You are absent but present. Exploring the presence of absence through a performance series of Interpersonal Fictional Realities

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You are absent but present.

Exploring the presence of absence through a performance

series of Interpersonal Fictional Realities

Name: Sabrina Elisabeth Huth

Student number: 11769440

Address: Hessenring 14, 12101 Berlin

Email: sabrina.elisabeth.huth@gmail.com Website: http://imaginedchoreographies.com/

Date: 27.03.2020

Thesis supervisor: Dr Sruti Bala

Second reader: Dr Paula Andrade Da Silva Albuquerque Institute: University of Amsterdam

Faculty: Graduate School of the Humanities Department: Arts & Culture

Research Master: Artistic Research

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Abstract

Initiated by a meeting that never happened, since July 2018, dance artists Ilana Reynolds and Sabrina Huth investigate the question of how to encounter the presence of someone who is in fact absent. Under the constraint that they never meet in the flesh, they have created a series of Interpersonal Fictional Realities - shared events, in which they inhabit either the same space at different times or different spaces at the same time. In this way, a methodological framework is proposed, which sets up performance experiments to explore conditions and modalities under which the presence of the other’s absence can be accessed and experienced. In line with Alva Noë’s claim that the presence of absence is one variety of possible presences and is not merely a matter of (spatial) proximity but of availability, each of these access spaces consists of a different structure which, in turn, corresponds to distinct qualities of experience. The thesis at hand lays down the choreographic thinking within and around two of these performance experiments, as well as the wider context they are embedded in. In both the performance installation You are here (2019) and the live performance Dance with me (2019), (im)material mediators and traces serve as a tool to relate to the absent other and to stimulate the relational and sensorial imaginary in between the performers. By this manner, Interpersonal Fictional Realities are considered as a shared practice that relates to the encounter of an absent other as a modality to experience togetherness rather than social detachment; an experimental context to train trust, care and solidarity.

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List of Illustrations

[Cover] Written traces created during the performance installation You are here, 2019. Photo: Sabrina Huth.

[Fig. 1] Ilana Reynolds and Sabrina Huth performing in the show window. Performance installation You are here, 2019. Photos: Ester Eva Damen.

[Fig. 2] Ilana Reynolds and Sabrina Huth performing in the show window. Performance installation You are here, 2019. Photos: Ester Eva Damen.

[Fig. 3] Schedule of the performers’ physical presence during You are here in the show window.

[Fig. 4] Written letters and notes created during the performance installation You are here, 2019. Photos: Sabrina Huth.

[Fig. 5] Snapshots video documentation of the performance installation You are here, 2019. Camera and editing: Ester Eva Damen.

[Fig. 6] Written traces of You are here feeding forward into handmade paper, 2019. Photos: Sabrina Huth

[Fig. 7] Ilana Reynolds on stage and Sabrina Huth on-screen performing Dance with me. Modes of Capture Symposium, Ireland, 2019. Photo: Liz Roche Dance Company.

[Fig. 8] Draft movement score Dance with me, excluding time and audio cues, 2019.

[Fig. 9] Rehearsal for live performance Dance with me, 2019. Snapshots Skype

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Opening

This is how it began

On July 29th 2018, Ilana Reynolds and I were supposed to meet in Vienna during the 6th IDOCDE Symposium hosted at ImPulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival. 1 Under the theme, You are here! dance artists, teachers and scholars were invited to co-inhabit time, space, and bodies of knowledge together; to collectively compose a choreographic sculpture of experience-based knowledge. Leading up to the symposium, Ilana and I were invited for a joint week-long residency on reflective and artistic dance documentation . One of us didn't make it to Vienna, nonetheless, 2 we decided to work together. Hereby, the geographical distance between us shaped our research: how were we going to collaborate without sharing the same time/space? How were we going to encounter a body that is not here?

In resonance with the symposium`s focus on collectivity, collaboration, and immediacy, Ilana and I wondered how else we might come together, and what else, together, we might do. Hence, conducted via Skype, email and WhatsApp, we set up time frames, movement tasks and perception scores that could be performed simultaneously but in our respective spaces. For example, we moved in the memory of what someone did, we wandered and wondered in the cities we were present at that time. Doing so, we documented, traced, and recorded the traces of these tasks 3 and scores leading the research process into new processes; becoming a digital, virtual, tactile, and somatic collage of what happened. Hereby, our imagination and fictional projection of each other provided a potent space to work from. It allowed to put ourselves in the place of where you are and I am not. After the first sessions, we distilled our conversations and experiences into the following topics: Absence of the

1_IDOCDE_{(International Documentation of Contemporary Dance Education) is an international online and} offline platform for the dissemination of contemporary dance documentation and education. It is committed to sharing dance practices, to the interweaving of dancing and reflecting, and to fostering community. Since 2013, every year a symposium takes place within the frame of the ImPulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival. See http://www.idocde.net/.

2_{The publication Mind the dance} _{served as an underscore for the residency. It is a collection of essays,}

manuals, scores, exercises, and maps framing the politics around creative and reflective practices of dance documentation. See http://mindthedance.com/#foreword.

3_{See Interlude: A Movement Score on page 11. This score is inspired by Christel Vesters who explores the} potential of wandering as an alternative way of knowing and being in the world. According to Vesters, “Wanderlust refers to a curiosity-driven mind-set, the longing to discover uncharted terrain without a settled plan or fixed objective. Guided by chance, the figure of the Wanderer embraces whatever they come across. (...). However, there is a dark and dystopian side to the figure of the Wanderer as well—the Wanderer who is not only geographically lost, but also mentally disoriented; lost in their own mind, their own way of thinking, their own logic”. See “On wandering as an alternative system of knowledge.” Accessed July 2018. http://www.unfinished-systems-of-nonknowledge.org/part2/part2.

