Theater as Liminal Space

Anna Hemphill

I am drawn to both the artistic world of theater and spirituality. In fact, they have been linked themes in a lot of my studies at CNU from my time at Oxford to courses I've taken in the theater department to now in Primal Religions. There is something in me - a God given desire, perhaps - that longs to express the depths of human spirit through art. I depend equally on both art and faith - one usually feeding the other.

Ever since I first learned about Victor Turner and his his concepts of liminality and communitas, I have understood art's connection to the spirit. I believe theater to be a liminal space, a threshold experienced by performer and audience. When one enters a theater and engages in drama, he is no longer existing in the outside world nor is he totally a part of the world of the play. The actors and the audience are in a space of nothingness - we experience words and sensations, but they are fleeting and once they occur we are on to another moment. In the same way, theater is communitas - a community of believers in the fictional world created on stage. Each person in the theater is connected by the events happening on stage, and everyone is affected by the group reaction. No one is alone in the experience of the play - we experience it sponstaneously as a group. We release the rules of the world and collectively adopt a new set of rules governed by the expectations of the drama.