The performance begins in total darkness. Gradually, nebulous moving lights appear on what is later revealed to be a large projection screen that stretches across the back of the stage. The indistinct images continue for a couple of minutes before it becomes possible to distinguish the images as street lights. Two actors are glimpsed in silhouette, a man and a woman, who sit motionless in chairs facing the audience, on a bare stage in front of the screen. They will remain almost exclusively in this immobile position for the length of the performance. By contrast, the screen images behind the actors are in constant motion, now recognizable as footage taken from the perspective of a car window, travelling slowly, searching through deserted streets from night until dawn. An evocative soundtrack accompanies the performance, providing an eerie counterpart through often repetitive distorted and distorting domestic and industrial sounds. The actors begin speaking the verbatim testimony of Australians who have been left behind by missing persons. Gradually, side stage lights illuminate their bodies and faces. In an unsettling, discordant effect the actors speak the testimony of a wide range of different people without moving or changing accent or expression.
This is a description of the beginning of The Disappearances Project, an innovative verbatim theatre piece produced by Australian contemporary performance company Version 1.0. Directed by David Williams and Yana Taylor, it was performed in Australia and England between 2011 and 2013. Disappearances is a performance of uncertainty, marked by contrasting qualities of movement and immobilization, interminable waiting and an atmosphere of grief, stalled action, frustration and resignation. In exploring the experiences of those affected by the disappearance of friends and family members in everyday (rather than specifically political or military) circumstances, directors Williams and Taylor immerse the audience in a stagnating world of affective loss and uncertainty. In some respects, the performance resonates with Alan Read's critique of the melancholic tendency of performance studies scholars to speak of the ‘death and disappearance of theatre . . . as though it bears some relationship to real deaths and disappearances’.Footnote 1 As a riposte to the abstract celebration of disappearance and ephemerality as a condition of performance, Version 1.0’s Disappearances deals with material disappearances and mourning for actual loss. However, it also sits in complex relation to another Read claim, that the ‘singularity of performance comes about through a peculiarly redemptive form of agency’.Footnote 2 Rather, Disappearances creates an aesthetics of indeterminacy, embodying an inability to take action that coheres with the paralysing impact of unresolved loss-through-disappearance felt by, as the phrase used by police and support services has it, ‘the left-behind’. This is achieved through complex dramaturgical practices that highlight and unsettle binaries of absence and presence, mobility and immobility, and appearance and disappearance. Furthermore, these practices work to engage the audience in the co-production of a compelling ‘atmosphere’ or mood, adding a further encompassing layer to the performance. As such, the performance troubles and potentially extends some current understandings of indeterminacy, affect and audience engagement within theatre studies, while containing some features whose interpretation requires us to look beyond conventional theatre studies paradigms. Most immediately, the performance's juxtapositions of slowed movement with stillness or immobilization point to a dramaturgy that hinges on a distinct and troubling kind of mobility.
The recent ‘mobility turn’ in the social sciences and humanities works to encompass and study the various mass and small-scale mobilities of objects, people, information and capital at both global and local levels, as well as the broader social implications of these passages. However, as Mimi Sheller observes, mobilities theory also ‘places an unprecedented emphasis on (im)mobility, moorings, dwelling and stillness as much as movement, speed, or liquidity’ alongside the analysis of temporalities, kinaesthetic and sensory environments, embodied practices, political power structures and more.Footnote 3 As such, mobilities approaches are as concerned with stillness as with passages and movement, as well as with the power dynamics that emerge in juxtapositions between different mobilities. The mobilities turn counters previous tendencies in the social sciences to consider human mobilities either as static and tied to specific places or as nomadic and moving within globalized contexts. With its emphasis on embodied experience, mobilities analysis also includes an affective dimension that seeks, for example, to find new ways of accommodating and, as Hester Parr puts it, ‘“attending to” smiles, movements, gestures, moods, feelings, types of talk, and “atmospheres” in order to register different forms of emotional practice and their orderings or “becomings”’.Footnote 4
The mobilities paradigm has been reflected on by a variety of theatre and performance studies scholars, most substantially by Fiona Wilkie in her groundbreaking book Performance, Transport and Mobility (2015). Wilkie, however, has tended to focus on examining mobilities in relation to the touring nature of productions or in performances that involve physical travel or transport. Rather than a travel mobilities focus, an analysis of Disappearances provides an opportunity to examine the use of mobilities and resulting atmospheres as dramaturgical ploys entirely ‘within’ a performance. In this respect, this analysis also provides the opportunity to consider how particular mobilities employed in a performance may contribute to a staging of affect and the production of indeterminacy, as well as complicating notions of redemption and agency. To this end, this article will analyse Disappearances through the application of concepts within the mobilities field. This will be spread across two sections: the first on immobility/immobilization or stillness, and the second on friction, stickiness and viscosity, as well as the production of atmosphere. The article will conclude with overall observations about Disappearances and its mobilities-based effects and affects and how this may relate to the wider field of performance.