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other/ Fiction of the Other/ the Space in-between each other. Departing from these key-topics and enchanted by the experience that the physical absence of one another made her presence even more alive, my collaborator and I decided to carry forward the research after the initial point of the residency. Doing so, since July 2018, we have been investigating the imbricated relation(s) between presence and absence by setting up a series of Interpersonal Fictional Realities - shared events, in which we inhabit the same place at different times, or different places at the same time. In this way, the absence of one another creates a set of conditions to experiment with modes of being-together whilst being physically remote. You are, where I am not. And I am, where you are not. What Erin Manning (2016) calls ‘enabling constraints’, serves as a foundation as well as limitation of our collective endeavour. Committing to the fact 4 that we never physically meet is “enabling in the sense that it provokes new forms of process, but constrained in the sense that it occurs according to the limits of this or that singular junction” (90). Each time a shared event, a ‘never meeting’, comes into being, “it does so ‘just this way’, in direct accordance with how the constraint was enabling in this singular set of conditions” (ibid.). Up to now, the ongoing research project manifested in a series of Interpersonal Fictional Realities. Most relevant to this thesis are the following: the performance installation You are here (2019) and its (video) documentation, the booklet A Fictional Double Interview (2019) and published article As You Sit in My past, I Project Into Your Future (2020), and the live performance Dance with me (2019).

This is what it is about and why that matters

The thesis at hand intends to give access to the choreographic thinking within and around these works. It aims to produce a communicating platform that weaves threads between the documents and writings that happened throughout the creative process and the larger questions, ideas and thoughts that stimulated and emerged from them. Indeed, negotiations between micro and macro scales of expressions - between what is happening inside the dance studio and the world outside - became a constant companion during the research-creation process. Throughout public 5

4_{Due to Erin Manning and Brian Massumi (2014), the term ‘enabling constraint’ was adopted for a} relational technique in its event-conditioning-role. “An enabling constraint is positive in its dynamic effect, even though it might be limiting in its form/force narrowly considered.” (93)

5_{Hand in hand with the institutionalizing of artistic research, practice as research, or art-based research} within universities and art academies there has been a broad discourse on how art itself might activate and constitute (new) forms of knowledge in its own right and how theory and practice might come together (Borgdorff 2012; Evert and Peters 2013). With Erin Manning (2016a, 2016b), I do not consider the research component as extra to the artistic practice, and hereby, emphasizing what has come to be known as a practice-theory split. Instead, I follow Manning’s (2016a) suggestion that research-creation “generates new forms of experience; it tremulously stages an encounter for disparate practices, giving them a conduit for collective expression; (...) it generates forms of knowledge that are extralinguistic; it creates operative strategies for a mobile positioning that take these new forms of knowledge into account.” (27)

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presentations and work-in-progress showings, Ilana and I noticed how audience members, colleagues and friends approached us to share their own stories of absence: the absence of a lover in a romantic long-distance relationship, the absence of a family member imposed by political circumstances, flight and migration, the absence of a physical counterpart in virtual reality environments or video conference meetings, the absence of a collaborator due to working conditions demanding ever more flexibility, adaptability and responsiveness. Staging the presence of someone who is, in fact, absent triggers, as it seems, connections with the everyday. What is more, it touches upon a broader social and cultural phenomenon: the dismantling of spatial proximity and the feeling of closeness.

In our globalized age, entanglements reach way beyond what one might even perceive. “Every act results from more than one can know, and bears consequences upon more than one knows”, dancer and choreographer Alice Chauchat (2017, 30) points out. Fostered by continually evolving communication and information technologies, the usage of mobile devices, and the impact of social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter and so on, we have moved towards becoming involved with the world as a whole; lessening the geographically defined gap between one another. We carry access to the world in our pockets. Our mobile phones transmit text, voice, image, and sound at any time to hardly any place in the world. In The Medium is the Maker J. Hillis Miller (2009) states that modern telecommunication media “have made more or less instantaneous touching-, feeling-, knowing-, seeing-, hearing-at-a-distance the most everyday experience imaginable.” (2) At the same time, whilst transforming from local to global beings, we might have widened the gap with what is physically close to us. The very tissue of our spatial and relational experience has altered, Anthony Giddens (1990) recognized already thirty years ago: “conjoining proximity and distance in ways that have few close parallels in prior ages.” (140) Our concepts of space, time, and the relationships we live in have changed fundamentally. We live in a time, in which the measure of presence is not closeness, and the measure of closeness is not touch anymore. We live in a time to which Kris Cohen (2017) relates as networked life:

“One way to characterize networked life is that it fundamentally rewires the relationship between the individual and the group, the person and the collective, the one and the many or just the two. But this means that networked life is constantly rewiring this relation - this constancy is the key.” (2)

In such a situation, the paper at hand questions what relationship to ourselves, one another, and to the world we are part of we choose to rehearse, perform, and elaborate by dancing. It posits dancing and making dances as an ethical practise of encountering the presence of the absent other which exceeds the measurement of closeness and distance. More precisely, the question is raised how to access and

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relate to the presence of the other’s absence. What are the conditions and modalities of such a being-with? And what might be its implications for the way we build and shape relationships nowadays?

