ABSTRACT
An image haunts me: I see a wall, industrial grey with random markings and dents, as in a factory perhaps, the edges of which are obscured by diagonal shadows of blackness. On this wall there is the faint shadow of a body in midair, with arms and legs intact and reaching outward as in a leap, but no other identifying characteristics. The space around this shadow is enormous, there is so much wall; and the body creating the shadow is not visible, already vanished from sight. This image appears whenever I think of performance: it recalls the state of disappearance that is for me the foundation of an event, and marks the desired stasis that will prove that it ever took place, that it could ever be recorded in some displaced form. It also marks the impossibility of retracing an event for any other purpose than to create a fictional narrative derived from it. We can never know what took place, because the image etched in memory is transformed the moment we attempt to reexamine it. Performance, through its embodiment of absence, in its enactment of disappearance, can only leave traces for us to search between, among, beyond. If the act of interpreting performance could be reconciled with its impossibility, perhaps that which has vanished would reappear in altered, unrecognizable forms, as its own fearless undoing and unknowing of events. This text marks the initial traces of a search for and examination of the workings of displacement and disappearance in performance. It does not propose to be a demonstration of the function or existence of displaced and vanished events; rather it indicates certain points on a map of survival tactics present in the performative spaces of moving bodies. The failure of performance to be fixed within the representational field is an underlying issue that motivates these pages; critics often do not register that what they are writing about is a representation. Much critical writing about movement in performance presumes the fixability and reproducibility of the performed event, and thereby romanticizes its ephemeral character. This is evidenced by criticism’s frequent recourse to description as a
discursive mode in order to recreate, fix, and some would argue, sentimentalize, the performance event.2 I see little value in sentimentalizing disappearance. Rather, I would like to celebrate disappearance as a powerful source of compositional and hermeneutical information. It is precisely the unstable and unfixable nature of bodies in performance which demands attention at this point in the development of bodily discourses-indeed, we must begin not only to let the body go, but also to revel in its absence, and in the traces engendered by its passage from presence to absence.
