Performance without Actors: The Theatrical Docu-Fiction

Performative practice is based on the presence of at least a single performer and a single spectator. The presence (Brook 1998), mainly tied into the bodies of the subjects involved, becomes a determining factor for the construction and circulation of meaning, a fundamental element of the embodied statement, where the body acts as the instance of the enunciation as well as the statement (Nancy 2000). What happens when a theatre performance without actors is performed? A new aesthetic emerges, consisting of interactions and transformations, the possibility of cooperation/interaction between contradictory elements. The analysis of two contemporary plays, Perhaps all the dragons of the theatre collective Berlin and Nachlass pièce sans personnes of Rimini Protokoll, will give us opportunity to discuss the growing phenomenon of the presentation, and representation, docu-fiction in the theatre, that is, when the technology generates the appearance (Schein) of an actual presence, without, however, bringing what is actually a manifestation (Erscheinung) – bodies and objects, as it is currently its present (Fischer-Lichte 2008).