Those are the questions I have been leaving with.

In the time from their formulations in early 2020 to the final stage of the thesis in March 2020, the world as we knew it has changed completely. Within a few weeks the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid-19) have spread exponentially from the original site in Wuhan, China, to places all over the world. (WHO 2020) As a consequence, severe measures 6 have been imposed worldwide to flatten the curve of Covid-19 outbreaks; sometimes from one day to the next. At this moment, in most European and international countries any kind of public or private gathering beyond a certain number of people is forbidden by law. Kindergartens, schools, universities, playgrounds, service companies, restaurants, bars, and clubs are shut down. All cultural, social, or sports events shortly are cancelled. National borders are closed. And daily, more and more countries impose nationwide curfews to slow the viral distribution and to prevent the collapse of their national healthcare systems. Public life, literally and figuratively, has come to a standstill.

In these times of crises, on the one hand, there is a strong voice for translocal solidarity and collective responsibility. Images from the spontaneous singing of songs from private homes and city balconies in Italy or the massive applause for caretakers in Madrid are circulating in high frequency in social media. In her speech on the state of the nation on March 18, German Chancellor Angela Merkel outlines that the responsibility of each citizen to keep social distance to one another and, thereby, to slow the Covid-19 outbreak cannot be overemphasized. The challenge we face today, she urges, isn’t an individual but a collective one. (Youtube 2020) All of a sudden, social values like togetherness, solidarity, and mutual care seem to regain utmost importance in an otherwise highly individual society. On the other hand, what receives less media attention is the fact that the current health crisis provoked by the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its predicted economic crisis might affect strongest the most vulnerable bodies; the ones who are already at the margins of society or who are refused entry to Fortress Europe and become invisibilized at its external borders. “Social distancing is a privilege,” Sahar Tawfeeq, a spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Iraq stresses out. (Collard 2020) And the circulating #StayTheFuckHome hashtag becomes a cruel joke if you don’t have a home to stay. Millions of people who experience homelessness are without a place to shelter in; they are increasingly older and sicker, and they lack access to basic healthcare or preventive health screenings. Especially when restaurants, cafes, bars, and public 6_{On 31 December 2019, pneumonia of unknown cause was first reported to the World Health}

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institutions are closed, they struggle to find public bathrooms to maintain basic hygiene. (Topping 2020) Similarly alarming is the situation for millions of refugees and displaced people. They live in cramped camps, informal settlements, and overcrowded or unfinished buildings with poor or no access to hygiene facilities or decent healthcare. Under these circumstances, protection measures like washing hands frequently, keeping social distance, and quarantining infected patients, to prevent or slow down SARS-CoV-2 infections are impossible to apply. Not to speak of the lack of medical resources to treat the afflicted. This is why Doctors without Borders and several NGOs raise an alarm of the devastating consequences a Covid-19 outbreak would have in refugee camps. In an interview with Deutsche Welle, Florian Westphal, head of Doctors without Borders Germany, expresses his extreme concern about the danger posed to the approximately 20.000 people currently living in the Moria refugee camp, Greece. Intended for around 3.000 people the camp is over six times overcrowded. Families of five to six people live together on about three square meters. According to Westphal, this setting would be an ideal breeding ground for the rapid spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the Covid-19 disease. (Schülke-Gill 2020) While governments implement severe precautionary measures to protect their citizens during the pandemic, the most vulnerable bodies on the margins of their societies are in danger to be forgotten, left out, or made invisible.

Though the artistic research project Imagined Choreographies hasn't emerged from the current situation we are experiencing with the Covid-19 pandemic, I cannot help but see a potential link. The situation Ilana and I had put ourselves voluntarily back in July 2018 out of an artistic choice, has now become reality for people all over the world. As a global community, our social encounters are limited to a necessary minimum. We are obliged to express care and solidarity for each other, in particular for the more vulnerable bodies, by keeping physical distance. Thus, the initial research question: how to encounter the presence of someone who is, in fact, absent, seems to become relevant for many of us in one way or another. Wherever and whenever possible, we connect through a screen or mediator of one sort or another (instead of meeting face-to-face): we skype, we chat, we call, we live stream. Within days a giant leap forward into the direction of a digital society has been made. Home Office has become the most natural thing in the world; yoga, meditation, and dance classes are taught online via live-stream and video-conferencing; cultural events, like concerts or readings, are live transmissions. And in Berlin’s deserted clubs are playing DJanes and DJs their sets in front of an absent - or rather virtual - audience every night. In these times of social isolation, aloneness and togetherness coexist in 7 a permanently bewildering temporality and spatiality; in a “contorted form of 7_{As initiative to support Berlin’s artistic and cultural players of the club scene the project unitedwestream} has come into life. Every night the sets of Berlin-based DJanes and DJs are broadcasted live stream from different deserted clubs all over the city whilst the virtual audience listens and dances to the music in their respective living rooms. See https://www.unitedwestream.berlin/.

