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Articles

Volume 32, Number 2 (2011)

Memorial Reconstructions: Presence and (Re)-presentation in Carbone 14's Le Dortoir

Submitted
August 1, 2012
Published
2011-06-06

Abstract

Francois Girard’s 1991 video adaptation of Gilles Maheu and Carbone 14’s stage production Le Dortoir is a moving exploration of identity and memory that takes as its primary theme and point of departure the “man-who-remembers” desire to bring his past to unmediated presence and projects a fantasy of his desire’s fulfillment on stage, but articulates this fantasy with a view to the impossibility of its realization. The manner in which Le Dortoir insistently activates the semiotic value of ‘context’ as an operant condition of its performance suggests that identity—and the partial, fragmentary memories it re-constitutes and through which it is constituted—is inevitably mediated by representation. However, despite its demonstrably postmodern attitude toward the self and representation, Le Dortoir frequently strives to bring into focus the inherent semiotic ambiguity of its dancers’ bodies— a move which engenders in the audience an intimation of presence and works to mimetically reproduce the narrative’s ostensibly modernist preoccupation with recovery and fulfillment. Having never experienced Le Dortoir as a live performance event, but only in its remediated form, I approach the work from a problematic but potentially productive intermedial standpoint. I situate my analysis at the intersection of live performance and media studies, and the theoretical framework I rely on derives from recent developments in the former. By bringing a specifically theatrical conception of presence to bear on my mediated experience of an imaginarily reconstructed ‘live’ performance—the form and thematic preoccupations of which mark it as a potentially illuminating case study—it is my hope to extend and complicate the critical discourse on presence and absence.