/Liminal Stranding
Live Performance, Performance, Super 8 Film, Artists' Moving Image and Expanded Cinema · Primary Work · Artist, Writer, Director and Performer · London, UK · 2023
01/ overview
[YEAR ]
[FORM ]
[PLACE]
Keep walking then I will be alright... I am invisible…I am safe
Project summary
2023
live performance, film
London
Liminal Stranding (2023) is a thirty-minute hybrid stage and film performance written, directed and performed by Mingxiang Wang. It premiered at Platform Theatre, Central Saint Martins, on 8 March 2023 as the MA Performance Design and Practice graduation work, completed with Distinction. The piece stages a live solo performance interacting with a filmed ensemble: Wang plays Harry on stage, while Jason / Jimmy, Hassan, Sarah, Damian and Alex appear only through projected image. A single toilet on a white plinth sits centre-left, facing stage right, between an outer frame with a transparent centre window and a rear opaque screen. Across roughly twenty-four hours of fictional time, the work follows Harry from a night in his flat through a morning train to Brighton, a cemetery encounter, a drug-using house party and a dawn walk into the sea. Spoken monologue and Super 8 footage shot at night on Kodak Vision3 500T run alongside the live body, so that two Harrys — the one on stage and the one on film — share the same stage without quite meeting. Liminal Stranding develops from Blue (2022), the three-part autobiofictional video poetry that serves as mother work, and from Blue Dream / Déambulr (2022), the live precursor first staged at the CSM Scratch Night.
02/ development
Artist's words
Liminal Stranding develops from Blue (2022), Wang's three-part autobiofictional video poetry, and from Blue Dream / Déambulr (2022), the live precursor staged at the CSM Scratch Night at Platform Theatre on 10 November 2022.
The film component was shot at night on Kodak Vision3 Super 8 500T, with a documented production day at Black Lab, Central Saint Martins on 4 March 2023, Day 2 of 2, covering scenes S1, S7, S8, S9, S10 and S11 close-ups. On stage, four projection zones — front frame with transparent centre window, rear opaque screen, frame, and stage area — hold a depth corridor in which the toilet on its plinth sits centre-left facing stage right, and Wang's live body shares space with filmed bodies projected at scale.
Roger Payne's Songs of the Humpback Whale (1970) opens scene 1; Jeff Buckley's Lilac Wine closes the final beach scene. The dual-Harry device places the live performer and a filmed Harry on the same stage at the same time, most visibly in the party sequence. Script v8 (23 February 2023) records the planned score; on the night, Wang abandoned the scripted needle action and improvised the final toilet sequence, leaving a documented gap between score and event that the MOSY archive treats as its calibration case.
Wang holds writing, direction, performance, editing and sound design as the through-line; additional production credits include DOP Claire Chevalier, scenographer Ruby Antonowicz-Behnan, costume Grace Carolan, producer Kyle Campbell-Pope, projection and VFX Hyun Jang, lighting Yiqing Tian, storyboard Jett Liu; film cast Ethan Bailey-Smith (Jason / Jimmy), Raman Kribi (Hassan), Susannah Gaffney (Sarah), Cornelis Joubert (Damian), Theodoros Vasiloudes (Alex); production stills Justin Atkins, poster design Mark Doherty.
Music rights for Lilac Wine and Songs of the Humpback Whale remain to be cleared at synchronisation and master-use level for any restaging at a non-UAL venue; restaging itself remains a future possibility contingent on rights clearance and partnership.
key time and events
10 Nov 2022: Blue Dream / Déambulr performed at the CSM Scratch Night, Platform Theatre.
4 Mar 2023: film-component shoot at Black Lab, Central Saint Martins, Day 2 of 2 (scenes S1, S7, S8, S9, S10, S11 close-ups).
8 Mar 2023: Liminal Stranding premiered at Platform Theatre, Central Saint Martins.
2023: Liminal Stranding presented as the graduation work for MA Performance Design and Practice, completed with Distinction. Documentation preserved includes script v8, monologue text, dissertation, storyboard, call sheet, production stills by Justin Atkins, stage-design renders, and a thirteen-file projection-export folder.
03/ documentation