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togetherness” (5) as Cohen (2017) phrases in his book Never Alone, Except for Now. In the wake of the rapid and drastic developments of the past days, I move back and forth between utopian dreams of future social group forms that are globally connected via shared meanings of belonging and togetherness and dystopian nightmares. I wonder what new forms of collectivity could be imposed and invented - in both the short and long terms - by the current Covid-19 crisis and in its aftermaths. Are we moving towards an entirely networked life? Towards living life online; one that rearranges and fragments both the time and space of our social encounter, “and concomitantly, the fantasies, norms, and forms of belonging that structure encounter?” (ibid., 3) Which forms of intimacy and contact could be invented in the folds of such an overlay? How might we relate to our sense of touch, our desire to be physically close to one another, after weeks, maybe months, of social distancing? And most important: Are we as a global community able to reinforce an ethic of solidarity and togetherness to be armed against the not yet predictable consequences of the pandemic? Are we able to strengthen a global sense of togetherness and responsibility to fight against social, economic, and political injustices that might be caused or accelerated by the crisis?

Those are the questions I am staying with right now. Those are the questions that are not explicitly addressed in the following chapters. However, they are in between the lines and they might help to imagine a script of how we will be together in the future; a script that hasn’t been written yet.

This is how it is done

In Māoritanga, the indigenous Māori culture in Aotearoa New Zealand, if you seek for the advice of community elders, you never approach them in a straight line; though, you slowly walk towards them in a spiral. Following a spiral pathway allows the elders to see you from different angles; it allows to observe and get to know you before you reach them; it allows to receive more information on the way towards the destination.

In July 2019, I have participated in an artist residency at ImPulsTanz Festival Vienna facilitated by the New Zealandian choreographer and performer Charles Koroneho. Koroneho generously shared his research on the individual, communal and ancestral body in ceremonial space and performance, as well as the cultural practices and traditions of his community, the Māori. Inspired by the indigenous tradition of approaching someone, or something, on a spiral pathway, the spiral has become a spatial metaphor for how this research project is conducted and, accordingly, the thesis at hand is structured. Its shape conveys the idea of perpetual movement, of constantly shifting and interrogating positionalities and (social) locations on the way towards the destination. The research subject, the encounter with an absent other, initiates a journey; it suggests a direction, yet, it can never be reached. Once the

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absent other would become physically present, the research has come to an ending or has transformed into something else. Hence, the topic of interest can only be pursued through a process of approximation. Throughout the research-creating process, the subject of interest is attended as closely as possible without ever closing the gap. Hereby, each performance experiment, each Interpersonal Fictional Reality, marks a specific position along the spiral pathway; a certain perspective on the research subject that reveals different underlying questions and strategies of approaching them.

Accordingly, the thesis is divided into three main parts: The first establishes the ontological groundwork this research project is built on. It turns around, twists and tweaks notions of presence and absence, and their imbricated relation(s). Doing so, it unfolds six propositions that emerged transversally throughout the research-creation process. The second and third part assemble concrete explanations about how the performance works - the performance installation You are here and the live performance Dance with me - came into being and how they are in related to theoretical concepts. Each chapter entails a description of the context and set-up of the work as well as the main choreographic questions underlying and the choreographic strategies developed and/or applied to approach them. Hereby, the embodied experience of the dancers before, while, and after performing is in constant dialogue with theoretical considerations that emerged throughout the research-creation process. Furthermore, the thesis as a whole and the aforementioned parts, in particular, are interwoven with so-called Interludes: extracts from archival material of the research project including scores, scripts, interviews, transcribed recordings, images, and so forth. In this way, the thesis aims to include multiple voices and multiple perspectives on the research subject and from within its research-creation process; above all the voice of my collaborator Ilana Reynolds. Her decisive role cannot be overstated. Without her, the whole project would have never come into existence. And without her, the thesis would have never put on paper. Indeed, I’d rather claim collective than individual authorship for the realization of the present paper. Even when not writing together I hear the voice of our collective thinking in my words. As part of that collective authorship, I would best describe my role as one of a ‘curator-writer’: I have collected, gathered, edited, transcribed, structured, summarized, contextualized etc. the numerous amount of (im)material traces we produced throughout the past one year and a half until a common thread unwinded. And finally, I added the particular colouring of how I am thinking, writing, and moving in, with, through the presence of her absence.

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Interlude: A Movement Score

Move in the memory of what someone did…

You have not seen this/these person(s) nor their actions. You have never been close physically to this/these person(s). You haven't inhabited the same place.

Yet you are sharing the same process.

Wander and wonder… For 6 or 60 minutes.

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Chapter One:

Ontological Groundwork: On absence, presence, and the

presence of absence

Absence and presence, these terms refer to fundamental states of being; may it be “the state or condition of not being present” or “the state or condition of being present”. This is why, with Amanda Bell (2019), it is hard to define absence and8 presence without referencing themselves. The difficulty, as she concludes, stems from the fact that both terms depend on the notion of being; and the “primary definition of being as to have or occupy a place … somewhere … Expressing the most general relation of a thing to its place.” (ibid) In accordance, etymologically the term absence derives from Latin absentia, present participle of ab-esse ‘to be away from’; and the term presence from Latin preasentem, present participle of præ-esse ‘be before, be at hand’. Consisting of the verb esse ‘to be’ and the respective prefix ab ‘off, away from’ or prae ‘before’, both terms indicate the relation between the quality or state of having an existence and the condition of doing so. Consequently, “being is not 9 inexplicable or transcendent, but exists within a framework or state.” (Bell 2019) The definitions of presence and absence explicitly rely upon the states within which they are found: the world, images, and representations - to name a few examples.