Immobility/immobilization and stillness
Lara Shalson has argued that ‘for many people, twentieth-century theatre history, at least, pivots around an instance of waiting’.Footnote 5 Citing Samuel Beckett's paradigmatic play of waiting, Waiting for Godot (1953), Shalson observes that in the play ‘waiting is not just what is represented onstage; it is what is done, collectively, by characters and audience alike. In a play in which he for whom everyone waits never arrives, waiting itself becomes the event of theatre’.Footnote 6 In the twenty-first century, Version 1.0’s Disappearances appeared to extend theatre's preoccupation with waiting. However, this was not an absurdist but a documentary play. Waiting is an actual event for the left-behind, who experience the ongoing uncertain loss of missing persons. Significantly in Disappearances, while the actors relay the testimony of the left-behind, which includes recounting ongoing efforts to find the missing, the production ends without resolution. No one has been found and the characters, like the audience, are left waiting. As Shalson observes, there is an expectation of waiting in the theatre, from the actor waiting in the wings to the audience waiting between act changes. ‘Yet, we do not expect to wait for long. The waiting to which we are habituated in the theatre is marked by discomfort if nothing happens’.Footnote 7 In the case of Godot, this phenomenon is elevated to a kind of existential punchline. In Disappearances, the focus is on the experience of the long-term left-behind and how their particular form of grief is embodied in immobilization or ‘stuckedness’. This is a hugely debilitating condition, the performance suggests, because it is defined against – and in turn defines – a status that is itself knotty and indeterminate: that of the missing person.
Defining someone as missing is a problematic exercise, particularly in the case of adults. There is a tension between the right of an individual to disappear of their own volition and the need for family and friends to know that the individual is safe. Issues such as suspected criminality, homelessness or evidence of mental illness further complicate the matter. In 2013, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) in the UK attempted to clarify and demarcate definitions by declaring a missing person to be anyone ‘whose whereabouts cannot be established and where the circumstances are out of character or the context suggests the person may be the subject of crime or at risk of harm to themselves or another’. By contrast, an absent person is a person ‘not at a place where they are expected or required to be’.Footnote 8 Regardless of such precise explanations, there is, as the authors of a book on missing persons in the UK put it, ‘implicit recognition by the police and by missing persons agencies of the problematic nature of a definition that originates with those left behind’.Footnote 9 This places the left-behind in a difficult position in that they must try to prove to authorities that the person does indeed fall within the definition of ‘missing’. Additionally, the unresolved nature of the grieving process means that the left-behind, particularly those in ongoing and long-term cases, are prone to suffer from what has relatively recently been referred to as ambiguous loss. According to Pauline Boss and Janet R. Yeats,
Ambiguous loss is an unclear loss that continues without resolution or closure. It is a relational rupture that can be physical or psychological. The chronicity and complexities of ambiguous loss create symptoms that may be construed as medical disorders such as depression or persistent complex bereavement disorder [the latter involves a prolonged grieving process and symptoms such as distress, denial, emotional disconnection and an unwillingness to move on] . . . Ambiguous loss differs from death due to the lack of definitive information and finality that allows for transformation and change. Unlike loss from death, ambiguous loss has no official verification of loss because the missing person is still present (e.g. dementia) or may yet be alive (e.g. lost at sea).Footnote 10
This form of unresolved ‘complicated grief’ can work to ‘immobilize people and freeze their grief’.Footnote 11 Hope, usually a positive element in grief recovery, tends to play a reverse role in instances of ambiguous loss. This is because ‘where the outcome of loss is unknown . . . the ongoing hope for reunification may inhibit movement’ forward, and result instead in ongoing internal ‘searching within’ (for reasons for the disappearance) and external or physical ‘searching without’ for the person.Footnote 12 The searching is often hyper-vigilant in nature. Additionally, in a desire to ‘re-establish physical proximity’, families may ‘go to places frequented by the person’ and ‘misperceive others for the lost attachment figure’.Footnote 13 Hence the experience of the left-behind can involve pathological mobilities of stasis and searching, as well as potential misperceptions, and compulsions around place.
