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Liminal presents [OFFENDING THE AUDIENCE]

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Liminal presents [OFFENDING THE AUDIENCE]

For Immediate Release
Portland, Oregon USA

     [ OFFENDING THE AUDIENCE]

     [ OFFENDING THE AUDIENCE]

Get Tickets Here.

November 6-22   7:30pm Friday, Saturday, Sunday; also 2:30pm Sunday
At Action/Adventure, 1050 SE Clinton, Portland, OregonUSA 
$10-25 sliding scale     $8 student-artist-industry     mature content

In 1965, Peter Handke began work on the seminal work of anti-theatre, Offending the Audience: a stripped-down, genre-defying and hilarious verbal happening that shook the establishment of the day. 50 years later, Portland performance group Liminal creates an original multidisciplinary adaptation, reworking Handke's avant-garde classic for the modern age of pan-surveillance and fractured media self-reflections.

In a fierce new adaptation that takes Handke's experiments into the 21st century, Seattle-based polymath Misha Neininger and John Berendzen orchestrate a complex musical, visual and conceptual score out of the original bare-bones text: sonically, rhythmic sung-spoken textual textures interact with an electronic soundscape; surveillance technology confronts the audience fumbling with messy feedback loops in the dark.

This Gesamtkunstwerk will be performed and in German and English. There may or may not be subtitles. The ghosts of Edward Snowden, Rosa Parks and Samuel Beckett may perform acts of defiance and nude interpretive dances. WARNING: They really, really dance.

Will you be offended? Answers Handke, "You don't have to feel offended. You were warned in advance." Offending is one way to relate, adds Berendzen. "No one is offended by anything in the theatre anymore. Either way that's not the point. We want to democratize the space between us and the audience, a level playing field. We want you to feel involved."  

Neininger came all the way from Berlin to find new audiences: “There is a real buzz from swarms of cyborg insects in the Northwest. People are getting pissed off. I watched people swatting drones with flip-flops. But who knows, the audience may turn out to be a dismal failure. For the audience to be a smashing success it needs to balance the fear of surveillance with the desire to be seen.”

In the end you may ask yourself: How do you look back at whoever is looking at you


written and directed by Misha Neininger and John Berendzen
media and surveillance art by Misha Neininger
sound design and music direction by John Berendzen 
electronic smart costumes by Jenny Ampersand
performed by Misha Neininger with returning founding member Amanda Boekelheide and Starr Ahrens, Evan Corcoran,  Carla Grant and Alex Reagan.  


Offending the Audience is the third installment in this year's series on Peter Handke, following the premiere of Radioplay I (Hand2Mouth, June 2015) and The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld (Imago Soiree, July 2015)"Liminal's been waiting twenty years to interpret this piece. Finally, we think we're ready." says Berendzen. Adds Neininger:

Sie werden kein Schauspiel sehen.
  There will be no play.
Ihre Schaulust wird nicht befriedigt werden.
   Everything will be open and transparent.


About Peter Handke
Best known for his screenwriting collaborations with Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire, Wrong Move), Austrian Peter Handke was a major voice among the anti-theatre experiments of the latter 20th century, along with Stein, Beckett, Fassbinder, Foreman and other theatrical subversives. Simultaneously linguistic clown and ontological terrorist, he eviscerates language itself in order to expose its comic failings, giddily exploding false theatricalities in order to reveal beneath the pure presence of the raw, exhilarating and liberating liveness of the performance event. This series marks Liminal's third plunge into the depths of Handke, following 1998's Handke Salmagundi (an amalgam of early writings) and The Hour We Knew Nothing Of Each Other (2000), a completely silent play.

About Liminal
Liminal
is a nonprofit Portland-based network of theatre, performing, and media artists. Liminal is known both for its uniquely staged plays (as in 2013's OUR TOWN), and also for its large-scale live walk-through performance installations (as in 2012's Liminal presents Gertrude Stein). Liminal was founded in Portland in 1997 and has produced nineteen original full-scale projects. Liminal has received numerous Portland Critics Circle (Drammy) awards, including Best Original Production (2000, 2003, and 2005); Best Choreography (2003); Best Sound Design and Best Music Direction (2000 and 2003).

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Liminal presents e.e.cummings' SANTA, announces Backdoor Theater residency

For Immediate Release

Attn:  Arts & Theatre

Portland, ORE

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! There ain't no Santa Claus!" - e.e. cummings

Liminal wants to save Christmas. From itself. Launching off of e.e.cummings' texts Santa Claus (1946), The Christmas Tree (1920), and others, Liminal once again tackles the big issues: life, death, sex, and online shopping. 
 
