Hello playmates,

It's a long-ass while since I've been here in any but the fleetingest of
lurker-modes - and, ah, but I've missed yous; hope you haven't forgotten all
about me and started going out with one of them rough boys instead.

I'm going to try to be less entwined in all - I admit that I was, for a while,
powerless over britpo, and my life had become unmanageable -

but I just wanted to lob something in about the liminality piece that's been
bubbling through of late - and which I haven't followed sufficiently closely
to feel that I can wade in like some colossal mutant e-heron; nonetheless,
this ginger bit:

I've just finished working with the Leeds-based performance group Unlimited
Theatre on their new piece, 'Scream If You Wanted To Go Faster', and in
setting out on the process of making it, in the spring, one of the things I
insisted they should take a look at was Victor Turner's work around van
Gennep's early formulation of the <rite de passage>. It had a considerable
effect on the finished piece, and on their working practices throughout the
process. I'm utterly convinced that the implications of Victor Turner's stuff
haven't really been worked through in performance with anything like the
rigour they could stand. (There may be some exceptions to this centred around
Schechner, Kaprow, Oldenburg etc. in the US in the late 60's: I don't know
that work well enough - in so far as one ever could now - to be sure.)

What interests me very much - and I'm trying to write something on this at the
moment, which I (presumptuously) suppose might wind up in some future QUID or
other - is what happens, what the implications are for poetry in particular,
if one posits a relation between the van Gennep / Turner model of <rite de
passage> - I can't recall off the top of my head the precise terms that they
use, but it's something like separation -> transition (liminal phase) ->
recuperation; and the Nida-style model of translation between languages, or at
least its psychological / preparational epiphenomena - i.e. what it's like to
move the complex of senses within and outside a language unit between source
and target.

I'm writing very clumsily tonight (as you'll have spotted) but perhaps I'll be
clearer in the long run. I think what I'm moving towards is considering - as
others in this discussion have sort of pointed to - the act of poetry as being
partly made out of decisions about how far you can prolong or maintain the
liminal phase both in the writing / working process and also in the act of
then communicating the results or the sense of that work. I have a feeling
that most of the differences of opinion (about poetry as an act) that I've
ever seen expressed on this list are essentially about the relations between
liminality and closure. 

But: what those early anthropological / theatre-anthropological models
apparently don't allow for is a recuperation that doesn't dispel and resolve
the liminal, whereas I get the feeling that most poets would aver a creative
tension between liminality and closure: which is *not itself* a 'liminal'
tension. So we must above all, comrades, be careful how we use this very
attractive word. Poor Unlimited Theatre can now barely get through five
minutes without declaring that, ah, yeah, that's fucking liminal, that.
Liminality is not the same thing as ambiguity, or irony, or metaphor, or
suspension.

But that's all one, my rant is done, and I'll strive to make some toast now I
think perhaps.

Feeling already as if I've never been away, xt help me, and us all,

Chris

-----------------------------------------

Chris Goode
Director, signal to noise
24 Newport Road
London E10 6PJ

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