LIMINAL ARCHIVE
The secret to this kind of fluid, seemingly borderless work is actually hidden discipline. The Liminal Archive is the sort of scrappy underground production that depends heavily on Christmas lights and the theatergoers’ goodwill, but despite (or because of) its material poverty, it takes scrupulous care of the audience. The producing directors Leah Bachar, Dennis Yueh-Yeh Li, and Monica Dudárov Hunken have agreed on a structure that moves the watchers around swiftly and confidently; every section of this crazy-quilt performance is brief enough to intrigue us but long enough to develop a thought. It displays the dramaturgy necessary to light-touch work, an attunement to how much an audience can sustain its attention in the absence of the usual interest-generators like plot. And despite the many folks involved, there’s a shared, modest intention behind the whole thing. This restraint registers as a kind of ragged elegance. In two places during the show, we hear a text by Ireri Romero: “I close my eyes and suddenly I feel a network of invisible threads that cover my entire body.” The collective makes us feel this sense of connectivity, first by demonstrating their own decentralized artistic partnership, then by sewing us — with six quick stitches — into their tapestry.
Photo by Erik McGregor
Review from AdrianDimanlig.com
Last Saturday night, I caught the final of a handful of performances of Liminal Archive (RECOMMENDED), a multimedia offering of the 2021 Ice Factory Festival at New Ohio Theatre. Devised by Al Límite Collective, the production is yet another immersive theatrical experience that mimics the act of museum-going. In this case, audience members are ushered through a parade of six performative installations depicting the isolation and loneliness felt by artists around the world during the last year or so. These varied, well-curated micro-scenes – which were inspired by the more than 40 pieces of art culled from a cultural exchange for international artists during the pandemic and other recent occurrences – provide an exquisitely intimate glimpse at how artists have perceived and processed these game-changing events. At each idiosyncratically designed “exhibit”, I invariably found myself, over the course of approximately an hour, face-to-face with six performers – the game Leah Bachar, Shan Y. Chuang, Sanam Erfani, Monica Hunken, Ann Treesa Joy, and Philip Santos Schaffer (all excellent) – who used artistic expression as a means to articulate what for many of us was, and continues to be, an overwhelming and confounding period of our lives.
Last Saturday night, I caught the final of a handful of performances of Liminal Archive (RECOMMENDED), a multimedia offering of the 2021 Ice Factory Festival at New Ohio Theatre. Devised by Al Límite Collective, the production is yet another immersive theatrical experience that mimics the act of museum-going. In this case, audience members are ushered through a parade of six performative installations depicting the isolation and loneliness felt by artists around the world during the last year or so. These varied, well-curated micro-scenes – which were inspired by the more than 40 pieces of art culled from a cultural exchange for international artists during the pandemic and other recent occurrences – provide an exquisitely intimate glimpse at how artists have perceived and processed these game-changing events. At each idiosyncratically designed “exhibit”, I invariably found myself, over the course of approximately an hour, face-to-face with six performers – the game Leah Bachar, Shan Y. Chuang, Sanam Erfani, Monica Hunken, Ann Treesa Joy, and Philip Santos Schaffer (all excellent) – who used artistic expression as a means to articulate what for many of us was, and continues to be, an overwhelming and confounding period of our lives.
