The reviews are in for 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.
Al Límite Collective was established in January of 2020, right before COVID-19 turned into a pandemic. As it ravaged the world, it did not discourage us. A year has passed and we have grieved with our friends and families for all the losses we experienced together. We look back on the year, and it reminds us of the perseverance and resilience that keep us moving forward. Al Límite Collective wants to share with you the work we have done for the past year so that we can envision a future that is stronger and better through the arts.
HAPPENING |
Graphic Design by Mario Fong
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LIMINAL ARCHIVE
July 14 - 17, 2021 at 7pm & 8pm New Ohio Theatre as part of Ice Factory Festival Liminal Archive is an immersive theatrical experience that guides audiences through intimate moments of isolation experienced by artists as they traverse the unknown during the early days of the pandemic. Liminal Archive began as an open-source platform, providing a cultural exchange where international artists could collaborate together during a lockdown and mass uprisings, and it has collected more than 40 artworks, including music, digital art and theater. Al Límite has curated these offerings into a 40-minute odyssey of live performances, projections and audio journeys where we venture through the past, the present, and find our way together into the future. |
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Support Our Kickstarter Campaign for LIMINAL ARCHIVE
The core mission to support an independent collective is to ensure that all the participating artists are compensated for their time and effort. We, as a society, have long overlooked the importance of the care for the independent artists’ finance. As almost all of the artists are taking on extra part time jobs to secure their living situation, we would love to help alleviate such financial burden by all means so that the participating artists will be capable of fully engaging in the creative process and the presentation, without worrying about their financial situations. |
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CALL TO COLLABORATE
Al Límite Liminal Archive Al Límite Liminal Archive , is a body of international collaborative work and co-created performances inspired by collected texts from artists from around the world. To the many that have contributed, participated, and collaborated; we thank you and we urge you to keep going. |
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BROOKLYN IS NOT A SACRIFICE ZONE
In collaboration with the movement against the North Brooklyn pipeline, theater collective, Al Límite, chooses to fight back with creative resistance. Each performer lives along National Grid's fracked gas pipeline path and understand what's at stake. This is a series of devised pieces set safely and physically distanced outdoors in each neighborhood along the route: Brownsville, Bed-Stuy, Bushwick, Williamsburg, and ending in Greenpoint. |
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Quiet Us/ Riot Us
In New York City’s coldest month of the year, we will perform an illuminated outdoor performance of a ritual for collective grief, safely distanced in the streets and rooftops. In these unprecedented times of isolation, economic suffering and racial justice uprisings, we are feeling called as cultural workers to bring open-facing, public rituals to hold space for grief and healing while developing new traditions and mythologies for this process. As an international collective, with members from Iran, India, Mexico, Taiwan and the US, we bring story elements from our own traditions and cultures into an amalgam to create this new myth about mourning, writ large with illuminated puppets into an outdoor spectacle. |
