With the purpose of formulating an apposite understanding of ConFest, this chapter evaluates and revises Victor Turner's core concept of liminality. Though Turner's ideas remain influential, their reconfiguration sets this study apart from Turner-inspired analyses of alternative events discussed in Chapter 1. There are three parts. First, focusing largely on his post-sixties material, I introduce Turner's project elucidating the significance of the limen. This is followed by a critical deconstruction which sheds light on aspects of Turner's essentialist tendency. An exposition of the basic elements of, and shortcomings in, Turnerian thought enables the fashioning of an appropriately tenored model accounting for a plurality of bodies, voices and genres. In the third part, I therefore posit that, as a unique alternative heterotopian threshold, ConFest is an organic hyper-liminal zone. In this final part, I articulate the two principal conceptual elements of this model. 1) I initiate discussion of the event's social organicism, which I find consistent with the anarchic poetics of Hakim Bey's TAZ. 2) As a hyper-performative cultural context for the expression of a triad of authenticity conditioning modalities (the limina of play, drama, community), ConFest is host to multiple alterity, ramified performance genres and variegated constituencies.

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