Haunted Presences: Theatre After the Real

Abstract

This paper examines how contemporary theatre reconfigures the concepts of presence, liveness, and reality through technological mediation. It traces the shift from traditional co-presence to digitally refracted performance, arguing that technologies, once ancillary now co-constitute meaning alongside human agents. By analyzing examples from The Wooster Group, Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, Punchdrank, Rimini Protokoll, and Suzanne Kennedy, among others, the essay contends that presence is no longer ontological but constructed, an interface effect shaped by projection, feedback, simultaneity, and simulation. Theatre thus emerges not as a mirror of reality but as an ontological machine that stages the instability of the “real” in a hypermediated, post-human era.