Performance Research

A Journal of the Performing Arts

ISSN: 1352-8165 (Print) 1469-9990 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rprs20

‘Indirect Modes’ of Theatre

Intervals of the presence in Teatro Ojo’s Deus Ex Machina

Rodrigo Parrini & Patricio Villarreal Ávila

To cite this article: Rodrigo Parrini & Patricio Villarreal Ávila (2019) ‘Indirect Modes’ of Theatre,
Performance Research, 24:7, 130-136, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2019.1717883

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2019.1717883

Published online: 17 Feb 2020.

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 ‘Indirect Modes’ of Theatre
Intervals of the presence in Teatro Ojo’s Deus Ex Machina
RODRIGO PARRINI & PATRICIO VILLARREAL ÁVILA

1
Teatro Ojo was formed in Within contemporary atmospheres signs and appeared in the process of the theatre play, and by
the year 2002 in Mexico
City, and its current
waves are spread. The airspace that surrounds the end of the season about fifty questions to be
members are Laura Furlan, any body or territory is flooded with various used by the performers/operators were formulated
Héctor Bourges, Karla
electrical materials that pass through or bounce addressing very different issues that went from
Rodríguez, Fernanda
Villegas, Alonso Arrieta, through them. To call, in this sense, is to send out Mexican history to recent local events, from
María López Toledo and waves and to create a momentary atmosphere. personal memories to the regional vocabulary or
Patricio Villarreal. The
collective has an extensive According to Peter Sloterdijk (2003), modern ways of talking, from their knowledge on popular
artistic production, and humans would be radial beings, antennas and culture to their feelings about the national
upon its own words ‘it is
located in a disciplinary means of transmission sending out and receiving context. It consisted in unusual enquiries where
undefinition zone’, where signals. Questioned by multiple anonymous instead of a sale, people were asked to talk. The
‘reality becomes the
absolute mediator’ (Teatro voices, we have learned to answer calls from calls’ dynamics meant a waiting time while
Ojo 2019). Ileana Diéguez strangers. In the global economies, thousands of numbers were contacted followed by a time of
states that within its pieces
‘an extreme slimming of calls are made daily from call-centres located in conversation, and, in some cases, a cut. Voices
the traditional different places of the world. India, for example, were summoned first, heard afterward and finally
representational apparatus
can be observed’ (2009: 183) has become an exporter of telephone attention gone. The voice’s appearance was followed by its
and the own collective services for English-speaking countries (Patel technical disappearance due to a simple ‘hang up’.
states that its production
does not seek to ‘represent
2010). Call-centres are part of a global traffic of The old Greek theatre character in which an
reality’, but ‘confront it signals and voices organized by little enterprises untimely god interrupted the scene to impose
directly’ (Teatro Ojo 2019).
as well as by big multinational companies its capricious volunteer (Murray 1913) was
2
Deus ex Machina was
a two-year project resulting
(Hudson 2009). Contemporary proletarians sell transformed into a black box with tiny stations,
in four different artistic their voices and put their vocal folds at the service computers and a program to make calls (Garza
pieces performed in of capital, just as the nineteenth-century workers 2019). The old theatre machine was transformed
different places in Mexico.
The last and main one was used to do with their own bones and tendons, into a commercial and technical system. We
the staging titled Deus ex according to Marx (1976). believe that this theatre piece put to work
Machina as well, held in the
Teatro El Galeón in Mexico Theatre group Teatro Ojo set up a call-centre specific ways of appearance and disappearance
City from 18 January to inside a Mexico City theatre venue where they and, in such sense, established an apparatus of
17 February 2018.
called hundreds of telephone numbers from appearance/disappearance operating an interval
3
The team was formed by
Inés Ramos, psychoanalyst; a commercial database.1 In this artwork titled gathering together historical, sensible, material as
Jesús Pérez Caballero, Deus ex Machina, whomever picked up the phone well as political dimensions.
lawyer and journalist;
Emanuel Bourges, was invited to answer a few questions about many In an essay regarding disappearance, German-
historian; and Rodrigo different issues.2 Through an open call, Teatro born artist Hito Steyerl (2012) mentions an
Parrini, anthropologist and
ethnologist. The artistic Ojo gathered together a bunch of performers experiment known as the Schrödinger’s box in
group worked separately and artists to play the phone operators in charge which, from a quantum perspective, a cat locked
with each one of them in
order to incorporate and
of the calls made from the call-centre system. inside a box could be either dead or alive. What
put to practice some To approach the desired conversations, the should be the status of such cat, subjugated
elements related to its own
area. In the case of
artistic group joined together an advisory team under the indeterminacy of time and space?
psychoanalyst Inés Ramos, in order to research and try to develop a special Steyerl affirms a paradoxical one, since the animal
the accompanying advisory
listening, as well as enquiry skills in order to carry is neither alive nor dead. Let us suppose that
term lasted until the end of
the season by attending out conversations tuned in with what is called that box is a way of government but instead of
weekly group sessions ‘in-depth interview’ within the anthropology a cat in it there are millions of inhabitants from
where experiences and
different affections caused field.3 Once the season started, some questions a country or perhaps from a specific region; such
by the calls were shared and were ready for using, but the majority of them a box is ‘governed’ by a dictator or is subjugated
discussed between the
performers/operators and
Teatro Ojo.

