Bryan Markovitz

Presented at the Portland Art Center - May-June 2005

The Resurrectory was an imagined 'facility' and research center for investigating the nature of death. The primary focus of the Resurrectory was on the trafficking and sale of cadavers for the benefit of science through long networks of people, objects and time. While in operation, Resurrectory staff would replicate the murders of nine victims from history in order to learn more about the victims, their assailants and the path their bodies took through the medical institutions that purchased their cadavers. During each performance, research about the crimes and their historic locations was presented by Liminal 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 described the Resurrectory as clinical yet grotesque, minimal yet gaudy, grave yet roguish. Was the Resurrectory a play? a lab? an archive? a museum? Perhaps all applied in various intensities and overlaps depending the time and place of one's participation.

Performed at Liminal Space - September-October 2003

Liminal’s Faust(Faust) was a performance installation for the Halloween season based on the epic tragedy of Faust. Fragments of the Faust story were presented by actors, vocalists and live musicians who interacted with each other in four rooms symbolizing the four elements of earth, air, fire and water. Audiences were encouraged to explore the ever-changing environment, view the performance from different locations, and come and go as they pleased during nightly installation hours.

Presented at Liminal Space - March 2003

Liminal organized Fluxconcert PDX, the first Fluxus event of its kind in Portland, Oregon. The evening consisted of several short performances executed by Portland artists from seminal classic Fluxus scores and several entirely new Fluxus scores conceived for the event.

As the self-professed Fluxus Chairman George Maciunas often noted, Fluxus is a way of life. It is not art, but a kind of anti-art—the concrete world presented as nonproductive events and objects. In Fluxus, social aims often take precedence over aesthetic ones. Fluxus upsets the routine of art and life. Fluxus is not a high form of art, but rather, “good, inventive gags.” Other Fluxus artists would not necessarily agree with Maciunas’ description, but there is a Zen-like ambiguity in his words that hits squarely at the Fluxus mystique. Indeed, such open-ended and differing interpretations make Fluxus unique in contemporary art movements. Fluxus is what you make of it.

While Fluxus finds its namesake in the early 1960s when Maciunas coined the term, the idea of Fluxus transcends specific time frames, groups or people. Yet, it is historically appropriate to note that a particular community of artists did come together to pursue parallel interests and ideas that are indicative of the energy and playful anarchy generally associated with Fluxus from the late 1950s forward. Their inspiration came from a number of antecedents and sources—Dada, Futurism, Surrealism, Duchamp, Klein and Cage immediately come to mind. Despite these connections, artists engaged in Fluxus activites often resist calling it a movement. Rather, Fluxus provides a context for understanding a kind of iconoclastic creativity where simple elements, when combined, express complex ideas.

Performed at Liminal Space - February 2003

Minimal at Liminal was the first in a variety of performances by Liminal that surveyed the ensemble’s roots in avant-garde music, art and theater. This performance was directed and conducted by John Berendzen. I participated in the performance and in the design of the show. For this particular production, American Minimal Music primarily referred to the compositions of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, who all began to focus in the early 1960s on the audible transformation of small musical phrases through repetition and the execution of processes determined by the composer.

Performed at Liminal Space - April, 2002

This performance was a large exploration of narrative structure that combined three short plays about five people into one performance. Unlike a play in three acts, the three plays were performed simultaneously on three raked stages where dialogue and action overlapped to create a contrapuntal arrangement of voices, sound, images and movement.

Three Plays, Five Lives also focused on the collision of several independent elements of action and media in live space. The technology in the space responded to the sounds and movements of actors through multiple digital sensors that magnified the intensities of their physical presence.

Performed at Panorama in Portland - Summer 2002

Liminal produced Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s lesser-known epic sung ballet, The Seven Deadly Sins. Liminal’s hour-long electric cabaret featured the original German score sung by mezzo-soprano Lyndee Mah, a live chorus of male singers, a digital orchestra by John Berendzen, and live piano by Stephen Alexander. The performance included a cast of 12 and was directed by Bryan Markovitz (who received a 2003 Portland Drammy for this work) with movement direction by Catherine Egan and Amanda Boekelheide, and an original Liminal translation by Emily Ford that was projected in supertitles above the stage.

