Bryan Markovitz

Liminal is an ensemble of performance, visual and media artists.

Founded in 1997 in Portland, Oregon, we collaborate on projects that utilize aspects of theatre and performance to create new forms of public interaction. The ensemble has produced more than fourteen original works in a variety of formats and spaces that invite audiences to collaborate in the composition of a shared experience. I co-founded Liminal and serve as the company’s primary director.

Much of Liminal’s work has focused on operations that are theatrical, but not necessarily theatre. In the tradition of the avant-garde, our projects have sought to escape linear narrative structures and passive positions for audiences. Unlike the avant-garde tradition, we have tried to avoid excessive fragmentation or abstraction in order to re-trace our work’s connection to the various worlds that we, and our audiences, inhabit. The questions that drive our work are concerned with the quality of a live experience, the efficacy of a participant’s role, the articulation of their concerns and the composition of the narratives that help participants put things in order.

We credit the group’s name to the anthropologist Victor Turner, who most prominently used the term “liminal” in his research on forms of social drama that function outside of theatre. The “social” is not made from a group’s stability, but rather, from instability and uncertainty located a sites of “drama” or controversy. The word “liminal” comes from the Latin, “limen” which means “at the threshold” or “the betwixt and between.” True to the term, a Liminal performance presents people, places and events that are in a state of change and collective composition.