In Disappearances these pathological mobilities are represented most clearly in the juxtaposition of the immobilized seated actors with the ongoing search for the ‘missing’ depicted in the screen images behind them. The stillness of the actors reflects the internal frozen immobilized state of the left-behind, while the film images reflect the external practice of obsessive searching through darkened neighbourhoods. The footage of nondescript shopfronts, parks and houses, which starts after the period of darkness and slowly coalescing images in the opening minutes, continues for the length of the performance. The footage slows almost to a stop at points, suggesting that something new will happen, before the car turns a corner to reveal yet another set of similar streets. There is a fade to black halfway through the performance that is used as a form of reset before the same images appear for a second time. In their repetition and circularity, the images cohere both with ‘compulsions around place’ and, because Disappearances ends without anyone being found, with the ongoing indeterminate nature of the search.
The stillness or immobility of the performers is a visually arresting dramaturgical element within Disappearances. André Lepecki notes a similar phenomenon occurring in dance when he argues that insertions of stillness or ‘still-acts’ in dance ‘are particularly powerful propositions for other modes of rethinking action and mobility’.Footnote 14 Within mobilities theory, the movement of things is recognized as being reliant on ‘relatively still infrastructures’, though at the same time immobility is often considered a negative state and seen as proof of the relationality of mobilities in terms of the unequal access to power (via mobility) by different people and groups.Footnote 15 According to Beverley Skeggs, ‘Mobility and control over mobility both reflect and reinforce power. Mobility is a resource to which not everyone has an equal relationship’.Footnote 16 In Disappearances, the stillness of the actors serves as a metaphor for the inability of the left-behind to ‘move on’ due to the lack of resolution around the missing person. This was reflected in Lyn Gardner's review of the production when it toured to Brighton, England. Gardner describes it as an ‘hour-long static show . . . The piece displays a frozen quality, its form mirroring the emotional state of those talking about the people they love, there one day and gone the next’.Footnote 17 The physical imperative to remain still is further explained in the spoken text as a character explains, ‘There was a sense we could never move because he might come back and, if he came back and we moved, he wouldn't be able to find us’.Footnote 18 The immobility of the left-behind is thus also a material situation.
The most common directive given to the left-behind by authorities, namely to ‘wait’, buttresses this position of immobility. David Bissell has railed against what he calls productivist attitudes which consider ‘waiting and subjectivity as examples of slowed and even deadened rhythms moving alongside faster events and practices’ because he claims that such an idea ‘obscures and potentially negates the ways in which bodies have the potential to transcend this schema’.Footnote 19 However, in the case of Disappearances, representations of unproductive slowed and deadened rhythms exemplify a waiting without any apparent chance of transcendence, reinforcing a sense that the left-behind are ‘stuck’ in their waiting. Disappearances shows that the left-behind are bound in place, not only through the psychological impact of ambiguous loss but also by the directives of authorities and by the missing themselves, who in their ongoing placelessness and absence force the left-behind to remain in place. In this, the left-behind are without the power and agency to move. The institutional barriers to their mobility, as well as barriers that prevent the left-behind from dealing effectively with the ongoing absence of the missing person, are further revealed through the spoken testimony featured in the performance. There are statements detailing intense frustration with authorities and institutions around issues such as not being allowed to redirect the missing person's mail or to register or sell their vehicle until up to seven years after the reported disappearance. Privacy and other identity-related laws also work to further mire the left-behind in a position of powerlessness in terms of stymieing attempts to gain information about whether bank accounts and other services have been accessed by the missing person. This is reflected in a statement from one of the characters in Disappearances, who says, ‘You have no control when you don't know’.Footnote 20 For the left-behind, then, stillness is an enforced state linked to powerlessness.