The short, yet technically demanding opera took place at Panorama, a run down cavernous queer dance club and college-age meat market. The strange mix of high and lowbrow entertainment brought together diverse audiences for a totally unexpected evening of live and electronic music, a constant flow of dance and action, and a dazzling array of lights and media.

Performed at the Seattle Fringe Festival, at the Dekum Building in Portland, and at the LIVE Biennial of Performance Art in Vancouver, BC - January-August, 2001

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.

Performed at the Metropolitan Art Studio - November 2000

Interrupt, was a retro-engineered multimedia performance installation and live experience where audiences, performers and technology could interact. Resisting the temptation to put the latest shiny new technology on display (not that our budget allowed much temptation), Interrupt explored the underside of progress - meltdown, misfire and miscommunication. Within the performance space, audiences participated in the operation of a mechanized, yet functioning dystopia where ‘high’ technology served the most crude ends. Moreover, Interrupt was about letting someone experience something they didn’t quite expect and then seeing how long they would play with it before they get bored again. Interrupt was directed and programmed by John Berendzen and created by over a dozen Liminal company members and invited artists.

Performed at Liminal's storefront gallery, the Metropolitan Art Studio - Spring 2000

Liminal presented Playwright Peter Handke’s The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other. Handke’s play features the comings and goings of more than 400 characters who pass by one another without speaking a single word. In the language free city square, Liminal returns storytelling to the spectator, while quietly suggesting that people don't need language to form a community. The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other also featured the work of visual, sound and culinary artists who produced an edible pre-performance gallery installation, digital sound design, and slide media.

Performed at the Rose City Ballroom - Summer 1999

Liminal returned in summer 1999 to present The Evening with the Photograph, an original work that continued Liminal’s exploration of synthetic and hallucinatory theatre The Evening with the Photograph was an ever-changing mystery that explored the lives of five characters trapped in various parallel worlds. The different worlds of the play were connected by Dr. Saxe, a scientist living on the border between genius and insanity. As Dr. Saxe’s experiments progressively fail, the performers and audience are led along a course of events that question the nature of gesture, performance and the point at which the virtual becomes real. The random sequencing of scenes within the show (or metaphorically, the dance along the artery) meant that each night was a truly unique experience, with an outcome that was never fully predictable.

Performed in the underground parking garage of the Portland Building - Fall 1999

This Liminal project merged a visual art installation with a deconstruction of an American drawing-room drama. Jowl Movements I-IX took a satirical and irreverent look at the world of high art, consumer culture and the media, while contradicting its own critical structure and meaning. Indeed, the play layered so many elements, that it is difficult to accurately describe the experience. Even the three press releases sent to media contradicted the performance by offering three completely different descriptions of the story.

A performance installation at Reed College - February and April 1998

Liminal presented the performance installation Handke Salmagundi at Reed College. This event was co-sponsored by Reed’s Division of Arts and Division of Language and Literature in conjunction with a public forum that Liminal organized to address the state of contemporary art in Portland. Over 150 people attended the discussion, which included a panel of Portland notables from the contemporary arts scene.

Handke Salmagundi was a performance installation that mixed text from Austrian playwright Peter Handke with original physical actions and shifting sound and light media. Actors performed in close proximity to the audience, while using the words and actions of Handke’s various early, middle, and late plays. The installation was a repeating hour-long event that consisted of several scenes performed simultaneously in synchronized time and space. Handke Salmagundi was the first performance that Liminal structured as a cyclical live exhibition within a 360-degree environment.

Much of the text and action for Handke Salmagundi was selected from the following Peter Handke Plays: Offending the Audience; Self Accusation; Calling For Help; My Foot, My Tutor; The Ride Across Lake Constance; and Voyage to the Sonorous Land.

A play by Sam Shepard at the PAN Theater - August, 1997

Liminal’s first project was a performance of Sam Shepard’s play Suicide in B-flat. It was performed at the PAN Theatre during a very warm Portland summer. Liminal’s version of Suicide in B-flat, put two roguish detectives on the case to solve a violent and mysterious death. Suicide in B-flat led Liminal into a world of anomalous initiations and deviant experiments that became the ensemble’s rite-of-passage. The production incorporated live musicians, programmed slide projections and physical action, Suicide in B-flat inspired the dissolution of narrative structure and tension that now characterizes much of Liminal’s work.