The Liminal Festival is a three-day music festival to be held September 24, 25 & 26, 2009 at various venues throughout the greater Chapel Hill/Carrboro, North Carolina area. The Liminal Festival’s goals are twofold: 1) to bring together musicians who are bridging genres, working to integrate genres or otherwise bend the rules of traditional musical genre, for performances to highlight the possibilities of this cross-genre experimentation and 2) to expose listeners, especially underserved or otherwise nontraditional audiences, to these performances.
The festival will include private outreach performances for underserved audiences, a free and open to the public performance on Friday, September 25 and will culminate in all festival acts performing back to back in both theatres of the ArtsCenter in Carrboro, NC on Saturday, September 26.
Liminality, loosely defined, means existing on the threshold of different states. Here’s what wikipedia has to say about it. I use the term in regards to music to define musicians and artists working outside of the confines of genres, alongside the confines of genre, or in the plane where genres get mashed together. Often this means more than one genre is represented in that artist’s musical output, or the musician’s visual aesthetic is so much a part of the experience as to blend the distinction of performance art and music. In curating this festival, I did make a point to invite artists whose creative work is wholly unique, that I deeply respect, admire and also which, I feel, the average listener could find accessible and appealing.
~Wendy Spitzer, festival curator