130 PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 24·7 : pp.130-136 ISSN 1352-8165 print/1469-9990 online

http: //dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2020.1717883 © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
by interventions from the militia, mafias, armies ‘Hello.’
and police, and all of them, the experimenters in ‘Good night.’
this case, operate and control that interval, where ‘Yes?’
nobody knows if they are alive or dead. Perhaps ‘My name is Eréndida Córdoba and I’m calling you
anyone inside that experimental and political from El Galeón Theatre of the National Institute
container could be either dead or alive. The of Fine Arts located in Mexico City. We are making
quantum indeterminacy will become another one, brief interviews for the development of a public art
political and vital. project. We will not ask for any personal data. Your
voice will be heard inside the theatre. Do you wish
How about the voices? Where are they? What
to participate?’
types of appearance and disappearance can be
‘Yes.’
explored when we make a call or when we answer
one? Or perhaps when we pick up a telephone ‘What national hero would you have liked to
have been?’
and then we hang up? Where is the starting point
of a voice coming out from an electronic device ‘What national hero?’
that, by using strategies belonging to the trade ‘Yes.’
of sale, questions our knowledge about history, ‘Well … Emiliano Zapata.’
or perhaps digs into our daily and intimate life? ‘Do you admire a particular hero?’
How does theatre appear when it only calls, ‘Pardon me …?’
crouched behind the dark side of technology? ‘Do you admire a particular hero?’
A theatre of voices without bodies that privilege ‘Him.’
hearing and being heard?
‘Do you like the statues of homeland heroes?’
‘Yeah, sure.’
I N D I R E CT M O D E S O F T H E AT R E ‘What statues do you like?’

Achille Mbembe (2001) writes about indirect ‘Emiliano Zapata … Pancho Villa …
President Carranza.’
modes of government, implemented by state and
‘What do you feel when you’re in front of them?’
non-state actors taking place at the core of the
State, but also on its margins. Within the thick ‘Well … yes … I feel pleasure when I see it.’
plot of post-colonial governments, Mbembe ‘Do you believe statues live and move when nobody
identifies those power exercises as a medullar sees them?’
feature of fragmented sovereignties, broken states ‘Noooo! Honestly! That is definitely something very
intervened by international financial organisms, … so away from the natural.’ ■ Deus ex Machina. El
Galeon Theatre, Mexico City.
unable to practice sovereignty in the modern ‘Do you think a statue from your town should January–February 2018.
sense, but through the monopoly over violence be destroyed?’ © Alonso Arrieta/Teatro Ojo

and its means in a given territory.

Our interest is not to specify such modes of
government for the Mexican case, but we still want
to keep the image provided by Mbembe in order
to think about indirect modes of theatre, through
which we can glimpse the intervals between the
things appearing and disappearing in a certain
historical moment and within the context of very
particular relations of power in practice. In the
case of Deus ex Machina, the theatre work does not
address disappearance as a political technology,
crucial for war and governmental strategies
implemented in Latin America since the sixties of
the past century until today (Calveiro 1998), but
we believe it recognizes aesthetic intervals that
can be read as political ones.

