Theatre Without Actors: Rehearsing New Modes of co-Presence

In this dissertation, I focus on the recent phenomenon of the absence of performers in the contemporary field of the performing arts. This phenomenon is heterogeneous and manifests itself in a variety of ways, but it has been a consistent tendency of the last fifteen years. I will approach this diversity by presenting seven contemporary strategies of staging that include either no professional performers or no physical human presence, illustrated each by contemporary performances, evidencing how pieces without performers are staged, and showing that the absence of the actor results greatly from an interest in staging the real. The absence of actors challenges an understanding of co-presence as a binary relation between a human actor and a human spectator, and allows for an expanded view of theatrical co-presence as a networked relation between humans and nonhumans, resisting essentialist definitions of theatre — and rehearsing posthumanist philosophical views.
I show how contemporary theatre without actors can be traced back to modifications in ways of thinking about theatre in discourses on theatre and performance in the 1990’s. Views on the staging of technology, the perceiving of theatricality in non-theatrical environments, and on the relations between theatre and the real, have opened new ways of thinking of the absence of actors. Furthermore, I demonstrate how ideas and forms of theatre without actors are an integral part of the history of theatre, moving from a number of early examples from the eighteenth century, to then look at authors who, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have explicitly advanced the possibility of withdrawing actors from stage as a necessary step to improve the practice of theatre. Differently from these cases, I show that the absenting of the actor results today mainly from engendering new modes of co-presence, evidencing how it reconfigures assumptions about theatre and rehearses perceptions of the real.