Nonetheless, there are attempts within the mobilities field to recuperate notions of stillness. David Bissell and Gillian Fuller contend that ‘[s]tillness punctuates the flow of all things: a queuer in a bank; a moment of focus; a passenger in a departure lounge’.Footnote 21 They argue for a conception of stillness that moves beyond negative or simplistic ‘dualisms of mobility and immobility’.Footnote 22 Nevertheless, they acknowledge that ‘stillness is so often anticipated, more or less, as an aberration and thus a problem to deal with. A moment of emptiness or missed productivity, producing a hobbled subjectivity without active agency’.Footnote 23 In various theatrical styles, it is common to invert this expectation: periods of stillness or suspension may have a positive dramatic or aesthetic effect. In Disappearances, however, stillness becomes a pathological state. Here, stillness does highlight an aberration and a problem that needs to be addressed, namely a group of people who have been immobilized, who, in their grief, have purportedly been unsupported or overlooked by society and its institutions.
This appears to be Version 1.0’s political message. Curiously, its potency is strengthened for regular viewers of their work by the fact that the use of stillness is something of a departure for the company, who, while their work is quite diverse, are known more for charged physical performances. For example, This Kind of Ruckus (2009–10) included frenetic dance sequences and running relays in its exploration of domestic violence and abusive behaviour in the Australian rules football community. The company's 2006 production From a Distance focused on the media coverage of the Sally Robbins ‘no-row’ incident, where the rower stopped rowing during an Olympic final. The production sought to capture the brutal experience of Olympic training and thus also involved extended, highly physical, choreographed sequences.
From a broader perspective, just as theatre audiences do not expect to wait long, they also do not expect actors to remain still. By contrast, Disappearances functioned in a way that echoes Vida Midgelow's analysis of Raimund Hoghe's dance performance Swan Lake, 4 Acts (2004):
Hoghe's use of expanded duration and stillness, perhaps due to our expectation of dance to involve movement rather than performers standing still, is uncomfortable, even torturous at times. This sensation is heightened by the contrast with Tchaikovsky's score that continues to run onwards whilst little ‘happens’ on the stage. Yet this feeling of increasing discomfort becomes precisely the point of Hoghe's approach. Our expectations, it seems, are purposefully unfulfilled, yet craved for . . .Footnote 24
The duration of the stillness and the relentless and repetitive quality of the slow filmic images in Disappearances, combined with Paul Prestipino's continuous soundtrack, produced similar feelings of almost torturous discomfort for this researcher while attending the performance. Williams and Taylor drew the audience into the affective world of the performance, inviting them to experience, in some part, the contrasting mobilities and tempos of the left-behind. Hence, while stillness played a key role in the performance, its impact depended on its being combined with ongoing mobility to create this form of unsettling affective contrast. This in turn contributed to a state and atmosphere of paralysing indeterminacy within the performance. This combination of contrasting mobilities can be understood as forms of friction that have been identified by mobilities theorists as producing viscosity or stickiness, and it is to that feature of the performance that I now turn.
Friction, stickiness, viscosity and atmosphere
So far, I have described the relationship between the still actors and the slow-moving screen images of searching through night-time streets as a juxtaposition. Arguably, however, the implication that these elements simply sit alongside each other is an oversimplification. The slow rhythm of the searching may be entirely appropriate to the task of looking for missing persons from a car window, but in a production where the performers are still, the slowness further exacerbates the sense of impeded action. Perceptually, the effect is troubling, suggesting a visual drag where it appears as if the still bodies are brushing against and thereby impeding and slowing the progress of the filmic images. This would appear to be a case of what Tim Cresswell describes as ‘fluid friction’, a category of ‘kinetic friction’ where ‘two surfaces are slipping against each other’.Footnote 25 In this case, it is between static objects, the actors, and a moving (albeit projected) surface.