PA R R I N I & V I L LA R E A L ÁV I LA : ‘I N D I R E C T M O D E S’ O F T H E AT R E’ 131

■ Deus ex Machina. El
Galeon Theatre, Mexico City.
January–February 2018.
© Alonso Arrieta/Teatro Ojo
4
The three long quotations
inserted in this article are
excerpts taken from
different calls made and
recorded during Teatro
Ojo’s Deus ex Machina
stage performance (Mexico
City, 2018).
132
‘Well, we don’t have one, to be honest.’
‘Have you ever thought about destroying a statue?’
‘Nooo! Never! No way!’4
Indirect modes of government are the way
in which control over certain populations
has been applied by extracting wealth from
a territory, where different types of resources are
expropriated, and the administration of violence
is imposed. Mbembe’s perspective – historic
and sociological – traces an argument with data
from pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial
Africa. Deus ex Machina call-centre reproduces
commercial modern technologies in order to
introduce other conversations in a country
marked by the experience of violence and the
forced disappearance of part of its population,
in particular since the war against drug cartels
decreed in December 2006.
On the one hand, we have a theatrical apparatus
exploring the intervals of presence through
a swaying between ways of appearing and
disappearing. On the other hand, we do have this
Schrödinger box in which modes of government
produce appearance and disappearance intervals
for subjects as well as collectives. Steyerl writes
that inside the box, ‘There were actually two cats:
one dead, one alive – both locked into a state of
so-called superposition, that is, co-present and
materially entangled with one another’ (Steyerl
2012: 1). This superposition would not be just an
experimental state, says the German artist, but
a radical political condition during the twentieth
century, ‘a standard feature of various forms of
government’ (3). The indirect modes of theatre
do not aim for power, but they find it. Moreover,
P E R F O R M A N C E R E S E A R C H 24·7 : O N D I S A P P E A R A N C E
they inhabit and, in some way, produce the
intervals of presence through in-site calls and
listening. They are indirect in its scenic strategies
as well. In the first instance, the indirect modes
of theatre would be ‘inside’ that box, manifesting
its intervals, and, perhaps, also interrupting
them. The indirect modes of theatre interrogate
these states of superposition, especially those
ones coming out from contemporary forms of
government. As mentioned before, the intention
is not only to address forced disappearance or
disappeared people, but also an attempt to imagine
the possibility, behaviour and dimension of that
superposition state, pointed at by Steyerl. In the
context of Deus Ex Machina, when a number
was dialled, the operators were ‘calling’ to the
Schrödinger box and in some way any of the ‘cats’
was picking up the phone from inside the box, even
though we never knew which one was answering.
Thus, these indirect modes aim towards a theatre
of indeterminacy, in the sense given by Steyerl.
A feature of Teatro Ojo’s work is its radical
immanence regarding the places where its pieces
are produced (Diéguez 2009). Their theatre
‘appears’ from either a particular place or
environment-specific conditions and therefore it
produces images, events and encounters closely
associated with these sites and the history they
bring. Teatro Ojo’s theatre does not ‘wear’ a scene,
but searches for the scene to arise within the
territoriality of any story or discourse. Its theatre
is, therefore, always indirect. It is not the record
of completed works, but a remnant of divergent
and singular interventions. But in Deus Ex
Machina, this indirect strategy is emphasized in
a particular way. The call-centre is set up inside
a theatre building, as a classic stage. But the
dramaturgy corresponds to the calls made and the
conversations held, guided by the type of questions
asked at the moment of the chat. Whoever assisted
in the play listened to those ‘lines’ and became
its ‘spectators’. Nobody could see the person or
persons talking at the other side of the line.
Voices touch one another just as the bodies
of Leibniz touch other bodies and, through that
contact, bodies that have not met before get in
contact. Voices touch one another through the
calls and technology becomes – in this case – the
way to summon them up, as the very surface
where they get in touch. At times, once somebody
answered the phone, some other voices from the
other side of the line could be heard alongside
the person holding the conversation. On some
other calls, the owner of the telephone told
stories about absent people, who were somehow
taking part in their account. Voices touching one
another as the Leibniz bodies, as the philosopher
says, ‘This intercommunication of things extends
to any distance, however great’ (Leibniz cited in
Steyerl 2012: 5).
‘What is your first memory?’
‘My first memory? No! I can’t remember. I’d never
had gifts or memories.’
‘The first thing it comes to your mind. Perhaps
a place, a scent, a person …’
‘My first gift was a cow. A cow, as we say it in
the ranch.’