Equal parts modern mystery play (casting Santa as Joe Everyman), anti-commercial anti-capitalist allegory (Death as the archetypal one-percenter robber baron), and good clean modernist holiday shenanigans (colors! line and form! conceptual constructs!), SANTA paints an alternate universe in which Death and Santa are twins separated at birth and Santa's home life turns out to be far more complicated than we thought. Metaphysical hijinks ensue when Death tricks Santa into endorsing products that don't quite exist. 
 
Will Santa ever discover his true secret identity? Is it still poetry if it doesn't rhyme? Do you really need to see A Christmas Carol  a fourth time? 
 
Recommended for ages 13 and up.

December 4-21; Thurs - Sun 7:30pm; Sun also 3pm; No show on December 13.
At the The Backdoor Theater, 4319 SE Hawthorne
$15-25 sliding scale
Reservations: 503 567 8309

liminalgroup.org  | facebook.com/liminalpdx
 
 
This production, Liminal's most intimate, features ensemble members Jeff Marchant as SANTA; Leo Daedalus (host of The Late Now) as DEATH; alto Carla Grant in a singing role as WOMAN; Alex Reagan as the CROWD; and introducing Delilah Scanlon (age 9 1/2) as CHILD. Sumi Wu (Imago) designs costume; Ben Purdy (defunkt, NWCT) ceates a dimensional video landscape as the set; and Rory Breshears (Rocky Horror Show) designs lighting.
 
Liminal co-founder and artistic co-director John Berendzen directs and composes music.
 
Liminal has been awarded a Winter Residency at The Backdoor Theatre, the home of their friends at defunkt theatre. 
 
 About Liminal
 Liminal is a nonprofit Portland-based network of theatre, performing, and media artists. Liminal is known both for its uniquely staged plays (as in 2013's OUR TOWN), and also for its large-scale live walk-through performance installations (as in 2012's Liminal presents Gertrude Stein).
 
Liminal was founded in Portland in 1997 and has produced eighteen original full-scale projects. Liminal has received numerous Portland Critics Circle (Drammy) awards, including Best Original Production (2000, 2003, and 2005); Best Sound Design and Best Music Direction (2000 and 2003).
 
“Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go.” - e.e.cummings

 

Liminal presents Our Town, announces Headwaters Residency

For Immediate Release

A multimedia, multi-level makeover of the American classic.

“Enjoy your ice cream while it is on your plate” - Thornton Wilder

Portland’s most experimental performance troupe enters the ring with America’s best-loved play. In this multimedia, multi-level flashback of psychedelic barbershop Americana, Liminal gives the American Dream a much-needed update. This is not your father’s Our Town, recommended for ages 14 and over.

Liminal brings together the créme of Portland theatre, visual, and multimedia artists. Portland art-comedy darling Leo Daedalus (host of The Late Now) leads as The Stage Manager. Introducing Jahnavi Caldwell-Green as Emily Webb, andCorey O’Hara as George Gibbs.  A singing cast features Jeff Marchant, Carla Grant, Alex Reagan, Leslie Finch, Rebecca Lowe, Wayne Haythorn, and Nathan Hansen, and . Jen Raynak (PCPA), Ben Purdy (defunkt, NWCT), and kollodi collaborate on sound, media, and visual design. John Berendzen directs.

Liminal has also been awarded a Fall Residency at The Headwaters, where last year P.E.T.E.’s R3 played to acclaim. 

November  14 to December 1, 2013 - Wed, Thurs, Fri, Sat 7:30pm; Sun 3pm
(no show on Thanksgiving)

At The Headwaters, 55 NE Farragut #9

$12-25 sliding scale   |  503 567 8309  |  liminalgroup.org

 

Liminal Presents Gertrude Stein

For Immediate Release

A part of the March Music Moderne 2012 festival, Liminal performance group curatesLiminal presents Gertrude Stein, an immersive multimedia performance installation in response to the writings of 20th century modernist master Gertrude Stein. Celebrating the sensual musicality of Stein’s own spoken language, as well as many of the musical settings of her texts, Liminal again brings together the best of Portland’s diverse arts scenes. Luminaries from every discipline join forces to create a total sensory music experience in a warehouse performance environment.

Virgil Thomson’s Capital Capitals becomes a video-opera in the hands of Leo and Anna Daedalus; director Camille Cettina and composer John Berendzen premier One Dancing, an original music-theatre piece based on Stein’s portrait of Isadora Duncan; Doug Theriault(sound) and Stephen Miller (video) turn Stein’s Plays into a media environment, David Abel performs ambulatory readings of her early works, and Sandra Gibbons shows her Tender Buttons series of comic panels. Other collaborators include JoAnn Johnson (performance), Margie Boule and Andre Flynn (voice), Stephen Alexander (piano), Bryan Markovitz and Ben Purdy (installation), Jen Raynak (sound), James Yeary (performative bartending), and many more.