This category of friction also encompasses viscosity, a friction that occurs within liquids and ‘leads to a thickening/slowing’ that Cresswell describes as ‘but one step away from’ coagulation.Footnote 26 Moreover, viscosity or stickiness need not be restricted to liquids. Jana Costas invokes Jean-Paul Sartre's metaphor of slimy stickiness to account for the ambiguity and frictions involved in the travel of the kinetic elite (highly mobile business and political leaders) as well as for gaps in wider theories of mobilities. Costas observes that the sticky is ambiguous and that it ‘provides neither a sense of stability nor a sense of freedom’.Footnote 27 According to Sartre, it is ‘essentially ambiguous because its fluidity exists in slow motion . . . its mode of being is neither the reassuring inertia of the solid or the dynamism like that in water which is exhausted in fleeing from me’. Its effect is a feeling of ‘fixed instability’.Footnote 28 This same sticky ‘fixed instability’ is discernible as occurring through the stilled actors and their shifting delivery of the testimony of the left-behind.
From their fixed seated positions, the actors deliver the testimony of the many respondents in largely affectless tones. As already noted, the actors do not attempt to transform physically or vocally or to move to take on the personas of the different people whose testimony they voice. The testimony is delivered in bursts, shorn of endings and beginnings, shared, swapped and at times overlapped between the two actors in a way that denies any coordinates of character or the identification of complete individual stories. As reviewer Charlotte Farrell observed of the actors,
Taylor and Gregory do not perform fixed characters, but multiple embodiments from a range of experiences of loss. These float across the surfaces of the skin and the resonant timbres of their voices, a performative choice that neatly destabilises the potential for a linear performance structure and without leaning into didacticism. Sustained stillness allows for this, as does the weaving of multiple stories in the performative fabric . . .Footnote 29
As a result, the spoken text shifts and moves in unpredictable ways and repeats similar scenarios and responses, emerging as what I have called elsewhere a ‘chorus of collective experience’.Footnote 30 The dynamic structure of the spoken text and its often compelling and distressing content is at odds with the stillness and the emotional flatness of the delivery. While the delivery does reflect a ‘frozen’ and perhaps dissociated state indicative of the left-behind, the shifting and shared nature of the edited text means that the multiple stories of those who gave their testimony move through the stilled actors in indeterminate ways. No names are ever mentioned and the two actors regularly swap between talking about the missing as ‘him’ or ‘her’ or ‘daughter’ or ‘brother’. Similarly, there are no markers in the testimony or the performances of the actors to indicate the gender, age or ethnicity of the individual characters. Accordingly it is also impossible to link a particular group of characters to a given actor. This results in a stuttered, unpredictable movement and an ill-fitting emotional performance, suggesting an indeterminate stickiness occurring between the actors and the ‘characters’ they inhabit at varying intervals.
This stickiness is further reflected in the varying tempos and durations of the delivery of the spoken text. There are points where there are relatively quick exchanges of short accounts, interspersed with longer monologues as well as lengthy periods of silence which seem to represent the wordless states that can occur in sufferers of trauma and depression related to loss. Thus, while the stickiness created through the juxtaposition of the movement of the screen images with the still actors reflects a relatively constant level of friction, the stickiness between characters and actors emerges from variable levels of friction. The variability in the latter seems to signal a more complex relationship between the two ‘surfaces’ of characters and actors.
