Performance of Absence in Theatre, Performance and Visual Art

139 Pages·2021·5.984 MB·English

by  Sylwia Dobkowska

Performance of Absence in
Theatre, Performance and
Visual Art
This research project investigates the concepts of absence across the disciplines
of theatre, visual art, and performance.
Absence in the centre of an ideology frees the reader from the dominant
meaning. The book encourages active engagement with theatre theory and
performances. Reconsideration of theories and experiences changes the way
we engage with performances, as well as social relations and traditions outside
of theatre. Sylwia Dobkowska examines and theorises absence and presence
through theatre, performance, and visual arts practices.
This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre, visual
art, and philosophy.
Sylwia Dobkowska is a lecturer in Theatre Studies at University of Gdańsk,
Poland, where she teaches intercultural theatre, contemporary performance,
and critical theory. She researches visual representations of language in the
form of theatre, performance, and art. She co-edited Justitia: Multidisciplinary
Readings of the Work of the Jasmin Vardimon Company (2016).
Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies
This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and
edited collections. Considering theatre and performance alongside topics
such as religion, politics, gender, race, ecology, and the avant-garde, titles are
characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative
studies on emerging topics.
Female Aerialists in the 1920s and Early 1930s
Femininity, Celebrity & Glamour
Kate Holmes
D’Oyly Carte
The Decline and Fall of an Opera Company
Paul Seeley
Touring Performance and Global Exchange 1850–1950
Making Tracks
Gilli Bush-Bailey and Kate Flaherty
Performing Resilience for Systemic Pain
Meghan Moe Beitiks
Performance of Absence in Theatre, Performance and Visual Art
Sylwia Dobkowska
Commedia dell’Arte for the 21st Century
Practice and Performance in the Asia-Pacific
Corinna Di Niro and Oliver Crick
Christoph Schlingensief’s Realist Theater
Ilinca Todorut
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
Routledge-Advances-in-Theatre-Performance-Studies/book-series/RATPS
Performance of Absence in
Theatre, Performance and
Visual Art
Sylwia Dobkowska
First published 2022
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Sylwia Dobkowska
The right of Sylwia Dobkowska to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
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any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-47112-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-04460-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-03351-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003033516
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Contents
List of figures vi
Acknowledgements vii
Preface ix
Introduction: towards an intercultural theorisation of absence 1
1 Absence and theatre studies 6
2 Absence and objects 35
3 Absence and performers 60
4 Absence and audience 91
Conclusion 121
Index 126
Figures
0.1 Map of the Book by Dobkowska 3
1.1 Space for Your Thoughts by Dobkowska 27
2.1 Eyes by Dobkowska 41
2.2 Sculpture by Dobkowska 47
3.1 Communion by Dobkowska 69
3.2 Yoni by Dobkowska 74
3.3 Forest of Possibilities by Dobkowska 83
4.1 Full Stop and Omission Cosmos by Dobkowska 94
4.2 Butō Notation by Dobkowska 100
Acknowledgements
This project developed throughout the years and across the globe, and I was
lucky to meet many wise and kind people to learn from.
I am grateful to Routledge editor, Laura Hussey, for supporting this book as
well as senior editorial assistant Swati Hindwan, Routledge publishing team,
and the readers for your interest in absence and theatre, performance, and visual
art.
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Royona Mitra for
mentorship, academic inspiration, sense of humour, patience, and friendship.
The intellectual support you provide is extraordinary. Your courage to change
the world through education is truly inspirational—I have so much to learn
from you.
This book would not have happened without the insightful and encourag-
ing guidance I have received from my wonderful advisory team—my PhD
supervisor, Professor Dan Rebellato, and advisor Dr Sophie Nield, Royal Hol-
loway University of London. I am grateful for the invaluable comments I have
received on the PhD project and the monograph proposal. Your comments
were crucial for the development of the project into a monograph—thank
you. I am grateful for the scholarships and support I have received from Royal
Holloway University of London for the entire duration of my PhD research.
I would like to thank all my academic teachers at Royal Holloway Univer-
sity of London, Goldsmiths University of London, and University of Wolver-
hampton for supporting my interest in everything that is between art, theatre,
and philosophy. I am grateful to Paul Brownbill for introducing scenogra-
phy into my life. I would also like to thank Duncan Fairfax for the lectures
about Jacques Derrida and design. I am lucky to have wonderful friends, who
encouraged me with insightful conversations about the subject. My grateful
thanks are extended to the most courageous people I know—Izabela Witoszko,
Alyssa Ueno, Dr Hsiu-Chin Hung, Jeehyun Kwon, Lilianna McManigle, and
Yumiko Naka. I am grateful to Dr Stacey Pitsillides for the conversations we