March 22, 23, 24: 7:30-11:30 pm

Liminal space: 340 SE 6th at Oak

503 567 8309

$12-25 sliding scale

Advance tickets available at Brown Paper Tickets.

A part of March Music Moderne.

Funded with support from the Regional Arts and Culture Council.

Space provided by happylucky, inc.

Beverages by Bengerminz Premium Vodka and Ninkasi Brewing Company.

Liminal Falls in Love, Exercises Left, Right Sides of Brain

For Immediate Release
Media Contact – Alex Reagan, 503-860-9585, reaganal[at]yahoo.com

The Theory of Love
from Liminal Performance Group
Portland, Ore. – April 13 through April 29, 2007

Birds are suddenly appearing, and Liminal may have something to do with it.

Liminal’s latest original work has arrived, this time in the form of a traveling multimedia lecture-opera entitled The Theory of Love. The Liminal Love Theorists have been at the blackboard for over three years of research, testing, and experimentation into the hidden workings of Love. All of its constituents and behaviors have now been successfully identified and analyzed, and the resulting formula is no less than 100% pure Love. This is the stuff. Not tested on animals, this new mixed-genre product proves conclusively that everyone’s favorite emotion is more than mere hypothesis.

But hasn’t enough been said about Love already? 

“It certainly has,” says composer and project leader John Berendzen, “and Liminal would like to have the last word.”  The Resurrectory (2005) was a complex and relentless sonic investigation into Death. The Theory of Love wrestles down the only other great subject with equal passion and intensity.

Now available for mass consumption in a readily digestible musical lecture format, The Theory of Love begins its tour of public presentations aimed at educating the senses. Special host partners Reed College, Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA), and Chapman Elementary School (NW) provide the multimedia classroom facilities appropriate for the Portland premiere undertaking. Future tour partners include On The Boards’ Northwest New Works Festival (Seattle, June 2007), and Links Hall (Chicago, Fall 2007).

Leading the public experiment are singers David Abel (bass) and Ms. Leo Chapeau (alto). Their syllabus/libretto (written by Abel) leads us down the corridors of Roland Barthes’ ravishing ruminations on the metaphysics of love, through the motherless monkey experiments of psychologist Harry Harlow (do we need love more than food?), and on to parts unknown. All throughout, the Loveplus video database informs the spoken and sung words with its imagery, turning information into beauty, and making beauty informative.

This classroom is no study hall, and Liminal assures audiences that there will be no risk of nodding off. Using alternative techniques of musical hypnosis for accelerated superlearning (pioneered by Soviet-bloc and Japanese researchers in the mid-20th century), audiences are invited into states of blissful, relaxed attentiveness as mind and sense hyper-saturate with full-spectrum vibrations of sound, light, and thought.

An experiment in harmonizing the poetic and the analytical, the sexy and the brainy, Love is a foray into a new form of communication, a full-body experience of sound, word, and image. As the frequencies of the left and right brain synchronize with each other and to the your environment, The Theory of Love presents solutions to the long-sought equation of Love to the conscious and subconscious mind. Finally, you are left to answer the question for yourself: 

Love, is it just a theory?

The Theory of Love
a traveling multimedia lecture-opera
from Liminal Performance Group

Collaborators:

Mr. David Abel – bass, librettist
Ms. Leo Chapeau – alto, love practitioner
Mr. Leo Daedalus – tenor, media/art director, linguist
Ms. Anna Daedalus – soprano, art/media director
Samuel Miller – 16mm specialist
Jenny Fern Anderson – vestiary
John Berendzen – baritone, composer, director

Portland Premiere

Friday April 13 – Sunday April 15
Reed College, Eliot Hall

Friday April 20 – Sunday April 22
Pacific Northwest College of Art, rm 314

Friday April 27 – Sunday April 29
Chapman Elementary School auditorium

Friday and Saturday at 8pm and 10pm
Sunday at 8pm

$8-15, pay-what-you-can
Limited seating

For reservations, detailed directions and more info:
503 890 2993
liminal[at]liminalgroup.org
www.Liminalgroup.org

Liminal is a nonprofit Portland-based ensemble of artists producing performance and media works. Now celebrating its 10th year anniversary, Liminal has produced more than 12 original projects, winning numerous Portland Critics’ Circle (Drammy) awards for its productions of The Seven Deadly Sins, Three Plays Five Lives, The Resurrectory, and others.

The Theory of Love is funded with support from RACC, The Kinsman Foundation, and individual donors. Sponsored by Willamette Week, Reed College Theatre Department, and the Pacific Northwest College of Art.

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