Complicating the Implication

Abstract

The article departs from considering how, in contemporary performances without performers, there is a rethinking of relations of co-presence between humans and nonhumans. In this framework, human acting is challenged and the agency of objects is highlighted, leading to perceiving nonhumans as animated, either by a human presence or otherwise. Considering that the animist potential in these pieces results from an entanglement of presence and absence — of both human and nonhuman agency — it is further proposed that such animism is better understood through an understanding of spectrality as a metaphor describing that entanglement. To illustrate these points, I introduce three performance pieces presented recently: Les Aveugles (2002), by Denis Marleau; 33 rpm and a few Seconds (2013) by Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué; and Sacre du Printemps (2014) by Romeo Castellucci.

The description of each piece is expanded by recurring to theoretical insights by Phillip Auslander, Elinor Fuchs, Una Chaudhuri and Bruno Latour, which allow me to demonstrate how I understand animism and spectrality to occur in stagings without human performers.

Following up, I continue with a brief historical overview of the idea of absenting of the actor in the modern and western theatre history, underlining how often the idea was associated with views on the staging of life and death. Recurring to how the absenting of the actor was approached by authors such as Kleist, Craig, Maeterlinck, Kantor, among others, it will be pointed out how that interest was suppressed from theatre history and thus marked by a mode of spectrality.

Finally, I conclude by reviewing how contemporary pieces without actors perform forms of animism that can be understood as a 'spectral metaphor' (Peeren), associating the recasting of the human's absence and the presencing of nonhumans.

Notes

1 ‘Tout chef d’œuvre est un symbole et le symbole ne supporte jamais la présence active de l’homme … Il faudrait peut-être écarter entièrement l’être vivant de la scéne. … Sera-ce un jour l’emploi de la sculpture, au sujet de laquelle on commence à se poser d’assez étranges questions? L’être humain sera-t-il remplacé par une ombre, un reflet, une projection de formes simboliques ou un être qui aurait les allures de la vie sans avoir la vie?’

2 ‘La “presence” obtenue par hologrammes tend à faire oublier le dispositif qui permet son apparition.’

3 A number of recent contributions are, however, reconfiguring this lineage. See, for example, Goebbels (2010) ‘Aesthetics of Absence: Questioning Basic Assumptions in Performing Arts’; Dorsen (2012) ‘On Algorithmic Theatre’; and Twitchin (2016) The Theatre of Death – The Uncanny in Mimesis