Theatrical Assemblage in Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s 45th Parallel

Paper delivered as part of a curated panel called: Assembling Absence: Performance, scenography and the politics of dis/appearance

The panel explored the displacement of the figure of the actor from the centre of the theatrical stage concomitant with the ‘scenographic turn’ in contemporary performance. It interrogated how theatrical assemblages effect a redistribution of presence, displacing the actor-performer from the centre of attention or even from the stage altogether. The panel aimed to historicise this aesthetic phenomenon as a significant shift in the configuration of theatre as a space of appearance by demonstrating that the decentring of the figure of the actor in an ‘aesthetics of absence’ (Collins 2015) is indirectly related to the political disappearances that have characterised the coextensive historical period – the disappearance of people not only from the mise-en-scène of the theatrical stage, but from the lived reality of history.

Theatrical Assemblage in Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s 45th Parallel explored the political potentiality of the ‘aesthetics of absence’ in Laurence Abu Hamdan and Forensic Architecture's practices of investigative theatre. Examining the deployment of scenarios and assemblages to demonstrate how absence is made present in Earwitness Inventory and 45th Parallel, Allen focuses on how the actors in the (real) stories of violence Abu Hamdan tells appear in absentia in order to activate the scene of their own disappearance.