What is the frame, or state, within which the notions of absence and presence are enveloped in this work? What is the ontological groundwork this project is built on? To this day, my collaborator Ilana Reynolds and I have never physically met. Yet, from the perspective of dancers and dance-makers, we have been exploring one another’s absence - and the presence of this absence - under the scope of themes revolving around embodiment, perception, and movement and their relation to fiction and imagination; wondering how to conceptualize, articulate, discuss, materialize, affect and be affected by making performances. The following chapter unfolds six propositions that evolved transversally throughout this research-creation process: 10

1. Presence and absence are not distinguished in binaries. 2. The presence of absence is one variety of presence. 8_{See Merriam-Webster Dictionary}_{https://www.merriam-webster.com/}_. 9_{See Online Etymology Dictionary}_{https://www.etymonline.com/}_.

10_{Though, placed at the beginning and in-line, one following the other, the propositions at hand do not} represent a linear process, neither a priority given to theoretical over experience-based knowledge. Throughout the research-creation process they emerged in a messy, unplanned, uncontrolled way; some of them didn't make sense till the very moment of writing them down. Yet, drawn from readings, discussions, reflections, and performance practices they proved to provide a solid structure from which to reach out to the performance experiments and its underlying questions in the subsequent chapters.

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3. The presence of absence is accessible.

4. The presence of absence creates a shared ‘fictional’ body of movement. 5. The presence of absence creates an agency.

6. The presence of absence is a modality to experience togetherness.

Proposition one: Presence and absence are not distinguished in binaries

Throughout history, philosophers have extensively debated the relative absence and presence within given conditions of being-in-the-world, placing their emphasis upon one or the other. Until Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida´s revision of the metaphysics of presence, the term presence seemed to be solidified in its privileged position next to truth and reality; and put in opposition to absence associated with imitation or copy (Bell 2019). 11 In the introduction to Being and Time, Heidegger (1996) articulates this priority is given to the presence and the present as follows:

‘‘The ancient interpretation of the being of beings (…) gains its understanding of being from ‘time.’ The outward evidence of this (…) is the determination of the meaning of being as parousia or ousia, which ontologically and temporally means ‘presence’ (Anwesenheit). Beings are grasped in their being as ‘presence’; that is to say, they are understood with regard to a definite mode of time, the present.’’ (22)

Turning toward the pre-reflective lifeworld of everyday experience, existential phenomenologists call into question the before mentioned privilege given to presence. In particular, Heidegger questions the privilege given to constant presence; “a metaphysics that understands all beings, including this being that is man, as being already present, as vorhanden.” (Dastur 2014, 408) In contrast to the metaphysical, substantial meaning of being, for Heidegger, the ontological structure of the world is not a given one, already there to be found, revealed or discovered. It rather arises through interaction, through a way of unfolding. Hence, what is central to Heidegger's philosophy of the being of beings is the orientation towards features and objects, both thought and experienced ones. In Being and Time, he comprehensively elaborates on how we encounter entities as equipment, in Heideggerian jargon, that is, as being for certain sorts of tasks. Hereby, he distinguishes between two major attitudes: ready-to-hand, in German ‘zuhanden’, ‘Zuhandenheit’, and present-at-hand in German ‘vorhanden’, ‘Vorhandenheit’. The first, ready-to-hand, defines how we achieve our most primordial relation with

11_{The term metaphysics of presence was coined by Martin Heidegger who argued that the entire Western} philosophy is driven by the desire for immediate access to meaning, and, in this way, built a metaphysics grounded in privileging presence over absence. At the heart of the metaphysics of presence is the determination of being as being-present: “Being is determined as presence through time” (Heidegger 1972, 2); as well as a belief in a “true being”, or unmediated, present state of being of representation. ( Bell 2019, Dastur 2014, White 1996, 147f)

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equipment not by some detached theoretical or intellectual study, or by looking at it in question, but rather by skillfully manipulating it in a hitch-free manner; famously demonstrated by Heidegger’s example of the hammer:

“The less we just stare at the hammer-thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is—as equipment. The hammering itself uncovers the specific ‘manipulability’ of the hammer. The kind of Being which equipment possesses—in which it manifests itself in its own right—we call ‘readiness-to-hand’.”

Heidegger 1996, 98 The latter, presence-at-hand, for instance, refers to the practices of natural science, when sensing takes place primarily in the service of theoretical or philosophical contemplation, reflection and observation. The entities under study are detached from the settings of everyday equipmental practice and are revealed as independent objects or things - as Heidegger sometimes refers to present-at-hand entities. In consequence, what is basic in our attitude toward things (including our attitude toward others) and thus our being-in-the-world, is a kind of self-concealment or absence: “the world´s furniture and stuff can absent and withdraw themselves.” (Noë 2012, 8) More generally, in existential-phenomenological thinking presence is repudiated in favour of absence, as Alva Noë (2012) points out in the following quote:

“For existential phenomenology what is basic in human experience is not our capacity for thoughtful observation or understanding of the world where we find ourselves, but rather, the fact of unthinking attunement. This attunement takes form of a readiness to act, and the disappearance both of the need for and also the possibility of looking and finding out how things are. The world does not really show up for us at all; for Heidegger, rather, it “withdraws,” at least when we are engaged and at home at it.” (7)

