins
Portland Mercury, August 29, 2002
The Seven Deadly Sins
Portland Tribune, August 30, 2002
Artbeat segment on Liminal
OPB, May 2001 [.mov]
Ad for the Artbeat segment on Liminal
OPB, May 2001
Where Text Meets Technology
The Oregonian, April 22, 2001
The New School
Willamette Week, Sept. 15, 1999
Letters to the Editor
Willamette Week, Nov. 11 & 18, 1998
Reviews
The Hour We Knew Nothing Of Each Other
The Oregonian April 13, 2000
Articles by Liminal members
Past news releases
Liminal stages Caryl Churchill’s play Far Away
December 16, 2005
Liminal’s Resurrectory Re-Commits, Investigates 100-Year-Old Murders
March 28, 2005
High-resolution photos of The Resurrectory
Bikes, Bands and Bacchanalia Oct. 21, 2003
Faust(Faust) August 13, 2003
Krapp’s Last Tape June 28, 2003
Three Plays, Five Lives April 1, 2003
FluXconcert PDX March 17, 2003
Minimal at Liminal February 4, 2003
The Seven Deadly Sins August 7, 2002
Objects for the Emancipated Consumer (in Vancouver, B.C.) Oct. 4, 2001
Objects for the Emancipated Consumer (in Portland) April 4, 2001
Objects for the Emancipated Consumer (in Seattle) Jan. 22, 2001
Thomas Leabhart workshop Dec. 3, 1999
Jowl Movements I-IX (3) Oct. 28, 1998
Jowl Movements I-IX (1) Oct. 8, 1998
Handke Salmagundi March 16, 1998
Symposium on the Avant-Garde in Portland March 16, 1998
Suicide in B-flat July 1997
