Jowl Movements I-IX

For Immediate Release
Contact: Bryan Markovitz
Phone: 228-7231

Portland, Ore. - Since they first burst onto the scene, Portland’s performance group Liminal has become a phenomenon. Now, after spending a politically controversial year in Nigeria studying the maverick techniques of famed choreographer, Inu Bisiriyu, Liminal returns to the Portland scene with the premier showing of an original new work commissioned by the Institute for Performance Research at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. 

Drawn both from the shamanistic traditions of Nigeria’s Yoruba cults, and from the meticulously notated physical mysticism of fifteenth-century Iberian scholar Abraham Abulafia, Jowl Movements I-IX tackles diverse human topics ranging from the sacred ritual of the daily meal, to the popular modern traditions of erotic dance. Set in a post-industrial landscape of juxtaposition and intertextual pastiche, Jowl Movements I-IX extends the limits of the senses with a dazzling multimedia array of technical wizardry that, as with much of Liminal’s art, refuses definition. 

Jowl Movements I-IX is, above all, a very human convergence of cultural planes, addressing such issues as race, gender, age, religion, and socioeconomic displacement with an all-engulfing fin de sicle anxiety.

Liminal’s Portland performance of Jowl Movements I-IX is made possible by the generous support of Cascadia Holdings Corporation, Inc.

The Portland Building, 1120 SW Fifth Avenue, Main Entrance
Saturday and Sunday nights, October 24-November 22, 8:00 p.m. Tickets are $6-15 on a sliding scale, cash or checks. For reservations, call 229-3851. 

Liminal
PO Box 86215
Portland, OR 97286
phone: 228-7231, fax: 228-8840, e-mail: liminal@valise.com

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Handke Salmagundi to Show on Reed Campus

For Immediate Release

Beginning Friday, April 24 through Sunday, April 26, the performance group Liminal will present the performance installation, Handke Salmagundi,at Reed College. This event is sponsored by Reed’s Division of Arts and Division of Language and Literature.

Handke Salmagundi is a site-responsive performance art installation where Peter Handke’s playwriting is taken out of common modes of theatrical context and is reorganized into a synchronic place and time. The installation will surround the spectator with visual, aural and corporeal sensations that move in and out of space. 

Half theatre, half performance art, the production attempts to remove divisions between performer and spectator, while using selected words and actions of Peter Handke’s various early, middle, and late plays to frame the “drama” of the event. The result is a blend of techniques between two different periods in this century’s post avant-garde movement: first, the highly ritualized, self-reflexive, communal practices of performance from the late 60’s and 70’s; second, the hybridization of artistic mediums and resistant semiotic techniques characteristic of postmodern performance.

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. 

Handke Salmagundi is free and open to the public. Performances will be held on Friday, April 24; Saturday, April 25 and Sunday, April 26. The installation will open each night at 8:00 p.m. and will close at 11:00 p.m. Spectators are encouraged to come and go as they desire.

For further information or directions please contact Bryan Markovitz at 228-7231.

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The PAN Theatre Presents Suicide in B-Flat

This August 8-30 will mark the first production of The PAN Theater’s new late evening series— LIMINAL HOURS. The series will premiere with a new performance of SamShepard’s idiosyncratic and atonal play, Suicide In B-Flat.  Unlike Shepard’s more recent popular works, Suicide resists much of the playwright’s traditional style of structure and thrusts the audience onto an intricate tightrope of frenetic action and sensory flirtation that follows the inner workings of a truly liminal experience. Quite literally, liminal is the betwixt and between; neither this nor that, neither here nor there. Transgressing beyond the ordinary, this performance focuses in on the marginal limits of human behavior with live musicians, visual projections, and outrageous action.

In Suicide In B-Flat,  two roguish detectives are on the case to solve a violent and mysterious death. Is it murder? Suicide? No one knows. The only thing certain about this crime is that beneath the surface of Shepard’s play lurks a world of anomalous initiations and deviant experiments that develops into a strange and unfamiliar rite-of-passage.

Suicide in B-Flat travels like a bullet speeding through time and space, reaching its final target right between the eyes. This summer, drop the night time movie listings and visit The PAN during LIMINAL HOURS for an exhilarating and esoteric seventy-five-minute feast of the unknown.

The PAN Theater is located at 419 SE 13th (at Oak).  For further information and reservations, call 736-9736.

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