‘Can you tell us a little bit more about that cow?’
‘It was a legacy, a legacy from my parents. May they
rest in peace.’
‘Did the cow have a name?’
‘Yes. Her name was “the rain”.’
Trapped in the boxes of political and vital
indeterminacy: What type of gestures can theatre
produce? How to call other unknown people in
a country where a phone-call might correspond to
a kidnapping or extortion attempt? The dreadful
pitch of technology comes across the production
of a historical time in which the whereabouts of
thousands of people in Mexico is uncertain. Tzole
country has become like the Schrödinger box and
its inhabitants that quandary cat, perhaps dead or
perhaps alive. Disappearance is neither an art nor
a theatre theme, but an epochal horizon.5
Therefore, the lurking question here is if the
classic theatre formats can give account for the
political, corporeal and subjective change of
disappearance, or if the violence that the country
has experienced in the past years has opened up
a gap not only on democracy or citizenship
narratives, but in a way that has created a fracture
within aesthetic strategies.
In this context, an indirect theatre assumes that
disappearance is not only the lived experience of
some subjects, but what is more, a threatening
fate that hangs over any life. In that sense, it
is an indirect mode of government. Deus ex
Machina does not contest the political processes
of disappearance but the aesthetic, experiential
PA R R I N I & V I L LA R E A L ÁV I LA : ‘I N D I R E C T M O D E S’ O F T H E AT R E’
and vital intervals emerging among appearing
and disappearing voices. In particular, the
performance explores a technical interval that is
also a sensible one.
PERSONARE
Personare: to resound. That is how theatre
invented the person. The mask covers the face,
but amplifies the voice reaching out until the
last marble stone. Lonely voices, choral voices,
being launched to whom is contemplating. And
those who contemplate, listen. Are we persons
because we can sing? A person with a mask: is
it an oxymoron? Or is it a pleonasm? We shall
remember theatre as the ghost’s realm, as the
God’s celebration, or as the place where our
deceased ancestors dance. Have we forgotten by
chance that we make theatre to take responsibility
for our dead people? Person, personare, ‘to
resound’. It seems that theatre survives by
forgetting a harrowing cry, a lament dissolving
among an infinitude of voices audibly circulating
around theatre spaces. It is a foundational wail,
separated from the current voices by an interval
of times and worlds. These theatrical voices are
its consequence, even when they constantly
blurred the memory of a bygone unendurable pain,
up to its disappearance. Who goes to a theatre
play thinking about attending to the echo of
a sacrificial act reverberating hitherto? Theatre
has been, perhaps, its own Deus ex Machina. It has
turned around its own narrative and, thus, has
disappeared that primitive strength able to bear
the cry that gives rise to tragedy. Tragedy: that 5
According to official
numbers given by Mexico’s
mortal act’s chant that places us at the side of the National Search
crime. We consider ourselves its survivors, when in Commission of the
Secretariat of the Interior
reality we were its perpetrators.
at the beginning of year
But that is something we must forget. Theatre 2020, more than 61,000
today is mainly a social event that shall not people are disappeared
throughout the Mexican
demand too many ties. We consider theatre as territory. Ninety-seven per
a kind encounter between people that in such cent of these
disappearances have
a way show themselves and communicate with happened since 2006, when
one another. We unequivocally believe that we are the Mexican Drug War was
declared by the then
persons who made the theatre. We shall remember Mexican Government (Pie
that in an original stage of the scene phenomena de página, 2020).
it was theatre that made the person. Person,
personare, ‘to resound’. Within that densification of
world we call theatre, the skinned skin of another
being – in the most known cases of an animal –
133
 became a mask to accumulate and throw the voice.
The resounding voice in the theatre would be the
consequence of a sound trajectory, beginning with
the cry of the one who passes away, turning into
the lament of the one who survives it and dissolves
into the words in which each scene is sung.
The voice that resonates in that theatre would
be a consequence of a sound trajectory that
originates with the shout of the one whose life
expires, becomes the lament of the one who
survives, to dissolve in the words with which each
scene is sung.
That theatrical dimension of the person is what
interests us here. We shall say about the person:
a voice resounding in the theatre space. Projected
voices for others’ listening, and bringing with
them the threshold, keeping life and death in the
same spot. The legal, philosophic, religious or
political person has a long and complex history
full of adventures, ridges and contradictions
(Esposito 2012) that will not be mentioned here.
We favour the possibility of imagining the person