Similarly, yet turning from the relation with equipment toward the corporeal, in The Absent Body , Drew Leder (1990) reveals in which way our own bodies are absent in everyday experience: forgotten, alien, uncontrollable, or obscured. Drawing on Maurice Merleau Ponty`s unfinished work The Visible and the Invisible, he examines how bodily phenomena, though the ground of our experience, manifest structures of alienation and concealment. In his own words: “While in one sense the body is the most abiding and inescapable presence in our lives, it is also essentially characterized by absence.” (Leder 1990, 1) Throughout his phenomenological investigations, he characterizes the lived body as an ecstatic/recessive being, engaged both in a leaping out and falling back. As ecstatic, the body projects into the world through its sensorimotor surface. (ibid., 11-35) As recessive, it “falls back from its own conscious perception and control” (ibid., 69) receding from “its own apprehension into anonymous visceral depths.” (ibid., 103) In addition, “at any time,

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parts of the surface body are left unused or rendered subsidiary, placed in a background disappearance ,” (ibid., 69) the body just ‘moves off to the side’. It follows its own “tendency toward self-concealment.” (ibid.) Thus, for Leder (1990), “the body is never a simple presence, but that which is away from itself, a being of difference and absence.” (69) At the same time, the absence of the body, etymologically its ‘awayness ’, must be seen “as ingredient within modes of self-presence” (Leder 1990, 70) to be fully grasped.

21st-century philosophers, like Heidegger and Leder, have shown that certain modes of disappearance and self-concealment are essential for our being-in-the-world. By 12 placing their emphasis upon absence rather than presence, they question traditional metaphysics of presence that “once connected presence to an absolute truth or origin and absence to imitation or copy,” (Bell 2019) albeit with a twist. What seems to be more relevant than favouring one over the other is that the deconstruction of traditional metaphysics came along with new ways of grasping the phenomenon. Due to Bell (2019), the terms absence and presence have lost their binary distinction; being absent and/or being present are not considered in opposition anymore but as mutually entangled: “Absence can be thought of as a kind of presence and presence as a kind of absence.” (Bell 2019) So to say, presence and absence manifest alongside a wide range of imbricated relation(s). This is the first proposition of the thesis at hand.

Proposition two: The presence of absence is one variety of presence.

From the very beginning of this project, my collaborator Ilana and I have experienced one another´s absence not so much as simply ‘being away’ or ‘being off’ but rather as a different kind of presence. During the performance experiments, Ilana has become present to my thought, to my experience, and my imagination, even so, she has been absent in the sense of being physically away; being out of view and out of touch. She has become present precisely as absent. The experience of being present in absence is - or can be - one variety within the wide range of possible presences. This is the second proposition of the thesis at hand.

12_{In this context, philosophers like Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze are important to mention as well.} Relying heavily on Heidegger's critique of the metaphysics of presence, Derrida introduces a play of absence and presence focusing on mediation. By means of examples of writing and speech, he displays that “it is impossible for signification to be absolutely present.” (Bell 2019). However, one can access signification via mediated forms like language (ibid). Like Derrida, Deleuze denies a binary distinction between presence and absence introducing the notions of resemblance, copy and simulacrum. He displays that the simulacrum, due to its absence of resemblance, “becomes an entity possessing a different kind of presence.” (ibid) Other key theorists of the notions of presence/absence are: Walter Benjamin, Henri Bergson, Michel Foucault, Shaun Gallagher, Edmund Husserl, Andre Lepecki, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Peggy Phelan, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Baruch de Spinoza, Daniel Stern, Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran, Alfred North Whitehead, and many forgotten more, or never acknowledged ones.

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It goes along with philosopher Alva Noë’s account of perception and perceptual consciousness. In Varieties of Presence, Noë (2012) thoroughly elaborates on a whole range of possible presences, including the one which withdraws or has withdrawn: the presence in absence. In contrast to the traditional representational theory of 13 mind and its companion internalism which takes perception as a somehow internal affair and “the world as devoured by the mental” (Finke 2013, 214), Noë (2012) articulates an account of perception and perceptual consciousness due to which presence is enacted rather than merely found: “Perception is not something that 14 happens to us, or in us, (...), it is something we do.” (Noë 2004, 1) Drawing on phenomenology and cognitive science, his main thesis is that all kinds of presences result from our efforts of achieving access to the world. Hence, presence results from the ways, in which we involve our practical skills and knowledge in making persons and things available to ourselves: “Presence is achieved, and (…) its varieties correspond to the variety of ways we skilfully achieve access to the world.” (Noë 2012, xi)

With respect to visual perception and visual consciousness, Noë suggests that we have a sense of the perceptual presence of something that is manifestly out of view. Perceptual experience, as he concludes, extends to hidden features of an object; we visually experience what is hidden, occluded, or simply out of view; we have a sense of its presence, that is, the presence in absence:

“For example, you look at a tomato. You have a sense of its presence as a whole, even though the back of the tomato (for example) is hidden from view. You don't merely think that the tomato has a back, or judge, or infer that it is there. You have a sense, a visual sense, of its presence.”

