On ABSENCE Doings: The Cuts of Disappearance

Abstract

This essay thinks through the ways in which a theatre director, a performer, and a video maker engage time by means of their specific practices with the camera during the process of creation and performing of What is to Disappear?—What We Not Know about an Empty Chair. The piece explores the notion of absence through practices moved by the process that dissolve the boundaries of bodies and open up the threshold time felt in the middle of and among things, not yet actualized, not quite something. The threshold time constitutes a composite of the affective atmosphere created by this particular performance of the not-known, and this absence/absencing is the topic of this essay. We focus on the virtual potential enabled by the action of the camera during the performance of What We Not Know about an Empty Chair, as a way to transit across the time/space of the not-known. We reflect on how our practices—directing, video making, and performing—co-create and co-compose a different sense and sensing of the camera. Thus the way we “do” our practices generates a different experience of “co-presence” with the camera in the process of making the not-known come into “presencing.” The essay engages with how the camera, and the computer-generated video and holograms with which it interacted, enabled forms of thinking and doing “time,” how they gave access to and yielded excesses of different temporalities as modes of engagement in a process of worldmaking. The engagement with the camera and other technologies in this performance is a way of co-creating through a multiplicity of actions a “surface” of projection, which becomes a pass-through, a way-path, a “wayfinding” where modalities of at-tending and attentions, and modes of attunement to the presencing of the not-known are found across the interval between people and materials.