When Life Gives You Limens

"You can't look back. You must look back."

The professor's sonorous proclamation of that vital paradox emanated from the podium and washed upward, outward over the steeply-inclined rows of square red seats in the bright, cubic hall. The British Arts Center auditorium, unflinchingly modern with its cement walls and lacquered blonde hardwood floor, seemed an unconventional lecture location in its flagrant rejection of Yale's opulent Gothic embrace, but the lecture proved anything but orthodox. The incomparable Joe Roach was explaining the essential predicament of the Orpheus myth during the first meeting of his World Performance class, where I, intoxicated by this first brush with performance studies at the outset of my final year of college, would hear for the first time the term that has come to describe every phase of my life between that moment and this one: Liminal.

Quite simply, "limen" means "threshold" in Latin, and liminality - the straddling of an existential threshold - informs conventional and experimental performance in that performative acts negotiate the space between artifice and reality, between past and present, between the familiar and the foreign. As it describes a state of flux, liminality inherently implies change: as Jon McKenzie states, its "spacial, temporal, and symbolic 'in between-ness' allows for social norms to be suspended, challenged, played with, and perhaps even transformed." Furthermore, as performance studies extends beyond the expected areas of theatre and performance art into the anthropological, sociological realm, liminality manifests in rites of passage such as the isolation and reintegration of a tribe's adolescent males, or even those four freewheeling, exhausting, stressful, euphoric, intense and all-too-fleeting years of college we so fondly remember. In all cases, participants and observers find themselves changed by their relationship to each other and to the event at hand. And since all performances involve liminality, and all life involves performance, liminality becomes ubiquitous, unrelenting, inescapable.

The oxymoronic idea of constant liminality prompted McKenzie to coin the term "the liminal-norm," a concept which "operates in any situation where the valorization of a liminal transgression or resistance itself becomes normative -- at which point theorization of such a norm may become subversive." Full disclosure: I freely admit that I lack the philosophical knowledge to completely understand some of performance theory's loftier concepts, and McKenzie's idea initially struck me as somewhat tautological and head-scratching. After re-reading it, however, it seems he implies that given humans' incessant desire to assign value to liminal states, attempting to brand liminality as the new status quo threatens to obliterate our awareness of change and its impact upon us.

Hence my decision to name this blog after McKenzie's term. Liminality dictates the lives of most twentysomethings as we bob and weave our way through the blinding glare of the post-college world and the wobbly-kneed adventures of early-career uncertainty. Those of us prone to obsessive introspection constantly identify it for ourselves and for each other, mercilessly analyzing its implications and cowering beneath the monumental significance we assign it. We cannot -- and should not -- escape it, but we must not become too accustomed to it or else we risk forgetting it and, in turn, forgetting parts of ourselves.