Aesthetics of [the] invisible

The question of ephemerality in current Performance Studies scholarship needs a different critical framing and vocabulary to understand the nature of the spatiotemporal dimension of how the invisible emerges and operates in the flesh of performance. This essay focuses on the philosophical insights of Indian performance theory to argue that the notion of “presence” in the Natyasastra cannot be conceived in Jacques Derrida’s sense as the ‘traces’ of the play of absence, but rather as the dismissal of it: performance as the presence of excess. To do this, the author outlines two sets of critical observations to contextualise the investigation of the ontology of the body in performance. Firstly, the chapter examines the Natyasastra’s concept of visibility and presence showing how embodiment and imagination inform the foundational discourse of the emotive experience (rasa or taste) of performance. The essay addresses Peter Brook’s production of Battlefield (2015) to situate the discussion of ephemerality, and outlines the ontology of absence of Indian logicians such as Gautama (600 BCE–200 CE) to emphasise the way in which the invisible gains the same ontological status as the visible in Indian performance theory. Secondly, the essay considers the act of perception to identify a gap in current debates on the ontology of performance. Finally, the essay proposes that Indian performance theory, through the idea of the experience of art as rasa, offers new ways of understanding the material base of [the] invisible in performance. In this way, the author argues, performance functions as heterotopia, where imagination gains a new ontological dimension in which the fictive becomes ‘real’ when the performance takes place. This, the chapter suggests, is the aesthetics of [the] invisible by which performance creates excess rather than its own disappearance as ‘trace’.