Performing Arts

The idea of interstitiality

The word interstitial means “between spaces,” and is commonly utilized to denote “in-betweenness” in a number of various cultural contexts. Architects refer to the leftover gaps between creating walls as “interstitial space,” becoming neither inside any room nor outside the developing. Medical doctors have utilised the term for hundreds of years to refer to a space inside the human body that lies in between blood vessels and organs, or in between individual cells. Tv station programmers refer to any short piece of content that is neither a show nor a commercial, but is sandwiched between them, as “an interstitial.”

How art can be interstitial

Take fiction as an example: If a librarian isn’t sure where to shelve a book, that may be since the material is interstitial in some way, not fitting comfortably into a single, conventional literary category. For instance, when novelist Laurell K. Hamilton 1st began writing and publishing romances featuring vampires and fairies, bookstores faced a dilemma: How do you file these stories when you’re working in a system that clearly labels 1 shelf for romances, a second shelf for fantasies, and a third shelf for tales of horror? There’s no single, obvious answer, due to the fact such a novel is interstitial fiction, its essence residing somewhere in between the boundaries of these genres.

Or contemplate the performance artist Laurie Anderson: She may go onstage and sing, tell a spoken-word story, project shadow puppets on a screen, and play a hacked violin whose bow is strung with audio tape. Is she a singer, a monologist, a puppeteer, or some kind of tinkering instrumentalist? Classifying such an act as interstitial performance art would be imprecise but efficient and accurate.

The interstitial arts movement

In the mid-1990s, Delia Sherman, Ellen Kushner, Terri Windling, Heinz Insu Fenkl, Midori Snyder, Kelly Link, Gavin Grant, Gregory Frost, Theodora Goss, Veronica Schanoes, Carolyn Dunn,Colson Whitehead, and other American writers interested in fantastic literature discovered themselves commiserating over the widespread perception that the genre-oriented publishing business found it challenging to market genuinely innovative fiction involving unusual, fantastical, or cross-genre elementsecause the mainstream literary fiction field demanded stories based in realism, although the fantasy field demanded stories that mostly followed the regular conventions of sword and sorcery or high fantasy. But it seemed to the authors that some of the very best literature was that which didn’t really fit tidily into either category but instead was becoming discussed in terms of much more amorphous, “in-between” descriptors such as “magic realism,” “mythic fiction,” or “the New Weird.” Further, the concept of interstitiality applied to other kinds of “in-between” fiction (unrelated to fantasy) and other “in-between” arts.

Over a period of numerous years, Kushner and Sherman prompted ongoing discussion about the significance of cultivating artistic “in-betweenness” led to the formulation of the broad concept of interstitial art. In 2002, literary scholar Heinz Insu Fenkl founded ISIS: The Interstitial Studies Institute at the State University of New York at New Paltz, and in 2003-04, Sherman &amp Kushner and some of their colleagues established the Interstitial Arts Foundation, a 501c(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to creating community and support for artists, arts-industry experts and audiences whose creative pursuits are interstitial in nature.

Interstitial Arts Projects

Interfictions

In 2007, the Interstitial Arts Foundation published an anthology of interstitial fiction through Little Beer Press titled Interfictions. It characteristics 19 stories from new and established writers in the USA, Canada, Australia, and the UK, and fiction translated from Spanish, Hungarian, and French. The anthology strives to “alter your mind about what stories can and ought to do as they explore the imaginative space between conventional genres.”

The anthology raised a number of questions and started many debates on the nature of interstitiality as applied to fiction. Reviewers raised the question of how critical the definition, or lack thereof, was to understanding the anthology as a whole and the stories individually. “The 19 stories contained within Interfictions serve as examples but not as points of an argument that could lead to a listing in a Funk and Wagnalls.”

Although a lot of of the stories are written by science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers and contain amazing or supernatural elements, Interfictions is not a genre anthology. “…interstitial fiction mixes and matches these preceptshost stories, science fiction, nursery rhymes, detective story, whatever might be handys part of a variegated prism to focus on the psychology of existence even whilst bending its collectively recognized state. …each and every “interfiction” shares this sense of disjointed narrative, but in extremely diverse techniques that do not lend themselves to straightforward genre categorization.”

Table of Contents

Heinz Insu Fenkl, Introduction

Karen Jordan Allen, “Alternate Anxieties”

Christopher Barzak, “What We Know About the Lost Families of —- House”

K. Tempest Bradford, “Black Feather”

Matthew Cheney, “A Map of the Everywhere”

Michael DeLuca, “The Utter Proximity of God”

Adrin Ferrero, “When It Rains, You’d Far better Get Out of Ulga” (translated from the Spanish by Edo Mor)

Colin Greenland, “Timothy”

Csilla Kleinheincz, “A Drop of Raspberry” (translated from the Hungarian by Nomi Szelnyi))

Holly Phillips, “Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom”

Rachel Pollack, “Burning Beard: The Dreams and Visions of Joseph Ben Jacob, Lord Viceroy of Egypt”

Joy Remy, “Pallas at Noon”

Anna Tambour, “The Shoe in SHOES’ Window”

Veronica Schanoes, “Rats”

La Silhol, “Emblemata” (translated from the French by Sarah Smith)

Jon Singer, “Willow Pattern”

Vandana Singh, “Hunger”

Mikal Trimm, “Climbing Redemption Mountain”

Catherynne Valente, “A Dirge for Prester John”

Leslie What, “Post hoc”

Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss, “Afterword: The Space Between”

External links

(international | independent | interstitial ) festival

Interstitial Arts Foundation

Toward a Theory of the Interstitial by Heinz Insu Fenkl

Coloring Between the Lines by Gregory Frost

Categories: Film genres | Literature | Art genres