Noë 2012, 15f

Following Noë`s line of argumentation, whilst looking at a tomato, or a cup of tea, we are conscious of both more and less than what projects into our nervous system. It is impossible to take in every detail of an object, or a thing; something always remains in the periphery or the background of our vision. And yet, for Noë, it is part of our visual experience that the tomato, or the cup of tea, has a back. It is present in 13_{Other thinkers have discussed manifold ways in which varieties of presence are experienced. For} instance, dancer and researcher Nita Little (2014) acknowledges in her dissertation “Articulating Presence: Creative Actions of Embodied Attention in Contemporary Dance” that presence appears within a variety of forms, determined by how an awareness of being is embodied. She distinguishes between five different forms of presencing: presencing 0 (not knowing knowing), presencing 1 (availability), presencing 2 (how knowing knows), presencing 3 (affordance - how knowing flows), and presencing X (agility). (Little 2014, 122-210)

14_{According to the internalist model of (visual) perception, we are not directly involved, or in touch,} which things themselves. Instead, we represent them; we experience them only mediately via certain ‘quasi objects’ in our brain or mind - which by themselves manage to convey the presence of an external world. For instance, visually present is only what is ‘here’; so to say what is perceived by the retina and processed from the retinal image. (Finke 2013, 214f; Noë 2012, 16-19, 30f)

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that sense. Its presence informs and structures our visual experience without actually being an element stimulating the nervous system. Thus, according to Noë, 15 what is occluded in the extension of what I am looking at, is itself a kind of presence; it is a variety of ‘real presence’ that results from the ways we achieve access, we bring our sensorimotor readiness into what we see and perceive. In other words:

“[P]resence is presence in absence because I know how to reveal, and, thereby, convert what is absent into actual presence. Presence is thus an unfinished project, it is acted out. (...) Presence in absence is what is hidden from view, what is not yet disclosed. Still, the hidden is retained in presence on the grounds of its availability. This means that the hiddenness intrinsic to presence does not escape me, it is afforded to presence by means of my bodily readiness to make further profiles actual.”

Finke 2013, 215

Proposition three: The presence of absence is accessible

Alva Noë’s way of turning presence in absence into a “yet undetermined hiddenness” (Finke 2013, 215) - but fully acknowledged as a kind of presence - is what characterizes the enactive approach. As mentioned earlier, it resonates with how my collaborator Ilana and I have been experiencing one another’s absence as some kind of presence in absence. Ilana lives in a remote city. She is too far away to be seen, heard, touched, or smelled. Yet, Ilana is present to me, insofar as I have access to her. Along with Noë’s (2012) claim that “we achieve access to the world around us through skilful engagement,” (2) her presence is grounded on the skills and knowledge I have to make contact with her. And indeed, I could take a train and see her. However, doing so would bring the project to an ending. Our artistic collaboration is built on the constraint that we never share the same time and space. We have access to each other in the sense of being available and present, nevertheless, under conditions predefined by the fact that we never physically meet. Thus, what defines our experience of one another’s presence in absence is not merely a matter of (spatial) proximity, of being more or less distant to each other; it is a matter of availability. Our skills and know-how determine the modalities in which we become present to each other within specific spaces of access - to introduce another main concept of Alva Noë (2012, 33-35). Each access-space consists of different structures “determined by the repertoires of skill that structure them.” (ibid., 34) And to each structure correspond distinct qualities. For instance, whilst skyping 16 Ilana and I are perceptually present to each other through our senses of distance; we

15_{See Alva Noë. 2013. “The puzzle of perception”. Accessed October, 15, 2019.}

https://bigthink.com/videos/the-puzzle-of-perception.

16_{Important to mention is that digitally mediated forms of communication, like Skype or Whatsapp, are} not the focus of this research project even so they have become a major tool for organisation and reflection during the research-creation process.

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can see and hear each other via digital devices, but we cannot perceive each other haptically or olfactory.

Referring to Noë’s access-space idea, perceptual presence and presence in thought can be considered as species of the same genus; they are varieties of explorations through which we achieve access to the world around us. What grounds their difference are “differences in their relevant skills of access.” (ibid., 35) Throughout the artistic research project, Ilana and I have been exploring one another’s presence of absence by setting up a series of Interpersonal Fictional Realities. Each performance experiment can be understood as an access-space, which contains a specific structure and distinct modalities of access; including perception, thought and imagination. In this way, what is absent can be graspable as what is present within certain spaces of access; it is accessible. This is the third proposition of the thesis.

Proposition four: The presence of absence creates a shared ‘fictional’ body of movement

“Dance is an expression, and it is not the same as its medium, the dancer. Dance and dancer are autonomous, although dance only appears when the dancer dances. Dancing, then, is the relationship at work between the dancer and the dance.”

Chauchat 2017, 29 As Alice Chauchat (2017) states above, positing a division between dance and dancer turns dancing into the space between these two. It further demands to choose and test alternative modes of relating to dance beyond logics of representation in which dance would be a tool to recount a story, convey a likeness, or represent the dancer’s self-expression. In a similar way, in Kinesthetic Empathy and the Dance’s Body, Dee Reynolds (2012) emancipates the dance from its representation through the dancer; claiming the dance in and of itself rather than through this or that dancer. In analogy to what film scholar Vivian Sobchack (2004) calls the film’s body, he introduces the expression the dance’s body to designate a body “that is not identified with a fixed subject position of either performer or spectator, but which is both ‘here’ and ‘there’, invested as subject and object in the shared materiality and affective flow of choreographed movement.” (121) In other words, whilst watching a dance one does not see people walking, running, jumping around but - in case it is well done - one sees the dance driving this way or drawn that way, assembling here and spreading there, rising, fleeing, holding etc.. Both Chauchat (2017) and Reynolds (2012) argue for a certain degree of autonomy of the dance that is danced. The dance is not located in the dancer’s body, neither in the spectator’s body. It unfolds from the encounter of the one with the other.

In the case of the artistic project at hand, the dance’s body always implies the presence of the other not being here. It extends beyond what is immediately graspable or accessible to experience; neither what is totally outside of experience. By staging the presence of the other’s absence the dance’s body manifests in what Ilana and I call

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Imagined Choreographies ; 17 somewhere in between the dancers’ actual bodies on stage (even so not in the same time/space) and the fiction of an encounter with the absent other. It is a shared fictional body of movement. This is the fourth proposition of the thesis at hand.

