Carolien Hermans

Area of practice: Dance/Performing Arts.
ARTI, ‘Art, Research, Theory & Interpretation’, School of the Arts, Amsterdam.
Subject of practice-based research: Embodied experiences: the way repetition and disappearance function in the construction of meaning.

Disappearance: self-loss in performance practice

Part of my research at ARTI is concerned with what I consider to be a crucial element of dance performance, namely the act of disappearance. Dance is always already vanishing, always in the process of dying before our very eyes, André Lepecki (1995) refers to this as the self-erasure of dance. Moving bodies fascinate because they have vanished at the moment we acknowledged them. Performance, through its embodiment of absence, in its enactment of disappearance, can only leave traces for us to search between, among, beyond (Heidi Gilpin, 1996). It is precisely this ‘unstable and unfixable nature of moving bodies’ that calls into question the current status of theatre as a representational machine. In my presentation I will discuss and show video excerpts of my latest piece ‘Conversation’. In this piece I have been working on several strategies for disappearing on stage (e.g. repetition, literal covering of the body, seek-and-hide game).