This fluctuating stickiness between actors and characters is a result, or perhaps an acknowledgement, of the fact that the two actors are embodying and speaking the testimony of a multitude of different characters. The variable speeds, instances of overlapping testimony, silences, and varying lengths of testimonial accounts break up the flow and movement of the spoken text. This functions to an extent as a dramaturgical device, presumably used to change the routine and to keep the audience engaged in an otherwise unchanging performance environment. The variability in delivery, however, also suggests an attempt by the practitioners to isolate and draw attention to sections of text and statements that are particularly affectively resonant, such as ‘You can't grieve. You can't get to grieve. You're trapped in the turmoil of wondering’.Footnote 31 The effect is akin to an extended filmic close-up where the camera zooms in and clings onto the character. In instances such as this in Disappearances, the perceived stickiness between the character and actor increases and the critical distance that the performance encourages the audience to view from is slightly diminished, because there is an opportunity, albeit briefly, to emotionally engage with one person's testimony.
Conversely, instances of overlapping testimony in the performance usually combine accounts of similar-sounding details, denoting a universality of experiences. For example, six minutes into the performance the actors begin a section of quickly spoken overlapping testimony recounting overwhelming concerns that the left-behind appear commonly to share within the first few days of the missing person's absence. The male actor, for example, delivers the following lines in quick succession:
She could have been hit by a car. He could have been attacked and left wounded in a back street. He could have finally had enough and thrown himself off a cliff. There was a million things that could have gone wrong. Perhaps she'd gone somewhere to take time out. She'd hurt herself. She'd killed herself . . .Footnote 32
In these moments, there is a still a sense of ‘fixed instability’ but the stickiness between character and actor is less noticeable as the various characters’ testimonies move through the actors’ bodies and voices at speed.
As mentioned above, the level of stickiness between character and actor seems to determine the extent to which the audience member is invited to enter into the emotional world of the characters. For reviewer Farrell, the critical distance that Disappearances invoked was somewhat antithetical to the ability to be moved by the plight of the left-behind. Farrell states, ‘At certain points, I wanted to be invited to “feel-with” these stories of loss, rather than hover over them’.Footnote 33 This is a significant point and while there are obvious ethical arguments to be made for denying the audience the opportunity to empathetically identify with the left-behind, I suggest that Disappearances gains much of its affective impact in a more cumulative way. This is achieved through the co-production of what mobilities theorist Ben Anderson would refer to as the ‘more’ of an atmosphere, which envelops the performance.Footnote 34
Broadly conceived, atmospheres may be thought of as a ‘personal experience of a situation’, which can be described in terms of a feeling or mood, such as disturbing, cold, joyous, haunting and so on.Footnote 35 Beyond this, atmospheres have been the subject of philosophical study and more recently have featured in writing on mobilities. While there are ongoing debates in the field, most scholars agree that atmospheres are intermediate and transgress boundaries. According to Gernot Böhme, one of the leading philosophers in the field, atmospheres are subjective in that ‘one must experience them in terms of one's own emotional state’, but also seemingly objective in that the subject experiences atmospheres as something ‘“out there”, something which can come over us, into which we are drawn, which takes possession of us like an alien power’.Footnote 36 Atmospheres are diffuse and elusive, yet palpable in their presence and subject to change and dissipation. Despite this it is possible to stage, design and maintain atmospheres.Footnote 37 Böhme describes atmospheres as having particular ‘characters’, and, following on from this theatre allusion, refers directly to the stage set as ‘producing’ atmospheres to ‘attune the spectators to the theatrical performance and to provide the actors with a sounding board for what they present’.Footnote 38
Significantly, while often linked entirely with notions of affect, atmospheres are dependent upon and are produced through myriad material and immaterial elements. As Tim Edensor and Shanti Sumartojo remind us, ‘affects, sensations, materialities, emotions and meanings are all enrolled within the force-field of an atmosphere . . . and though each of these terms might be fruitfully conceptualized separately . . . atmospheres are phenomena that blur the boundaries between them’.Footnote 39 Thus in theatre an atmosphere is that which emerges between and through the co-presence of actors, space, audience, dramaturgical practices, elements, and so forth, and the emotions, meanings and affects that arise in response to this co-presence. An atmosphere is thus the result of a relational and generative dialogue between the different elements.