within the realm of theatre beyond the origin of
a word, or perhaps its etymological description.
We crave for that voice to resound. That voice that
preceded us and today seems lost. In addition, we
crave for the resounding of a future that can be
thrown by that same voice.
When such a voice resounds once again in
the scene, some strength of theatre, apparently
extinct, then comes back. An act of apparition
opens up, of re-apparition. It will not take too
long, but will last forever.
D I V E RT D O M I N AT I O N
If theatre could interrogate death, what questions
would it ask of it? According to Achille Mbembe
(2001) new domination technologies are being
created, although the old ones have not yet
disappeared. In the global capitalism call-
centre, technology is used to make transnational
commerce chains work. Within the call-centres
capitalism calls and listens, asks and answers.
Resounds? Inaugurates short dialogues with
neutral accents at different times of the day and
from multiple places. Call-centres are machines
of a radical deterritorialization for interpellation.
The well-known Althusserian scene, known as
interpellation, in which a policeman calls someone
134 P E R F O R M A N C E R E S E A R C H 24·7 : O N D I S A P P E A R A N C E
in a square and that very same someone recognizes
the call and turns, constituting themselves as
a subject in that very instant (Althusser 1971), has
been replaced by these technical interpellations
in which anyone is called by anyone while
being recognized by the serial form of its own
interpellation and no longer for the singularity of
an invocation. When today the telephone rings at
home or in our pockets, something of that old call
made in the street still resounds.
The indirect mode of theatre penetrates
inside this serialized repetition of commercial
questions and displaces it towards the absurd and
the surprise. In Deus ex Machina, the operators
of the call-centre performance informed the
interlocutors that they were contacted from
a Mexico City theatre and participating in a public
art theatre play. After the introduction, operators
asked them if they wished to answer some
questions. If the person accepted, the game of
questions was started. The call was the same type
as in a sale, but they asked and chatted instead.
It sounded as if they were offering something, but
they were only playing.
What kind of calls are those? What is the
technology that mobilizes this type of call-
centre? A theatre removed from its classic frame
inverts the positions as organized by traditional
scene and transforms the audience into nomadic
dramaturges of their own stories. It is a theatre of
listening and not of vision. A theatre listening to
the historical and intimate voices, summoned to
an artistic space.
The sonorous masks of classic theatre have
changed into technical masks of contemporary
economies. Is it about reproducing the marketing
micro conversations where things are offered,
sold or supported? In its sophisticated service
systems, capitalism uses the sonorous masks
of voices answering in the global call-centres,
as if a way of theatricality corresponded to
a commercial strategy. But in Deus ex Machina
that commercial sonority ended up displaced
into another playful, useless one, without any
doubt. What kind of people emerge in these
conversations? Teatro Ojo uses a technological
apparatus to build up a sonorous mask to produce
auditory personifications, delirious or surrealist
micro-dialogues, just as exquisite corps of social
conversations at the verge of intelligibility.
 ‘When was the last time you felt calm?’
‘When I stay at home I feel more calm than in
the street.’
‘Would you say that when you’re outdoors you feel
more worried?’
‘Of course! One goes outdoors and there is no end to
it … One is always watching in case we get robbed …
and I’ve seen it … somebody grabbing the earrings,
or a purse … I’ve seen it with my neighbours …
somebody
took away their cell-phone … So many things
I’ve watched!’
‘When was the last time you saw an image you
consider was violent?’
‘Oooh! Just here in front of my house! A few guys
approached, running and the police after them. The
police caught one of them and beat him up! Oh! I felt
so bad to see that! Until my neighbour stepped out of
his house and I told him to ring the neighbourhood
alarm we have in this block, but anyway they
took him with them, and he was so beaten! Both
policemen kicked him so hard! It was awful to see
that, and one feels very bad …’
‘Did it cause you a feeling of pain?’
‘Sure! A lot of pain! But we don’t know if it’s true or
not. And if it was true, why they beat him? Why they
don’t take him to the correct place and judge him?
Why beating him?’
‘In what specific part of the body do you feel
this pain?’
‘Here, in the top of the belly.’
It is not about bringing theatre to individuals
and collectives never assisting with performances
or lacking the chance to experience art, as if the
artistic group should assume the state anxieties
that links art with audience, tickets with success,
culture with crowd. Rather, it is about disguising
theatre with market costumes, more effective in
its enquiries than the nation state old voices and
