Liminal Stranding

[Location] Platform Theatre, London, UK

[Medium] Live Performance / Film / Video Installation

[Role] Writer, Director & Performer

[Organisation] Central Saint Martins, UAL — MA Performance Design and Practice

[About]

How about this time we bring the toilet onto the stage and give visibility to those who are usually unseen?

That question — the last line of my MA dissertation — is the entire impulse behind Liminal Stranding. It is a 30-minute one-person show combining live monologue and projected cinema, developed from the scratch night performance Déambuler: Blue Dream (2022) and presented as my graduation work at Central Saint Martins, MA Performance Design and Practice.

The sole set piece is a toilet perched on a white plinth — a quiet homage to Marcel Duchamp's Fountain. Before the show begins, when the audience sees a toilet alone on stage, uncertainty stirs. As Hannah McGill writes, bathrooms and toilets represent the negotiation between our public and private selves — sites for illicit activity, excretion, weeping, secretive drinking. They know the worst of us. That is the threshold I wanted the audience to cross.

Through the protagonist Harry — a Chinese international student in the UK — the performance traces a single catastrophic weekend: a stranger's overdose in his flat, a train to Brighton, a confession to a friend, and the pull toward the sea. The storyline moves chronologically, but the stage fractures time. I divided the performing area into four zones: the front semi-transparent screen, the back screen, the frame, and the stage itself. Jimmy — the stranger who overdosed — appears on the front screen as a spectral projection, his body looming over Harry's huddled figure on the toilet. This juxtaposition of size, of the virtual and the physical, delivers the feeling of being marginalised and othered by simply not presenting the characters on the same plane.

The piece holds several entangled social discourses without trying to resolve any of them. Class: Harry asks his friend Sarah, "Can you envisage residing in a country where drugs are more economically accessible than alcohol?" — a question about the reality of living costs in the UK that pushes young people toward more dangerous substances. Addiction: the 'horny and high' crisis within the LGBTQ+ community, where some individuals feel compelled to engage in sexual activity only under the influence of substances — a behaviour linked to internalised homophobia that associates queerness with uncleanliness and illness. Identity: living as an international student means inhabiting a liminal space that hovers between the thresholds of 'here' and 'there', where the ephemeral nature of a visa underscores your non-permanence.

The mask became a key symbol. For Chinese students in the UK, mask-wearing is more than a health measure — it is a negotiation of liminal identity, caught between cultural expectations and personal comfort. When a character at the party calls Harry "coronavirus," the racism is both specific and structural, a testament to how misinformation and xenophobia collapse onto the bodies of those already living in-between.

In conceptualising Jimmy, I drew on the relationship between Francis Bacon and George Dyer — specifically the Triptych May–June 1973, painted after Dyer's death from an overdose. The performance opens with Harry in the same disconcerting posture: head buried between his thighs, seated on the toilet. Dyer never felt an authentic sense of belonging within Bacon's social class. Jimmy and Harry mirror this dynamic — opposing yet complementary, like Yin and Yang, trapped in the same state of liminality.

The film elements were shot on Kodak VISION3 Super 8, 500 ISO, at night — producing extreme grain that makes the bodies nearly invisible. I was influenced by Derek Jarman's Blue (1993), where he uses his declining eyesight as a canvas for mourning, memory, and the body during the AIDS epidemic. I wanted the same intimacy: the warmth and imperfection of analogue film, its refusal to be sharp. The Super 8 format carries an element of unpredictability — each tape lasts only two and a half minutes, and I never knew what it would look like until the digital scan arrived. Even the smallest scratch could create something remarkable.

Subtitles function as a separate performing dimension. Inspired by Morgan Quaintance's Surviving You, Always (2020), where voice-over and subtitle run as parallel narratives, I used projected text as its own layer of meaning — lines that directly referenced what people said while under the influence of substances, running against the monologue and the images simultaneously.

The staging was inspired by Jarman's Wittgenstein (1993) — symbolic elements filmed against a black studio with minimal distractions. According to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, meaning is not inherent in essence but in how something is used within a language game. The toilet on stage means nothing until it means everything. It is acceptable to open a bedroom door and immediately step onto a train platform, because the emptiness between them is where liminality lives.

In the final scene, I chose not to follow a fixed script. Instead I worked from a sequence of tasks: sit on the toilet, silence, deliver lines, reach for the prop syringe, improvise. When the moment came and I stared at the harmless prop needle in my mug, paralysis set in. I abandoned the planned action and let improvisation carry me — Samuel Beckett echoing in my thoughts: where now? who now? when now? As Deirdre Heddon writes, the performer may perform the self, but one can never be entirely sure of who the self being performed is. Both selves keep slipping. That slippage — between the self that is performing and the self that is performed — is the work itself.

Liminal Stranding is not a concept to be merely discussed and dissected; it is a lived experience. By bringing the toilet onto the stage, by telling a story others might shy away from, the work gives visibility to those who are usually unseen. Liminality's essence is found in the state of constant becoming. In the theatrical context, it is a reminder that performance itself is a series of transitions and transformations — and that by embracing this, we accept the fluidity of our experiences and identities.