ABSTRACT
The performer with presence brings a heightened level of vital power to the time and space of performance. The energy at work may be understood as natural vigour, wild animal spirits, elemental force, magnetic drawing power, electrical current or mesmeric command. All these associations are consistent with scientific accounts of the world, but in creating such accounts, scientists had to contend with prior modes of understanding that had a religious and folkloric potency irresistible to the dramatic imagination.