Proposition five: The presence of absence creates an agency.

Since the early beginning of this research project, Ilana and I conducted experiments, like Collective-Reading Sessions, in which we performed the same task/action/activity at the same time but in our respective places. During these sessions we didn’t have any other interaction than imagining the other performing the same task/action/activity; neither any proof that the other in fact does so. As a result, one recurring observation we agreed on was the difference perceived between performing the same task/action/activity and doing so with the knowledge that the other person does the same thing. Inviting in the other’s presence through thought and imagination profoundly altered the way we perceived the performance of our own actions. It created some sort of agency.

“Because I was thinking the moment that that absence of the body becomes actually a present body than that agency, the agency that you are talking about, then it changes. It becomes different.”

Ilana Reynolds, Audio recording, 2019 18

Generally spoken, with Kris Cohen (2020), an agent is one who acts. And the “power granted or effected through that action is the quality of agency.” Though, when it comes to any theoretical, conceptual, historical or metaphysical perspective from which the notion of agent/agency is looked at, its definition becomes vast and anything but unified. 19 In the case of the agency implicated in the presence of absence, it seems hard to grasp what kind of agency that is, or could be. However, as the quote above indicates, both Ilana and I experienced it in its effective force to inform our sensorimotor activity and, in further consequence, the dances we co-created. That's why the fifth proposition of the thesis at hand states that there is

17_{For further description of what is conceptualized as Imagined Choreographies, see Interlude: Imagined} Choreographies.

18_{Extract from a transcribed} _{audio recording consisting of accumulated and de-accumulated fragments} of Skype conversations Ilana Reynolds and I have had during and after rehearsing for the live performance Dance with me.

19_{“On the} _{one hand, there is a vast literature, ranging from the discipline of History to the disciplines of} Artificial Intelligence and Sociology, in which ‘social agents’ are empirical or quasi-empirical entities (...). On the other hand, there is a body of work which understands itself to be acting within an explicitly political framework and which views agency as a tool for conceptualizing the modern subject. (...) In the middle, or to one side, is another vast literature: the philosophical work on autonomy, agency and free will, which tends to understand agency as a self-reflexive relationship – a relation of self to self – and to take as its central, motivating task the clear differentiation of free will from coercion.” (Cohen 2020)

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some kind of agency immanent in the presence of the other’s absence, which, in turns, informs the aforementioned dance’s body.

Proposition six: The presence of absence is a modality to experience togetherness

In One World in Relation, the philosopher Édouard Glissant (2011) speaks in conversation with Manthia Diawara of the necessity to “consent not to be a single being.” (4-19) However, his phrase doesn’t claim hasty consensus, neither the reduction of other bodies to existing normative values, rules, actions and imagination. Rather, it encourages to question what brings our individual bodies together and what tears them apart. Accordingly, modern relationships are coined by the paradox of becoming more and more connected and more and more distant. The appearance of widespread affordable and stable internet connection and mobile applications has been contributing to a networked (digital) community in which - once you have access - anyone can be connected with anyone else over any geographical distance. At the same time, our globalized networked society requires ever more flexibility and mobility, sometimes at the cost of social ties to our immediate surrounding and local communities and feelings of social detachment. For instance, in the field of dance and performance, it seems like it has become the usual habitus to move from one project to the next and to swap one group of collaborators for the other. 20 It was precisely this case that initiated the artistic-research project at hand: my collaborator Ilana and I - without knowing each other beforehand - were picked and paired for a joint week-long residency at IDOCDE Symposium in Vienna (see chapter Opening). The fact that one of us didn’t make it revealed the precariousness of such an endeavour; just as much as it opened up the possibility to make it a subject of discussion. We decided to collectively participate in the residency from two different locations and, doing so, to disclose modes of collaboration that would come along within such an environment. This initial starting point has lead into the movement-based performative practices and a series of performance experiments discussed in the thesis at hand which enact the tension between intimacy and distance. Thus, a framework is provided to speculate on modalities of being-with whilst being physically remote that aim to move beyond getting nostalgic about the past and pessimistic about the future. Instead, we linger in the incongruity of modern relationships to see what else might emerge and how else we might relate to one another. In the following quote Ilana and I describe the particular relationship we have been building (while never meeting) throughout the past year and a half as one of disorientation rather than anything linear and, in that, a tremendous amount of closeness has developed.

20_{Regarding contemporary modes of production it seems important to point to socio-economic structures} underlying this development as well. Due to a high amount of precarious and/or in most instances project-based funding short-time collaborations are mostly in favour over long-time commitments and/or collaborations.

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“As I wander in my steps, an imagination of you is by my side. With you, I come closer to sensing the multiplicity of time/events. These conditions create an experimental context to train trust, care, and solidarity; a way of being-with and working together that exceeds boundaries of space and time and quantifiable measurements. Proximity and distance are playfully entangled, without seeking to close the gap between us.”

Huth and Reynolds 2020, 43

Drawn from our personal experience, in the course of this collaborative project Ilana and I aim to encourage an alternative perspective on remote relationships; one that might include experiencing the presence in absence as a form of togetherness; a being-together-whilst-being-apart. This is the sixth and last proposition of the thesis

You are absent but present. Exploring the presence of absence through a performance series of Interpersonal Fictional Realities