had about Digital Death and the role of absence in society. To my PhD research
friends, who provided invaluable comments especially at the first phase of the
research on absence—Dr Louise LePage, Dr Matt Smith, Dr Liam Jarvis, who
is a co-director of Analogue, an excellent and inspiring theatre company, and
viii Acknowledgements
Dr Adam Alston—thank you. The first line in the introduction to this book
was usually the first sentence in our conversations about absence. I am grateful
to Laura Ziuzia-Januszewska, Dr Wiktoria Szczupacka, and Jacek Tarasiewicz
for your support despite my absence.
I am immensely grateful to Dr Meghan Kuckelman Beverage for the conver-
sations we had about absence, presence, poetry, and performance. Thank you
for your kindness and academic excellence in reading the drafts of this book
and providing insightful comments. Our experiments with introducing Butō
and performance into language classes were inspiring. I am grateful to Meio
University in Okinawa, Japan, and Professor Masanori Tokeshi for the sup-
portive working environment and encouragement in introducing drama and
theatre into the curriculum.
I would like to say thank you to Professor Shin Yamashiro and the University
of the Ryukyus. I am glad to have the opportunity to learn from your example
about kindness and support in academia.
I am grateful to the Performing Arts Department in the Institute of English
and American Studies at University of Gdańsk for believing in this mono-
graph, in particular, to Professor Mirosława Modrzewska and Professor Tomasz
Wiśniewski for their trust in my research and also to Dr Maria Fengler and
Dr Agnieszka Żukowska for their support and inspiration for my future aca-
demic work.
I would like to say thank you to Morishita Takeshi from The Hijikata Tat-
sumi Archive for his support in finding resources about Hijikata Tatsumi. I am
grateful to Kae Ishimoto and Dr Rosa van Hensbergen from POHRC for
organising the Butō workshop in Akita 2018. I would like to extend my grati-
tude to Kanazawa Butoh Kan, in particular, Moe Yamamoto and Kei Shirasaka
for their patience and excellent work in teaching Butō.
Akasaki-sensei and Chifu-san—thank you for sharing wonderful stories and
for being so supportive. Thank you Teruya-sensei for the fantastic ikebana les-
sons throughout the years. I could notice the importance of absence in nature
and art.
To my family, who have supported me with endless love, in particular, my
parents Wiesława and Jan Dobkowscy, my sister Paulina Kozłowska, and my
niece Oliwia—thank you. I am grateful for the encouragement and kindness
to my family-in-law, Wanda and Zbigniew Gredżuk, my sister-in-law Agata
Gredżuk and Kacper.
To my dear husband and best friend Dr Szymon Gredżuk, your love and
support are as encouraging as your passion for adventure and spark for life,
thank you for your brilliance, patience, and an excellent sense of humour,
especially in the difficult times. I will always remain grateful.
Preface
A journey has many beginnings. One was in a dusty corner of an old library,
when I wanted to find answers on the nature of thought and language. The
feeling of inspiration during a performance, when I realised that the situation
unfolding in front of me is a physical thought. The bitter feeling when I could
see no space for my foreign voice. Then, I could see how important absence
is. Moving half of the globe away helped me discover other ways of thinking
about absence. There will be many more beginnings as this research can only
be an introduction to the intercultural theorisation of absence.
This book developed from my PhD research where the majority of examples
of theatre, performance, and art were produced in Europe but later I extended
the theory and practice to the international perspective. There is a fundamental
difficulty with the subject of absence—defining something that does not exist is
not academic. Defining absence could make an interesting ghost story, fictional
adventure, or religious experience, but I am not interested in those interpreta-
tions in this book. That would define absence as other kind of presence. Defin-
ing absence by negation of presence could only reinforce binary thinking. That
was not the feeling I had in theatre, not the feeling I had when denied voice,
there had to be another way. The philosophy of language was helpful in find-
ing absence in the structure of presence but did not give any manual on how it
actually works in real life.
When I moved to another part of the world, I noticed that absence can be
non-binary. I realised that my argument is stronger and clearer by writing about
absence as a cultural construct. The gaps in discourse appear by unfolding
sociopolitical thinking and by reconsidering things taken for granted. Socio-
political constructs, such as racism or nationalism, affect everyone. These con-
cepts have physical manifestation in the choices we make and in our actions.
Noticing absence within every presence can be a matter of life and death for
the discriminated and the critical category of absence is more important now
than ever before. The space and platform for thinking are theatre, performance,
and visual art. I realised that the role of arts is crucial to nourish societies that
are open to reconsider ideas taken for granted. Absence as a critical category is
useful not only for society but also for artists who notice the gaps in discourse.
Those absences, once realised, are a source of creative ideas.