In the case of Disappearances, it is the use of particular mobilities and their unsettling juxtapositions and resonances between bodies and space, combined with the spoken testimony, that contributes to an atmosphere of frozen action, sticky indeterminacy and despairing frustration. As such, the performance does not rely on the testimony, or on the emotional (or otherwise) performances from the actors, to convey the ‘story’ of the left-behind. Rather, Williams and Taylor seem more intent upon implicating the audience in an immersive atmosphere that in some way stages the psychological and material immobilization of the left-behind.
In a further ploy, having the actors mirror the static seated bodies of the audience members arguably enhances the transmission of body-to-body affect. Ben Anderson contends that the arts and sciences make use of the ‘affective qualities that emanate from the assembling’ of human and other bodies to manipulate atmospheres.Footnote 40 In particular, Anderson highlights how ‘atmospheres are intensified by creating patterns of affective imitation in sports stadiums and concert halls’.Footnote 41 In Disappearances, this mirroring of audience and actors’ bodies ‘thickens’ the atmosphere, making a co-produced connection between the groups, while also drawing attention to an additional instance of stillness. From my own perspective as an audience member, I found myself becoming increasingly uncomfortable with, and aware of, my seated position and how this reflected the static ever-waiting positions of the characters. In effect, the stillness was not only doubled by my own body, but also multiplied by the number of other audience members seated in the auditorium. This created a sense that the whole group, characters and audience members alike, had become forcibly becalmed as we waited for resolution, for something to change, for someone to be found. As such, the ‘more’ produced by the atmosphere felt oppressive, strained and paralysing.
Conclusion
In its lack of resolution (the missing are not found) and its ongoing indeterminacy, Disappearances does problematize Alan Read's notion that performance is ‘a peculiarly redemptive form of agency’ in a conventional sense. There are, however, flickers of redemption and new agency near the end of the performance as the testimony centres on the positions and experiences of the now long-term left-behind. For the most part, this for them is reflected in a resignation to the idea that the missing may never return. One character, however, finds an unexpected positive outcome:
One of the really good things to come out of it. I've learned how to deal with agencies and authorities and all the games and manipulations you have to play to get things done. It's made me a lot more strategic in the way I deal with things . . . If you don't say it and you don't push, nothing's going to happen.Footnote 42
In this there is a sense that while the missing may not have been found, this member of the left-behind has found a way to manage the immobility and powerlessness imposed on her or him by authorities and institutions, and found a way to answer back to it.
While this may go some way towards redemption and agency, the ongoing indeterminacy of the production remains an issue. From a wider performance perspective, it is interesting and challenging to see what happens when indeterminacy is staged. Certainly the combined use of different mobilities is central to the dramaturgical success of the production in creating this sense of indeterminacy. However, in choosing to focus solely on cases where the missing person is never found (most missing-person cases are resolved), Williams and Taylor have risked fetishizing indeterminacy, and in running the testimony of the respondents together they similarly run the risk of homogenizing the experiences of the left-behind. From my perspective, I do not believe this occurred. Nevertheless, the performance did make me very uncomfortable and perhaps necessarily so. I am still unsure, however, whether being affectively immersed in an atmosphere that seeks to reflect, in some part, the experience of the left-behind is more ethically sound than risking identification with the left-behind as Other through the more conventional mode of empathetically identifying with particular characters and their stories. This is an area for further investigation.
Ultimately, examining Disappearances as I have done here has provided an opportunity to identify and explore a variety of concepts from the mobilities field and to apply these to unpacking the impact of specific strategies and practices in performance that seek to reflect the experience of the left-behind. Concepts such as stillness, stickiness and friction help produce new insights into how a state of indeterminacy related to affective loss may be staged within a performance. Similarly, examining how an atmosphere is co-produced and manipulated within performance helps us understand how Disappearances evokes a particularly immersive and unsettling affective environment. It is certainly possible to argue that other mobilities concepts, alongside those explored here, may also be of use in deepening understandings of dramaturgical practices and finding new perspectives in the analysis of performance. Furthermore, in their ability to ‘stage’ mobilities, theatre and other forms of performance have the ability to produce new knowledge that can contribute to the wider field of mobility studies.
