ABSTRACT
This chapter examines stage presence as key to thinking about performance and ethics. It uses the term "disorientation" to describe the experience of losing one's bearings, subjective, material, imaginative, during which the world perceived becomes strange. During a 2010 performance of Moon Water by Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, their music, pre-recorded and played over a sound system, began repeating the same notes over and over. The kind of stage presence Phillip Zarrilli claims for himself may be a kind of stage presence, but ultimately it affirms the tradition that keeps the performer separate from and dominant over the attendants. All of the characteristics speak to the possibility of finding stage presence during theatrical blunders. Beyond the conditions set between myself and others as we are, Bernhard Waldenfels' finds Merleau-Ponty's concept of space as a Spielraum. "Concrete" movement and "physical" space refer to the over-determination of task-oriented movement drained of perceiving subjects.
