ABSTRACT
Dance exists at a perpetual vanishing point. […] It is an event that disappears in the very act of materializing.
(Siegel 1968: 1)
In theatre, as in love, the subject is disappearance. (Blau 1982: 94)
Performance originals disappear as fast as they are made. No notation, no reconstruction, no fi lm or videotape recording can
keep them. […] One of the chief jobs challenging performance scholars is the making of a vocabulary and methodology that
deal with performance in its immediacy and evanescence. (Schechner 1985: 50)
Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so it becomes something other
than performance. […] Performance […] becomes itself through disappearance.