hiding the scene under a sale technology. The
piece searches, in some way, for the displacement
of the voice’s place within the theatrical
apparatus: instead of asking for the silence from
the spectators, they are asked to talk.
But commerce and violence seem to overlap
in contemporary Mexico. The calls made for
sale or for service are interspersed with others
made to extort or threaten. Given this ominous
cohabitation of market and crime, the calls made
in each Deus ex Machina performance needed
to go through layers of fear and astonishment,
PA R R I N I & V I L LA R E A L ÁV I LA : ‘I N D I R E C T M O D E S’ O F T H E AT R E’
although they seek to produce friendly
conversations. Fear was definitely not part of the
piece’s design, but a radical symptom of the times.
To resonate in the daily experiences of violence
and impunity implied summoning for bodily
and affective tensions that this generated and
beginning to ‘listen to them’.
Even when the conversations dealt with
different issues, violence appeared and, in
that sense, the attempt to turn fear or distrust
into contact and a conversation then, was
transformed into a strategy of precise keywords
and intensities, seeking to survive the first
communication that appeared once somebody
decided to answer the phone. Through a first
introduction combining familiarity with
estrangement, the voice on the other side of
the line was asked to participate in a theatre
play. On the one hand, it became important to
work with the proximity and familiarity that
call-centre machines have produced in most
of the population during the last decades.
Paradoxically, a call from an unknown number
in contemporary Mexico is as much an assumed
act as a disquieting one. A familiar and friendly
atmosphere was created when operators gave
their own name as well as the place the calls
were made from. It was familiar – because of
how much it has become accepted – this effort
to keep someone stuck on the telephone line
holding a verbal interchange. The estrangement
appears when the purpose of the call diverted the
commercial, productive, helpful intention towards ■ Deus ex Machina. El
Galeon Theatre, Mexico City.
a particular one, privileging the unrepeatable and January–February 2018.
uniqueness of a singular voice (Cavarero 2005). © Alonso Arrieta/Teatro Ojo
135
 The estrangement became even greater because
accepting the call meant there was participation
in a theatre play.
Can an indirect theatre divert domination? Can
that theatre create machines able to hinder the
old and new dominance of technologies and
detour power towards laughter, fear towards
confidence and silence towards conversation? The
call-centre production shows two singular
operations: the use of commercial and
communicational apparatus belonging to global
capitalism for other ends – to interpellate away
from either the Althusserian policeman or the
anonymous criminal. Spectral marketing and
surreal questioning: this is an indirect strategy,
a way of diversion. But it is also the path to
recognize and produce intervals of the presence
that emerge at the very point in which certainties
and convictions are going through a radical crisis:
6
In order to explore the it is a theatre without habeas corpus,6 that must
relation between modern
forms of corporeality and
call/ask not to produce a subject, but to
the legal figure of the acknowledge the existence of a body and the
habeas corpus in Europe,
presence of the subject that bears it. Through the
see Cohen (2008).
resounding of the calls, different forms of persons
spring up, with vulnerable and uncertain sonorous
masks; persons irremediably marked by the fateful
intervals of the presence within the contemporary
regime of power and corporality. To call is to
glimpse the presence of that one on the other side
of the line, but, also, the continuous threat of
its rupture.
The old Greek god interrupting the scene to
produce another course of time appeared then
in the Deus Ex Machina’s performance made
of phone calls and listening, yet through his
own indirect mode made of a mixture between
theatre and government. Appeared to anyone
present, however invisible for our contemporary
gazes, perceptible in sounds and in the touch
sound waves produce. The god – or perhaps the
goddess – remained hidden behind the theatrical
machinery weaving signals, numbers dialled
and connections from where it made possible
the verbal intercourses coming out from the
communicational apparatus inside the theatre
venue. But for Mexican historical reality, perhaps
this god, this goddess, was not exactly hidden
nor disappeared within theatre, but dissolved in
infinite gestures belonging to the contemporary
world. We shall think this divine entity dissolved,
136 P E R F O R M A N C E R E S E A R C H 24·7 : O N D I S A P P E A R A N C E
atomizing her own strength into the many
voices that were said somewhere, but heard at
the other side of the line to tell of their own
shared survivals.
REFERENCES
Althusser, Louis (1971) ‘Ideology and ideological state
apparatuses (notes towards an investigation)’, in Lenin and
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